If you take a hike along Orange Avenue from Hotel del Coronado to the Ferry Landing, you’ll find a whole lot of restaurants that skew more toward commercial than characterful. Coronado’s food scene is a unique one. Because many of its customers are out of towners, most of its restaurants are concentrated along about 1.7 miles of Orange Avenue, many fighting for foot traffic from local hotels.
Take The Henry, owned by Fox Restaurant Concepts. Its parent company? The Cheesecake Factory. Just next door is The Brigantine Seafood and Oyster Bar, one of eight others. Blue Bridge Hospitality owns Little Frenchie, MooTime Creamery, Village Pizzeria and is in the process of opening The Avenue Fish and Oyster Company.
I lived for a time in Japan, where it’s easy to stumble into a restaurant with a grandmother making her specialty ramen, passed down through generations. It is also easy to sit at a bar and have a drink with the owner while listening to his jazz collection on vinyl. In the U.S., the pickings for this mom-and-pop atmosphere are slim; in Coronado, they’re even slimmer…