The 8 Best Restaurants on Adams Avenue

In 2019, the old Circa California Soul Food space at 2121 Adams Avenue in University Heights turned into something very different: an intimate omakase counter called Soichi. It's the best restaurant on Adams Avenue, and by September 2021 it had a Michelin star. The Michelin Guide reaffirmed that star in 2022 and still lists Soichi as starred.

The restaurant belongs to a husband-and-wife team, chef Soichi Kadoya and Raechel Kadoya. Soichi Kadoya spent more than 20 years in Japanese cuisine before opening here, including a long run behind the counter at Sushi Tadokoro in Old Town. The format is simple. You sit at the counter, order the nigiri omakase, and the chef sets the order. Michelin calls the sushi "straightforward" and says it shows "a great deal of skill." That's a sushi chef's kind of compliment.

The praise centers on the fish itself. The Hokkaido scallops and the long-marinated fish get singled out again and again, not just the intimate room. Kadoya also works with a low-waste ethos, using nearly every part of the fish instead of throwing away the trim. It's a thoughtful way to run a counter this small.

The planning is the one part you can't improvise. Seats are booked through Tock, by email or by phone, the counter is small, and Soichi is closed Monday and Tuesday, so aim for a Wednesday-through-Sunday night. Michelin puts it in its top price band, and it's the biggest per-person spend on Adams Avenue, so it makes sense as the birthday dinner, the anniversary, or the night you finally stop saying "we should go to Soichi." Book the seat first, then let dinner be the whole plan for the night. Grains, number six on this list, sits on the same University Heights stretch if you want a reason to come back for lunch.

Bosforo, in Normal Heights, is the Adams Avenue dinner for people who like to order a lot and share all of it. Chef-owner Seckin Sage Anlasbay built it around Istanbul's meyhane culture, the Turkish tavern tradition of meze, shared plates, wood-fired kebabs, rakı, cocktails and live music.

The story behind it is personal. Anlasbay had lived in San Diego for 15 years and felt Turkish food was underrepresented here, so he built a restaurant around the food of his childhood in southern Turkey. Bosforo started out as a wood-fired pizza catering business, and only later became the brick-and-mortar restaurant at 3201 Adams Ave.

Here's how to order. Put a spread of meze in the middle of the table, then add a fire-grilled kebab as the centerpiece. Those two, the kebabs and the meze spread, are what diners bring up most, by a wide margin. The lahmacun, a thin Turkish flatbread, gets plenty of love too, and so does the Turkish branzino when it's the fish of the day. If Soichi is the precise, intimate splurge, Bosforo is the big, generous table where plates keep landing.

Bosforo is dinner only and closed Mondays. Plan on roughly $40 to $80 a person, and on weekends, get there early, because tables go fast.

Zia Gourmet Pizza is the Normal Heights pizza night for anyone who gets bored after pepperoni. The menu runs to more than 30 pizzas across meat, vegetable and vegan categories, plus dessert pizzas, and in reviews its vegan options come up more often than any single meat pie on the street.

The combinations are where Zia has fun. The Eggplant layers oven-roasted eggplant with herbs, cranberries, garlic, mozzarella and a yogurt sauce. The Sweet Southern goes sweet and savory with marinated chicken, feta, caramelized pears, walnuts and mozzarella. Order either one as a Grande, or get both and trade slices. There's also The New Yorker, which landed third on Yelp's national list of the 20 most unique pizzas. Reviewers like the craft beer and soda lineup too, so there's something good to drink with all of it.

Zia's roots go back to Café Zia, a now-closed spot that was a favorite with SDSU students. Years of experimenting there eventually turned into a gourmet pizza restaurant of its own, one that talks about treating pizza "as art." With cranberries and yogurt sauce on the eggplant pie, you can see what they mean.

Zia is evenings only, 5 to 11 PM every day, which makes it the one place on this list serving until 11 every night of the week, and one of just two dinner picks here that's open on Mondays. It ranks just ahead of Madi because it answers the dinner question, and it answers it with more variety than almost anywhere on Adams.

Madi is what happens when a weekend brunch gets so popular that its owners decide to serve it every day. This Normal Heights brunch restaurant sums itself up as "Sunday brunch seven days a week," and it has the deepest pile of reviews of any restaurant on Adams Avenue.

It's the little sister of Madison on Park, the University Heights restaurant Jeffrey Fink and Matt Sieve opened together in 2016. The two partners came at hospitality from different directions. Fink had a law career and opened Flux Nightclub in 2010 before turning to restaurants, and Sieve is a third-generation restaurateur who used to run Isabel's Cantina in Pacific Beach. After the pandemic, Madison's weekend brunch did so well that the partners built a spot to do "brunch seven days a week." Madi opened on Adams in 2022 and has since grown to Pacific Beach and Hillcrest.

The order starts with waffle churro sticks for the table. They're Madi's most talked-about dish, with the shakshuka close behind, and the berry-topped French toast is the other headliner. Add a mimosa and you've got the whole Sunday-morning idea on a random Tuesday.

Plan around the clock and the crowd. Madi closes at 2 PM every day, holds only a small number of reservations on weekends, and runs mostly on walk-ins. Large weekend parties have been quoted waits around 40 minutes. The only thing keeping Madi at number four is the hour it closes. This is a list about full meals, and a kitchen that wraps up at 2 can't cover dinner.

Et Voilà is the classic French bistro on Adams Avenue, the one for onion soup, mussels and a soufflé you order well before dessert. It's in Normal Heights at 3015 Adams Ave, and it runs on a clean split of jobs: chef Vincent Viale handles the kitchen, and his partner Ludo Mifsud handles the front of the house.

Viale moved to California in 2005 and cooked at Tapenade and Bernard'O before he and Mifsud opened Et Voilà in 2016. The name was chosen on purpose. In French, "et voilà" is what you say with a little pride when something is finished, and the partners picked it for the neighborhood bistro they wanted this part of town to have.

Reviewers talk about the soufflé and the mussels more than anything else, with the French onion soup, made with Emmental, and the beef bourguignon close behind. The menu also names coq au vin and duck confit with potato galette and fig reduction. The move is escargots to start, with the soufflé ordered right alongside them, since it needs lead time.

Plan on about $40 to $100 a person. Et Voilà is closed Mondays, and street parking on this block takes some patience, so build in a few extra minutes. It edges out Grains on this list because it's built for exactly the kind of sit-down dinner people mean when they ask where to eat on Adams.

Grains is a Thai-rooted kitchen in University Heights, and for years its plant-based cooking got more love in reviews than almost anything else on Adams Avenue. Sisters Napatr Chayodom, the chef, and Katiya Hendricks, the general manager, own it together and opened it in 2017 in the old Adams Avenue Grill space, cooking reimagined versions of the Thai home food they grew up with.

In December 2025, Grains made a big change. After nearly a decade of plant-based cooking, the restaurant announced on Instagram that it would start serving meat, pointing to rising costs and how hard it is for small restaurants to stay afloat. The plan was to keep many of the plant-based dishes and add meat options alongside them, for guests "whether you eat plant-based, meat-loving or something in between."

The dishes that built the Grains following include Buffalo cauliflower, mushroom "calamari," drunken noodles and vegan tom kah. The order to start with is the banh mi, and if the table is sharing, add popcorn chicken.

If you eat strictly vegan, look over the current menu before you go, since it's no longer all plant-based. On weekdays the kitchen takes an afternoon break from 3 to 5, while weekends run straight through. Grains sits on the same stretch of Adams as Soichi.

The reason to know Dos Palmas Cafe is out back. Behind the coffee counter at this Normal Heights cafe there's a peaceful garden patio with tables and benches, and reviewers bring it up almost as often as the food.

The food holds up its end. Dos Palmas has the highest rating of any spot on this stretch of Adams, and the paninis are the most-praised thing on the menu. Get a breakfast panini and a Mexican mocha and carry both out to the garden. The menu also covers acai bowls, fresh-baked breakfast breads, smoothies, and hot and iced coffee, so a quick stop can easily turn into a long one.

Local couple Laura McNary and Valentin Salas opened Dos Palmas in 2015 and ran it for nine years. In 2025 they sold it to Mahdad Taheri, another local San Diegan, so the garden cafe has stayed in local hands under its new owner.

It's counter service and closes at 2 PM daily, so this is a morning or lunch plan. If this were a list of daytime stops, Dos Palmas would be hard to beat. On a restaurant list, the 2 PM close is what keeps it at number seven.

Cantina Mayahuel is the Normal Heights pick for margaritas, mole and a real introduction to agave. It's a restaurant, mezcalería and tequilería in one, with a bottle shop you reach through the cantina, and its margaritas come up in reviews more than almost any other dish or drink on Adams Avenue.

The mezcal story starts with the staff. The restaurant's connection to Oaxaca reportedly began through dishwashers who had family ties to fourth-generation mezcal producers there, and that relationship grew into a sourcing partnership. Mayahuel also has Casa Don Lorenzo, a house spirit line made just for the restaurant. The lineup includes a flight of wild agave varieties, Mexicano, Arroqueño and Tepeztate, roasted in a stone-lined pit over red oak and distilled in a double copper still.

Come for happy hour and order the mole and a margarita. The mole gets real praise of its own, and tacos make a good second round. When you're ready to go deeper, the Casa Don Lorenzo flight lets you taste those three agaves side by side.

It's first come, first served, with no reservations, and ordering runs through a QR code. After 7 PM it's 21 and over only, so plan earlier if anyone younger is coming along. It's closed Mondays, and happy hour times can shift, so check before you go.