VanMan Kitchen occupies the former Donut Bar space in Pacific Beach, a high-traffic corridor that has seen a recent surge of burger concepts and fast-casual openings. The restaurant sits near Local H2O and Desserts by Clément and just blocks from several other recent burger debuts, placing it squarely in the middle of Garnet Avenue’s evolving food landscape. Unlike many of its neighbors, however, VanMan Kitchen is as much a physical manifestation of an online following as it is a standalone eatery.
Ogorek rose to prominence through The VanMan Company, a wellness and personal-care business built around handmade products such as tallow-based balms, tooth powder, honey formulations, and shampoos. His brand emphasizes ancestral living, regenerative agriculture, and skepticism of mainstream consumer goods, an ethos that has attracted a fiercely loyal audience while also generating controversy. With hundreds of thousands of followers across social platforms, VanMan has turned that worldview into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer operation, now partially housed next door to his restaurant.
At VanMan Kitchen, that philosophy is carried directly onto the menu. The restaurant focuses on grass-fed smash burgers and fries cooked exclusively in 100 percent grass-fed and finished beef tallow and butter. Burgers are priced modestly, with classic and Oklahoma-style onion smash burgers featuring grass-fed beef, American cheese, organic produce, house pickles, and potato buns. Fries are cut from organic potatoes and fried in tallow, served with house-made organic ketchup, reinforcing the kitchen’s rejection of seed oils and industrial fats.
The drink menu mirrors the same clean-label approach, offering organic lemonade, watermelon juice, hibiscus aqua fresca, raw milk sourced locally, Mexican Coke, and spring water. Coffee service includes fair-trade organic cold brew from San Diego’s Ryan Bros, along with espresso drinks that can be made with raw milk in place of organic A2 whole milk. Desserts lean nostalgic but intentional, with milkshakes made from Straus Family Creamery organic ice cream and apple fry dippers battered and fried in beef tallow.
What sets VanMan Kitchen apart from a typical influencer-backed restaurant is the operational footprint extending beyond the dining room. The adjacent space is being used to batch and scale products for VanMan’s wellness line, which will be sold within the restaurant, effectively turning the Pacific Beach location into a hybrid storefront, kitchen, and production hub. The setup underscores Ogorek’s broader goal of building a vertically integrated lifestyle brand, where food, personal care, and ideology coexist under one roof.
The opening arrives amid renewed debate around wellness culture, food sourcing, and the growing influence of internet personalities in physical retail spaces. Ogorek’s outspoken views and anti-mainstream rhetoric have made him a polarizing figure, and his move into San Diego’s restaurant scene has already drawn both curiosity and criticism. Still, early interest suggests that his online following is willing to show up in person, at least long enough to see whether the burgers live up to the brand.
Whether VanMan Kitchen becomes a lasting Pacific Beach fixture or a flashpoint in the ongoing collision between wellness culture and hospitality remains to be seen. What is clear is that the concept has immediately positioned itself as one of the more unconventional openings on Garnet Avenue, combining food service with a broader lifestyle operation in a way rarely seen in San Diego’s dining scene.
VanMan Kitchen is now open at 1380 Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach. For more information, visit vanmanskitchen.com.
Originally published on January 12, 2026.
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