SanDiegoVille

Netflix's 'Love Is Blind' Finalist Couple Both Share Surprising Past In San Diego's Alcohol Industry

One of the final couples standing on Netflix's hit reality dating series Love Is Blind has a surprising connection to San Diego, and it involves more than simply having lived here. Season 11 contestants Blake Carver and Erika Ellis discovered during their blind dates that both previously worked in San Diego County's craft alcoholic beverage industry, with ties to a North County vodka distillery and a locally founded hard kombucha company.

San Diego's Southern comfort food scene has another destination for buttery biscuits, crispy fried chicken and hearty breakfast sandwiches. North Carolina-born Rise Southern Biscuits & Righteous Chicken has officially opened its second San Diego County restaurant, bringing its signature biscuit sandwiches and unconventional self-service pickup system to El Cajon.

San Diego's growing obsession with Japanese snacks, anime collectibles and Asian beauty products has a massive new destination, and shoppers are already lining up to get inside. Ebisu Life Store has officially opened at La Jolla Village Square, bringing thousands of imported products to a sprawling retail space that attracted enormous crowds during its grand opening celebration.

Gen Korean BBQ is rumored to be closing its longtime Mira Mesa restaurant, with residents speculating about rising rents, a new shopping center owner and the future of the popular all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue chain. While no closing date has been announced, a sweeping $100 million corporate transaction could soon bring major changes to both Gen restaurants in San Diego County.

Enjoy those evening sunsets while you can, San Diego. The city will experience its final 6 p.m. sunset of 2026 on Thursday, October 29, before daylight saving time ends this Sunday, November 1, abruptly pushing sunset to just 4:57 p.m. For the next 10 weeks, San Diegans will watch the sun disappear before 5 p.m., with the earliest sunsets arriving in early December, when daylight will vanish around 4:42 p.m.

Hollywood actress Christina Hendricks is returning to San Diego's North Park neighborhood for a special Halloween night DJ set at Part Time Lover, bringing her signature mix of goth, shoegaze, dream pop and alternative music back to the intimate listening bar that drew enormous crowds during her previous appearance earlier this year.

One of downtown San Diego's most recognizable landmarks has temporarily disappeared from the city, as the iconic Little Italy neighborhood sign spanning India Street has been taken down for repairs and refurbishment following damage sustained earlier this year. The beloved gateway, which has welcomed visitors to the historic Italian-American neighborhood since 2000, is expected to return in time for the community's annual holiday festivities.

North County's Shoots Fish & Beer is preparing to paddle south, with the sustainable seafood concept behind two of San Diego's most beloved coastal eateries filing paperwork for a third location in Encinitas' Leucadia neighborhood.

What was supposed to be a memorable international running experience turned into an expensive nightmare for dozens of participants in Sunday's Binational Half Marathon, who returned from Tijuana to discover their vehicles had been towed from a San Ysidro shopping center. Now, conflicting accounts from runners, race organizers and a nearby parking operator, along with new statements from the City of San Diego and San Diego Police Department, are raising questions about who directed traffic, whether participants were sent into an unauthorized parking lot and who should be responsible for the resulting towing bills.

One of San Diego's most celebrated independent bakeries is preparing for a major transformation, just months after its founder publicly insisted she had no interest in expanding. Wayfarer Bread & Pastry, the nationally acclaimed Bird Rock destination known for its sourdough bread, flaky pastries and persistent lines, has entered a partnership with a restaurant investment and operations team whose business history includes multiple Broken Yolk Cafe franchises and a now-closed Mira Mesa churro shop.

Long before she became the longtime partner of Hollywood Superman Henry Cavill, Natalie Viscuso was living a very different kind of celebrity lifestyle in San Diego, starring on MTV's My Super Sweet 16 as the privileged teenage daughter of a wealthy nightclub owner whose Gaslamp Quarter entertainment empire helped define downtown nightlife in the early 2000s. Now a Hollywood executive and mother of Cavill's child, Viscuso has a surprisingly colorful San Diego backstory involving multimillion-dollar mansions, luxury cars, extravagant parties and some of the city's most notorious nightclubs.

San Diego's rapidly expanding Chula Tacos is preparing to open its fifth location in less than a year, an ambitious milestone for a locally grown Mexican food business that has built a loyal following for its Tijuana-style street tacos.

One of San Diego's most prominent nonprofit organizations is facing a mounting crisis of leadership, finances and public trust, raising serious questions about the future of the city's massive annual Pride celebration and the organization responsible for producing it. San Diego Pride has announced the departure of its seventh leader since 2023, confirmed another round of staffing cuts and acknowledged significant financial challenges, all while confronting lingering fallout from a controversial festival booking, declining corporate sponsorships and years of complaints about its leadership.

Just when downtown San Diego's increasingly chaotic Modern Times saga seemed incapable of another plot twist, the troubled restaurant formerly known as The Local and more recently Timestead has announced yet another identity. The Fourth Avenue establishment is now Infinite Bar & Grille, supposedly operating under new ownership, with another brewery preparing to move into a space already entangled in disputed business arrangements, payroll complaints and unresolved licensing questions.

San Diego's newly installed Padres ownership is moving forward with another rodeo at Petco Park despite years of protests, serious horse injuries, animal deaths and a Superior Court judgment finding that the event's management team, including the Padres, deliberately misled the public about an injured horse from its inaugural event.

San Diego has a streetlight problem that apparently no amount of taxpayer money can illuminate. An independent SanDiegoVille investigation has uncovered 14,826 streetlight maintenance complaints still marked unresolved in the City's own reporting system, including thousands dating back years, even as spending has more than doubled and a new audit reveals that nearly three-quarters of repairs are concentrated in just three of the City's nine Council districts.