San Diego Dining, Day One

Jan. 3:
It's so nice to travel from wintry, land-locked Cincinnati to a sunny place on the ocean. The only thing that would have made San Diego yet more marvelous would have been NOT having to go to a convention, give a paper, or attend other people's papers. But in that case, we wouldn't have gotten to go.
The omens were not good for dinner that night: we had booked an evening with our friend Brian, whose professional responsibilities are ten times as onerous as both of ours put together, and who takes them seriously, yet. By the time we had dragged him away from the reception after his talk, it was after nine P.M. and restaurants in the area were closing like clams - not what we expected of a seaport/resort. The result: we had to head back to the Marriott's "sports pub." Now, this didn't bother Brian, who hadn't eaten all day, and has certain traits in common with Calvin Trillin's "Man with the Naugahide Palate" (sic - I checked the spelling in American Fried). But we hate dining with televisions and medleys of 80s music blaring all around us, and sports pubs don't generally supply much beyond that, beer and burgers - okay for lunch, not dinner. But this pub, DW's, wasn't that bad, especially once the bottle of Chardonnay arrived. We had adequate crabcakes, and the horseradish-crusted salmon with mesclun greens was actually very good.
What helped maintain our equilibrium was that we'd had a very elegant lunch at JSix (named for its location in the neighboring Gaslamp district) earlier in the day. There had been a small starter of rich red Ahi tuna tartare, followed by a plate of crusted snapper on mashed potatoes, and a dish of clams and spicy sausage in a red sauce on fresh angel-hair pasta. A pinch of salt was needed on everything but the latter - the chef is a local-food fanatic, and it seems to me that they often undersalt, unless they're Maldenites pushing the native fleur de sel. The wine was Sokol Blosser Evolution, rather like a Viognier. So to paraphrase Sydney Smith, "Fate (i.e. the sports bar) cannot harm us, - we have dined to-day."