Food & Wine Magazine is reporting that longtime Daniel Boulud protégé, Chef Travis Swikard, is returning to his hometown of San Diego next month and will be seeking a location to open a Meditteranean-inspired, California-driven restaurant.
Last month, Chef Swikard departed his position as Executive Chef of Daniel Boulud's Boulud Sud restaurant in New York City. Swikard was also the culinary director of Bar Boulud and Epicerie Boulud. Swikard cites celebrity chef Gavin Kaysen amongst his mentors and credits him for bringing him to Boulud's employ. Prior to joining Boulud in 2008, Swikard was previously a consulting chef at Barbeques Galore in San Diego from 2006-2007 and worked for the Cohn Restaurant Group at Island Prime from 2002-2005 before beginning a formal culinary education at New England Culinary Institute.
Swikard, along with his wife and two children, will move back to San diego on September 30. In the meantime, the 34-year-old chef and Santee-native is traveling around the world eating at some top restaurants for inspiration for when he opens his own.
"I want to do a more California-derived Mediterranean cuisine," Swikard said to Food & Wine."Light, bright, delicious cuisine. I’m not going to say it's 'healthy,' but that’s what California cuisine is: bright, light, textured, vegetable- and seafood-forward."
Chef Swikard is currently in the process of searching for the ideal San Diego space to bring his dream to fruition. Based on his history with the company and the fact that he hired the Cohn Restaurant Group's local public relations company to spearhead media outreach for the mid-2019 opening of his unnamed restaurant, we believe that David & Lesley Cohn will be "silent partners" in Swikard's San Diego eatery.
