Recreating a classic

DEVELOPMENT: Recreating a La Jolla Success Story

Jason Peaslee is trying to recreate the quaint atmosphere and charm of The Cottage restaurant that he and a partner own in La Jolla in a remodeled portion of an Encinitas shopping center.

The Cottage in La Jolla is in a remodeled Victorian home.

Recreating the hominess that exemplifies The Cottage La Jolla in Encinitas was a challenge, but Peaslee, with the help of architect Satoshi Ikedo, CEO and principal project manager of Ikedo Design based in Solana Beach, pulled it off by incorporating touches of the La Jolla restaurant in Encinitas.

That includes painting one interior wall a shade of yellow that was originally used on the La Jolla restaurant.

“Some of our old customers will recognize it,” Peaslee said.

The New and the Old

Peaslee in June signed a 15year lease on 3,500 square feet of space that had been a Native Foods Café in a shopping center at 127 N. El Camino Real.

“When we first took over the space, it was a big square,” Peaslee said.

The Cottage La Jolla has an impressive history behind it.

Built around 1905, the cottage was the primary home of Edward Howard and his wife Eliza who were among La Jolla’s earlies settlers. Howard also was La Jolla’s second physician.

The house was built on Prospect Street but moved to Fay Avenue by the Howards.

In the 1970’s, it became the Village Pet Shop, then the Vienna Café Konditorei.

In 1986, Nanci Long bought the pastry shot and rebranded it as The Cottage, and Peaslee acquired the property in 2018 with his business partner, Bernardo Kanarek.

While it’s impossible to recreate that history in a modern shopping center, Peaslee and Ikedo wanted to make the new restaurant feel as welcoming as that old house.

California Cottage

With Ikedo’s design, Peaslee said the area was broken up into smaller rooms, each with a slightly different look and feel.

“We wanted to break it up so it didn’t have that empty, cafeteria feeling like it did when we took it over,” Peaslee said. “Each dining room got its own kind of flooring design.”

Lap board, similar to the siding used on beachside cottages, was used on interior walls. “We used a lot of wood,” Ikedo said.

Spanish tile in the entranceway and in the bar area is meant to give the restaurant “a little bit of a California cottage feel,” Ikedo said.

Framed mirrors on the wall also make the rooms look bigger.

Like The Cottage La Jolla, The Cottage Encinitas has a patio for outdoor dining, although it’s smaller with room to seat about 50 compared to the La Jolla restaurant, which has patio seating for 85.

Offsetting the smaller patio, The Cottage Encinitas has interior seating for about 85 compared to about 50 in La Jolla.

Local artists created murals in the new restaurant that Peaslee said he plans to sell by auction at some point with the proceeds going to a nonprofit charity.

One mural depicts the city of Encinitas and the other birds that can be seen in the area.

Growing

Peaslee said he chose Encinitas for his second Cottage restaurant because the community has a similar feel to La Jolla, although the clientele tends to be more

local with fewer tourists than La Jolla.

“We’re kind of at the entrance to Rancho Santa Fe. There’s not a lot of food offerings in the ranch so we’re kind of right there for people coming out of the ranch to stop and eat,” Peaslee said. “In La Jolla, 50% of our customers are tourists.”

By comparison, Peaslee said that in Encinitas, “we’re not going to get much of the tourism sector because there’s not a lot of tourists going to the eastern Encinitas area but there is that middle class, kind of upper class customer that’s going to come that cares about what they put in their body, the right food.”

With that in mind, Peaslee said the The Cottage Encinitas menu will have more vegan and vegetarian offerings.

Ikedo specializes in restaurant design, and and he said that the biggest challenge in building out the Encinitas restaurant was just getting materials in a post-COVID world.

“We had to change the wood panel selection three times,” Ikedo said

Peaslee said he’s hoping to open more restaurants under The Cottage brand, calling the Encinitas restaurant “the foot in the door, kind of getting into the North County.”

“That whole North County coastal zone is not the sleepy little area that it used to be,” Peaslee said.

As near as he can tell, Peaslee said the restaurant business in San Diego County is recovering nicely from the worst of the pandemic, when many closed or could only serve take-out orders.

In 2020, Peaslee said his business at the La Jolla restaurant was down by about 60% from what it was pre-pandemic.

It started to bounce back in 2021, and so far, Peaslee said it looks like the business in 2022 will be close to matching pre-pandemic levels.

“We’re probably hitting right where it should be,” Peaslee said. “In general, we’ve been really lucky that we had such great support from customers. We’re busier than we’ve ever been.” ■