Brad Wise of Trust, Fort Oak, and Rare Society talks restaurant wins and terrors and names the best sandwiches in San Diego.

"We were scraping by, praying that we were going to have a busy weekend to make rent and—not only that, but payroll," recalls chef Brad Wise.

Thank god his food was good and his wife had a job.

It's been 10 years since his first existential terrors as a restaurateur. A decade of woodsmoke in nice places. When Wise and team first opened Trust around the corner from the main drag in Hillcrest, there wasn't anything like it. I'm sure there were outliers, but it sure felt like the only San Diego restaurants setting wood on fire were pizza joints and barbecue stands.

Trust was San Diego's first to do Culinary Institute–style cookery over a blaze. Charred leeks. Smoked whole fish. Burning pineapples for cocktails. There is science behind the charms of this approach (woodsmoke gives off 400 or so more phenols and flavor compounds than food cooked on gas). And now it feels like every top restaurant has a pile of wood next to the kitchen.

But back then, Trust was alone on that fire island. And it nearly didn't make it.

Word eventually gets around. I named Trust my "Best New Restaurant" that year, because it was a perfect mix of cave people food and hoity-toity food. Eight years later, I named him my chef of the year because he'd dotted the map with some pretty great concepts—Fort Oak, Rare Society, Cardellino, Wise Ox, and the brand new smokepoint-French brasserie, À L'ouest.

He's our guest in the studio for our Happy Half Hour podcast this week. In honor of him being a Jersey deli kid, we do a fantasy draft of our favorite sandwiches from across San Diego.

Discover more at San Diego Magazine. Check out Brad Wise HERE.

A few years back, Accursio Lota—2017 World Pasta Champion and chef-owner of Cori Pastificio and the new Dora Ristorante which was named for his nonna—told us he raised snails under his family's staircase as a child in Sicily. Fattened them up on raw spaghetti and fresh herbs, eventually ending their journey on this planet with some butter and garlic.

Turns out this was an entire neighborhood kid thing. Some kids ride bikes. Some puree their brains playing video games. Kids in Lota's neighborhood waited for the rain to come, then went around collecting a very Sicilian version of escargot.

"There would be all of us kids out there with our grocery bags," he tells us on this week's episode of Happy Half Hour. "We'd all have bags full of snails."

Lota was just awarded the Tre Forchette from Gambero Rosso (essentially the Michelin Guide of Italy). It's the very highest honor you can get as an Italian chef, equivalent to three Michelin stars. Lota's the only San Diego chef to receive the honor, and one of only 11 chefs outside of Italy.

He brings some focaccia into SDM. We eat, we laugh, we talk about snails, art, the history of food, and why we should give a damn.

It is now time, when hot dogs become communion wafers once again. The weather is Joe Musgrove's elbow. The Fernando Tatis baseball dance-swagger reenters. He is the most exciting right fielder in the history of the game, almost appearing on every play as if he has no idea to execute the task in front of him—until he defies gravity and pulls a baseball out of the the beginning of space, then throws a 600 mile per hour strike to catch someone trying to steal.

And for this episode of Happy Half Hour, we take the "Bebemos Golden Hour" tour into a Padres pregame classic—Bub's at the Ballpark. It started with Todd Brown moving to San Diego in a Winnebago, selling his wings at a gas station in Oceanside. Eventually he opened Bub's Dive Bar in Pacific Beach. Most of us leave PB when we're 28—when we look around at all the new ab muscles and feel like a senior citizen—but Todd and his wife stayed for 25 years and still own Waterbar in the 'hood. They opened this second offshoot in the historic Simon Levy building next to Petco Park in 2011.

And every game day, it is a scene. The Animal House of baseball joy. They've got tots and they've got kale. They have Steakums on the menu. Steakums, bless. It's like a bald eagle with a heart of a Ford F150. Every reasonably American ballpark has a place like this… a big, durable playground lacquered within an inch of its life to protect us from our excitable spillage. Its soul is Budweiser, but they've got everything on tap except pretension.

On March 25, Tony Gwynn Jr. will come to Bub's to hang with the Padres people, and kick off his new partnership with San Diego's upstart tequila people, Bebemos. Tony's sharing his family's recipe for a pineapple margarita that doesn't taste like a glass of insulin. Nearly an agua fresca.

Co-hosts Troy Johnson and Jackie Bryant, Bebemos co-founder Preston, and Todd debate the greatest baseball food from restaurants across the city. That is to say, the best hot dogs—from Doggos Gus to Lefty's to Nason's Beer Hall to some random, open-all-night place Jackie found in downtown—plus some nachos and ice cream.

Play ball.