SDM Guide to San Diego Food + Drink - Civico 1845

Get the raviolo. Pasta by hand, stuffed with sauteed prawns and ricotta, then silked up in a brown butter-thyme sauce. Brown butter is one of the best flavors on earth, a magic trick where you heat regular ole butter until the solids caramelize and the flavor is somewhere between oh dear and god.
This is my guide to where I’m from. Favorite dishes, drinks, places, things in San Diego. The stories of the people who make our food + drink culture hum.
At Civico 1845 in Little Italy (@civico1845), one brother is in the back cooking. The other is in the front welcoming and waitering and bussing and operating and charming. Dario and Pietro Gallo came from Calabria, Italy, and opened this modest restaurant with a mix of modern and grandma Italian. Notes from home. Pietro’s girlfriend at the time was vegan, so he started tinkering and tinkering to cook for her and win her over. That’s why Civico became one of the first Italian restaurants in California, if not the country, to have a full vegan menu. And they’re now married, which is a pretty hefty endorsement.
It always sounds very Italian in here. You could do DuoLingo, or you could just have a drink at the bar and learn the amaro way.
“San Diego and Calabria are so similar,” says Dario. “When someone comes in and tells me, ‘Oh my god, this is exactly like the food I had in a little village in Calabria..’ this is why I came to the United States and this is what makes me so proud.”
Try the pasta al forno, grandma’s recipe, with mozzarella and beef ragu, baked until it cures the Sunday scaries. Get the fantastic vegan pistachio gelato. Make it an affogato (swimming in an espresso shot, the ultimate hot-cold treat).
These are the people of San Diego’s food + drink scene. For more of these stories, visit sandiegomag.com, or subscribe to the dreadfully pretty magazine itself (link in bio).
Video by the awesome @jeremy_sazon.