R10 Social House in Redondo Beach, CA

Even on a rushed trip, we try to do our best with trying different restaurants and our hotel was within easy walking distance of several. For Saturday, I had intended for us to do kind of funky for lunch and somewhere nice for dinner, but as it turned out, we reversed that. Our hotel was located near the King Harbor Marina and the long business lunch that we had was at the Bluewater Grill. It was a lovely setting of course and the only disappointment was no Dungeness crab on the menu. I did have shrimp and it was delicious.

One of the objectives in our wandering all around the harbor later that afternoon was to decide about a restaurant for dinner and the boardwalk area was pretty much on the funky side. A little place called the R10 Social House caught our interest with their farm-to-table and artisan beer claims. How are you going to pass that up? As it turns out, they actually bill themselves as a gastro pub which is a term that the British have adopted – “a pub that specializes in serving high-quality food”. Anyone who has dined in London will understand why they had to come up with a special term. Anyway, back to the R10. Their menu was limited, but intriguing. The beer and wine were both the kind that you don’t routinely get here and since we had done seafood at lunch, we went the other way for dinner. The server highly recommended the beer-braised short ribs with special onion rings atop a cauliflower puree. Hubby ordered that and I had the hangar steak. The food was excellent and in smaller portions which was perfect with no ability for us to deal with leftovers. The other dishes that passed by us looked equally good and we decided not to try the live music in the lounge upstairs. It had been a busy day and we had an fairly early departure planned for the next morning.