Por David Schwab | Reportero SDUN

The Cosmopolitan Hotel & Restaurant in Old Town has taken something old and made it new, and two of its chefs, Uptown residents Andrew Lee Sasloe and Caitlin Gyelo, have figured prominently in that transformation.

“We brought it back to what Old Town used to be in the 1800s,” said head chef Sasloe, a Normal Heights resident who’s rejuvenated the menu of Cosmopolitan, formerly Casa de Bandini, overlooking Old Town Square. “There’s so many Mexican restaurants in town; but you can come to Cosmopolitan and get steak, seafood, a pasta dish — or a burrito.”

Sasloe said Mexican food still accounts for about 30 percent of the restaurant’s revamped cuisine, but added, “We’re doing different Mexican food, not the average red rice and refried beans.”

They are also growing some of the spices used daily in the kitchen on the restaurant property.

Sasloe’s pastry chef and Banker’s Hill resident, Gyelo, brought her dessert flair to Cosmopolitan’s menu. Her churros, voted “best” by San Diego Magazine, are a mainstay of the reinvented menu.

“It’s the chocolate dipping sauce that goes along with the churros,” she said. “What makes it different is the pâte à choux dough used to make éclairs, cream puffs and doughnuts, which we fry and roll in a cinnamon sugar vanilla bean mixture and serve along with the semi-sweet chocolate sauce that includes cardamom and cayenne pepper — that’s my little spin.”

Cosmopolitan proprietor Catherine Miller, who co-owns the restaurant with her husband Tom Withers, boasts about another of Gyelo’s confectionary treats, her cornmeal scones, which Miller said patrons in the hotel’s 10 Old West-style, customized guest rooms rave about.

“She does such a beautiful job with her scones and her fresh, homemade pomegranate jam which guests get treated to in the morning,” Miller said.
After a $6.5 million dollar rehabilitation the Cosmopolitan Hotel & Restaurant, which is San Diego’s oldest surviving building built by pioneer settler Juan Bandini in 1827, has once again become Old Town’s community center and a regional destination.

These days, it’s all about getting back to the establishment’s roots.

“Cosmopolitan is actually the name of the hotel that was here in the 1860s,” Miller said, adding that it was a stop along the stagecoach run. “It was [the] state park’s vision to give people a sense of what it was like to be here in that period. It touches people’s lives when they think about what was here; get a feel for what life was really like. That’s an enjoyable unique part of this restaurant.”

Authenticity is what the staff and owners of the Cosmopolitan strive for; the staff dresses in Western period garb and piano players in the courtyard regale guests with a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of classic and modern tunes.

The hotel-restaurant offers entertainment five days a week, not only piano players but guitarists and harmonica players as well.

However, the kitchen staff, including Sasloe and Miller, would like to take Cosmopolitan’s new direction one step further.

“I’d like to bring theme nights here, prime rib on Monday, [shrimp] scampi on Tuesday, crab legs and lobster other nights,” he said.
Miller said she would like to broaden the hotel-restaurant’s clientele to go along with its expanded cuisine.

“We’d like to draw people from Uptown and other areas of San Diego,” she said, adding that she thinks the Cosmopolitan is a great “Staycation” spot.
“It’s the only hotel in the park,” she said. “So basically, the park is yours.”

“Old town is not just for Mexican food or for tourists anymore,” Sasloe said. “You can come down here five days a week and get something totally different every time.”