Omar S.
Yelp
Because the people running The Haven are so nice, I promised myself that when I reviewed the place, before I talked about the food, I'd say something positive, so here goes:
When you tire of having your dignity assaulted and appetite denied by the staff and kitchen at Cucina Sorella, you won't have to travel far to find a meal; you can walk next door to The Haven.
There it is. And now comes the hard part: While it's easy to write about good or bad food, I'm not sure where to look for new ways to say "mundane."
The Haven's menu is straightforward. Pizza, pasta, some salads and a bunch of vegan stuff form the bulk of the restaurant's offerings, but though the list resembles that of a Roman pizzeria, nothing I've eaten at The Haven - indeed, nothing I saw on other diners' tables - bore any reasonable resemblance to anything I've had in Italy.
You may protest, "But we're not IN Italy!" and that's fair, and it brings me to my second point: There is such a thing as California-Italian cooking, pioneered by Jonathan Waxman and served in his Manhattan restaurant, Barbuto, and though The Haven's menu strikes me as a sorta-kinda version of that cuisine, it's much less Barbuto and much more California Pizza Kitchen, delivering every disappointment that the comparison implies.
For instance: Depending on the type of pie and where it's made, a pizza's crust and cornicione should be brown-to-charred, maybe crispy, and it should taste to some degree of tangy fermentation.
The pies at The Haven have none of those distinguishing features; the five I've tasted rested on what were essentially Kaiser rolls stretched into discs, then baked at a low temperature. Toppings were generally of good quality but were provided sparingly, as though to show off... I don't know what, exactly... the bread below?
As for The Haven's pasta: Sauce should be the star of any pasta dish, and, at least for the dishes The Haven sells, the pasta should be turned in its sauce so as to coat and cover it.
But at The Haven, most pasta plates were loaded with various shapes, then lightly topped with one sauce or another, as though the kitchen was concerned about running out before service ended. This, it seems to me, is a very efficient and thrifty way to serve insipid food.
I have no experience of The Haven's salad, nor of its gluten-free or vegan things, but the menu seems proud of them, so I'll just say that if The Haven is primarily intended as a home for such preparations, its signage should plainly say so, in order to save the time and effort of people who might have come there for a substantial meal.
Overall, The Haven is a perfectly nice place, staffed by perfectly nice people, but its pizzas and pasta dishes suffer by comparison to most San Diego restaurants serving similar dishes. That's really saying something, given the dismal state of Italian cooking in "America's Finest City."
On the other hand, it isn't Cucina Sorella.
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Cucina Sorella: https://bit.ly/3TzITDW
