San Diego’s Lunch Is Inland

MTS Route 992 runs from the San Diego airport to Santa Fe Depot in about fifteen minutes. It is a clean way to land. Sleep downtown if you like the bus. Dinner is somewhere else.

The airport bus ends downtown. The meals are a drive inland. Kearny Mesa’s Convoy Street is one parking lot, a strip of Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese rooms that fills on ordinary weeknights. National City’s East Plaza Boulevard is another drive, often twenty to thirty-five minutes from Convoy. Leave a gap. Each one is its own lunch.

Filipino Americans are the county’s largest Asian American community, from Navy careers and family reunification, stretching from National City toward Mira Mesa. The weekend is a Convoy lunch and a Plaza Boulevard lunch.

Park once on Convoy and stay with the car. Dumpling Inn, at 4625 Convoy Street, is the pork-and-chive dumpling room, closed Monday and Tuesday. Jasmine Seafood, at 4609, still runs cart dim sum, and on its own hours Monday is lunch only. Look at the calendar before you promise anyone a table. If there is an hour left, Marukai on Balboa Avenue is the grocery in the same pocket of town.

The next day, drive south. Seafood City at 1420 East Plaza Boulevard in National City is the place to start, aisles first and hot food if you are already hungry. Tita’s Kitchenette, at 2720 East Plaza, is the steam-table plate when you want to sit down. Mira Mesa is a third Filipino map, farther north. On a two-day weekend, keep Plaza Boulevard. Mira Mesa can have you back.

Chicano Park, under the San Diego–Coronado Bridge in Barrio Logan, fits the morning between those two drives. Neighbors took the land under the pillars in 1970, and the park is a National Historic Landmark now. Read the murals. The museum at 1960 National Avenue is open Thursday through Sunday when the week’s hours say so. Check that door before you count on it.

Salt air can wait until both lunches are done. A Tijuana afternoon needs a passport, the Blue Line to San Ysidro, and time for the line coming home, anywhere from half an hour to a few hours. Leave the rental car on this side of the border.

Have the inland meals before you point the car at the water.