Sorrento Valley’s LuckyBolt restaurant launches evenings-only dinner Lounge

If there’s been one absolute on Kris Schlesser’s road to success with his Sorrento Valley restaurant business LuckyBolt, it’s his ability to adapt to change.

It helped him transform his LuckyBolt Kitchen + Bakery business model during the pandemic to survive. And more recently it has led him to expand this fall with his new evenings-only The Lounge, which serves sourdough-crust pizzas on Wednesdays and Thursdays and a prix-fixe Mediterranean-style mezze dinner service on Fridays and Saturdays.

Both the daytime café and The Lounge use organic farm-to-table ingredients direct from San Diego County farms and ranches.

Providers include PastureBird chicken from Warner Springs; pasture-raised chicken eggs from Happy Hens in Ramona; grass-fed beef from Perennial Pastures in East County; organic tofu from San Diego Soy Dairy; and produce from Chino Farms in Rancho Santa Fe; Stehly and Schaner farms in Valley Center; J.R. Organics, Be Wise Ranch and Mountain Meadow Mushrooms in Escondido; Hakuma Produce in Ramona; Eli’s Farm in Fallbrook; and Rodney Kawano Farms in Oceanside and Vista.

The hands-on, direct-from-the-farm connection has been a goal for Schlesser ever since he conceived the idea of providing healthier lunch alternatives to office workers, like his former self, more than 20 years ago. Bypassing food brokers and distributors not only means he can serve fresher produce and proteins, it also means farmers earn more by not paying for middle-man food storage and delivery costs.

Schlesser launched LuckyBolt in San Francisco in 2011, delivering lunches from the city’s top restaurants to offices via bicycle-pulled carts. After he relocated to the more-sprawling San Diego in 2014, Schlesser transformed the business into a healthy meal prep and delivery business run from a shared kitchen.

In 2018, he opened his brick-and-mortar bakery/kitchen location on Roselle Street in a small, tucked-away strip mall under the I-805 overpass in Sorrento Valley. It offered takeaway and office delivery meal service. And in 2019, the business grew to include two cafés in office park locations in Sorreno Valley and Mission Valley.

Then the pandemic hit in 2020, shuttering offices and the two cafés. Once again, he pivoted to begin delivering prepared foods and farm-fresh groceries directly to customers’ homes.

In the years since, LuckyBolt Kitchen + Bakery’s business has grown steadily, and now a full bakery and café-style breakfast and lunch menu is available for dine-in or takeout. The café’s top-selling item is its sourdough bread loaves, baked fresh each morning with organic flour from Cairnspring Mills in Washington state.

With the business now thriving, Schlesser recently decided to follow through on his long-incubating plan to transform the vacant retail space next door into The Lounge.

He started slow last spring by offering takeout-only service on Wednesday nights for sourdough-crust pizzas with farm-fresh toppings like Mama Lil’s peppers from Oregon, dry-cured Moroccan olives and seasonal Chino Farms produce like Swiss chard and broccolini.

That was received so well, he expanded pizza service for dine-in and takeaway on Thursdays.

Then last month, he introduced his dine-in mezze service on Friday and Saturday evenings.

Mezze, the Arabic word for appetizer, is something Schlesser grew up eating and loving in his native New York. Working with his longtime friend, New York-trained chef Jesse Aghravi, they developed an all-inclusive mezze meal service for two priced at $35 per person.

Mezze at The Lounge includes baked-to-order pita bread, vegetable crudités with ranch dressing-style tahini sauce and dukkah (a fragrant seasoning of toasted seeds, nuts and spices), housemade hummus which Schlesser calls “whirled peas,” tabouleh lettuce wraps, an eggplant purée he nicknamed “babagadeesh,” turmeric-pickled vegetables, marinated Castelvetrano olives and green zhoug hot sauce.

There are also a few extra mezze dishes available for sale a la carte, including falafel, a “Grandma’s style” fried egg dish with Medjool dates, labneh and crispy shallots, and a Merguez-style farm-raised beef sausage patty. The Lounge also serves wines by the glass from California and Sicily and beers from San Diego and Italy.

While pizza nights offer walk-in service, Schlesser is requesting reservations for the mezze service, where diners can reserve a table for 90 minutes. The mezze service has been particularly popular, with reservations booking up weeks in advance. Schlesser said he’d like to eventually expand the mezze menu with whole lamb service and fresh-caught seafood.

“Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive,” Schlesser said of The Lounge. “We benefit a lot  just by virtue of being underneath the highway. It’s the last place you’d look for what we’re doing. People come in and they’re delighted. They open the door with their face pre-crunched and then their facial expression just melts and it’s all just good times from there.”

LuckyBolt

Kitchen + Bakery hours: 7:30 a.m.to 2 p.m. daily

Lounge hours: 5-8:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursday for pizza service; 5-9 p.m.Fridays and Saturdays for mezze

Where: 10920 Roselle St., Suites 104 and105

Phone: 858-352-6766

Reservations: exploretock.com/luckybolt