| Wednesday, May 14, 7:00 p.m.
Members $85, guests $110
To say that Los Angeles Times restaurant
reviewer S. Irene Virbila was surprised by how good the food was
during her first visit to the out-of-the-way hotel restaurant with
the “unfortunate name” Nine-Ten would be an understatement.
“It’s not only me,” she wrote in her enthusiastic
review. “Everyone at my table is equally entranced with their
first courses.” Their initial reaction was sustained for the
duration of the meal. “With its ingenious market menu, careful
attention to ingredients and Michael Stebner’s intelligent,
sensual cooking, Nine-Ten may be the year’s most serendipitous
discovery,” she concluded. “The fact that it’s
in La Jolla makes it all the sweeter.”
Had Virbila been reading the Beard Foundation
Calendar, of course, she would have known what she was in
for. That’s because Michael Stebner first came to cook at
the Beard House in 2000, when he was the chef of Azzura Point at
Loews Coronado Bay Resort. (He was 27 at the time.) Stebner grew
up in Scottsdale, Arizona. He started working in restaurants and
hotels in high school and found his way into the Mobil five-star
kitchens of Mary Elaine’s at the Phoenician. There he met
James Boyce, who became a friend and mentor. Stebner moved with
Boyce to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, and then moved again
to the kitchens of the Loews in Coronado Bay in 1994.
In 2002 Stebner opened Nine-Ten in the historic
Colonial Hotel (built in 1913), in a space that was once home to
a celebrity watering hole called Putnam’s Pharmacy and Soda
Fountain. The sodas are gone—as are Gregory Peck and Groucho
Marx—but pastry chef Jack Fisher, who came with Stebner from
the Coronado Bay Resort, fills the sweet-tooth bill just fine. San
Diego Magazine critic David Nelson called Fisher’s desserts
“sublime.” Virbila called him a “talent,”
after singling out his “shimmering panna cotta,” “buttery
financier,” and his “killer…half-cooked ‘chocolate
cake.’” The votes are in: together Stebner and Fisher
are a perfect nine…um…we mean ten. |
