Some festivals happen because a city needs them. Others because one guy walked into a bar in Louisiana, saw someone playing accordion with their whole body, and never recovered. And thankfully, the latter is how Gator by the Bay became San Diego's largest Louisiana-themed festival. It returns to Spanish Landing park May 8 through 11.

On this week's Happy Half Hour, co-founder Peter Oliver explains how a trip through Lafayette and New Orleans in the late '80s turned into a lifelong obsession with Louisiana music, dance, and culture.

Its first version launched in 2001 with eight bands, a gospel tent, and about 2,000 people showing up more or less out of nowhere, Oliver shares. It also lost money. So they did it again. Then again. Somewhere along the way, the true believers stuck, they folded the blues community in, and the city got itself a waterfront party, Louisiana-style.

Today, it features more than 100 performances across seven stages, dance lessons, parades, a musical petting zoo, and 10,000 pounds of crawfish trucked in from Louisiana because, "California crawfish just don't cut it." If you've ever been elbow-deep at a proper boil—corn, sausage, steam, spice, mudbugs, and somebody telling you to suck the head—you already know this is not a cuisine that rewards restraint.

Also joining the episode is Derek Boykin of Beignet Belly, one of the festival's vendors and proof that fried dough can absolutely become a life path. Boykin—originally from Oakland, CA, but whose family's roots run through Baton Rouge—started tinkering with beignets after deciding he could make a better one himself. Now he and his wife Maria run the business as a pop-up, serving hot, powdered-sugar-covered pillows of joy at Oceanside Sunset Market and events around Southern California.

Finally, Panda Fest hits Waterfront Park April 25 and 26, the San Diego Zoo's Food, Wine & Brew returns May 2, and Corbin's Q has officially reemerged as Barlando in Rolando.

Discover more at San Diego Magazine.

"I've wanted to be a chef since I was 4 years old. I'm a humble dude with a skateboard in the back of my truck. I'll stand behind the ingredients and let them shine before I do."

This is why Travis Swikard has brought a plate of lightly poached local veggies to the Happy Half Hour studio this week. It's both not what you expect from a chef who's trained under some of the biggest global names in French cooking, and exactly what you'd expect from a San Diego native.

When he was working as the right hand of famed chef Daniel Boulud in NYC, Daniel would order the very best raw ingredients he could find, as chefs do. Swikard would unpack the boxes of in-season fruit and veggies. On the side of that box often said the same thing: "San Diego, California."

So this plate of veggies—served with garlic aioli that's aerated with a PSI machine into a bowl of aioli fluff, then dusted with dehydrated herbs de Provence—is everything when it comes to explaining the lighter French food at Fleurette. Haurkei turnips from JR Organics. First asparagus of the season from Stehly Farms. And the Cheetos-orange badger flame beets, Nantes carrots, and Pink Beauty carrots? From some guy named Jared in Lakeside.

"These carrots taste like they took the souls of other carrots and made a supernatural heirloom carrot," says HHH host, Troy Johnson.

Fleurette is not the buttery butter stereotype of French food (a kind of valid but unfair casting of French heritage, since they also gave us lighter, more ingredient-focused movements like cuisine minceur and nouvelle cuisine). Fleurette is "cuisine du soleil," and butter is barely in the house. It's lighter, olive oilier, seafood- and veg-forward—world-class ingredients tweaked just enough but also left enough alone.

"Some type of food should taste like it's been kissed by the sun," says Swikard.

Of course, since this is HHH and not a graduate seminar in regional French cuisine, the conversation eventually took a hard and proper San Diego turn into Travis's and Troy's favorite fish tacos, burritos, sandwiches, and other handheld seafood favorites from across San Diego—shout outs to Oscar's, Fish Guts, Tunaville, TJ Oyster Bar, and other places where do it messy and perfect.

Discover more at San Diego Magazine. Follow Travis HERE.

Brad Wise of Trust, Fort Oak, and Rare Society talks restaurant wins and terrors and names the best sandwiches in San Diego.

"We were scraping by, praying that we were going to have a busy weekend to make rent and—not only that, but payroll," recalls chef Brad Wise.

Thank god his food was good and his wife had a job.

It's been 10 years since his first existential terrors as a restaurateur. A decade of woodsmoke in nice places. When Wise and team first opened Trust around the corner from the main drag in Hillcrest, there wasn't anything like it. I'm sure there were outliers, but it sure felt like the only San Diego restaurants setting wood on fire were pizza joints and barbecue stands.

Trust was San Diego's first to do Culinary Institute–style cookery over a blaze. Charred leeks. Smoked whole fish. Burning pineapples for cocktails. There is science behind the charms of this approach (woodsmoke gives off 400 or so more phenols and flavor compounds than food cooked on gas). And now it feels like every top restaurant has a pile of wood next to the kitchen.

But back then, Trust was alone on that fire island. And it nearly didn't make it.

Word eventually gets around. I named Trust my "Best New Restaurant" that year, because it was a perfect mix of cave people food and hoity-toity food. Eight years later, I named him my chef of the year because he'd dotted the map with some pretty great concepts—Fort Oak, Rare Society, Cardellino, Wise Ox, and the brand new smokepoint-French brasserie, À L'ouest.

He's our guest in the studio for our Happy Half Hour podcast this week. In honor of him being a Jersey deli kid, we do a fantasy draft of our favorite sandwiches from across San Diego.

Discover more at San Diego Magazine. Check out Brad Wise HERE.