Vegan brunch, craft cocktails and more: What’s trending on San Diego’s food scene
Wondering where San Diego’s insiders are eating and drinking? It’s easy to spot lines out the door, but some underlying trends are harder to see.
We took a data-driven look at the question, using Yelp to deduce which local businesses have been seeing especially high review volumes this month.
To find out who made the list, we looked at San Diego businesses on Yelp by category and counted how many reviews each received. Rather than compare them based on number of reviews alone, we calculated a percentage increase in reviews over the past month, and tracked businesses that consistently increased their volume of reviews to identify statistically significant outliers compared to past performance.
Read on to see which spots are extra hot this autumn.
Side Bar Nightclub & Lounge
Whether or not you’ve been hearing buzz about the Gaslamp’s Side Bar Nightclub & Lounge, the cocktail bar, which offers tapas and more, is a hot topic according to Yelp review data.
While businesses categorized as “Cocktail Bars” on Yelp saw a median 1.9% increase in new reviews over the past month, Side Bar Nightclub & Lounge bagged a 39% increase in new reviews within that time frame, maintaining a superior 4.5-star rating. It significantly outperformed the previous month by gaining 5.3 times more reviews than expected based on its past performance.
Open at 536 Market St. (between 6th Ave and Fifth Avenue) since last September, Side Bar Nightclub & Lounge offers small bites (sliders, pizzas and more) and craft cocktails such as the ahi poke martini.
Side Bar Nightclub & Lounge is open from 6 p.m.–2 a.m. on Wednesday-Saturday and 9 p.m.–2 a.m. on Sunday. (It’s closed on Monday and Tuesday.)