I'd give this small restaurant a 4/5
OK, full disclosure, I'd never heard of the Delmar Maker's District. It is just an area on Delmar east of the Pageant. Right now it is VERY close to all the demolished homes from the May 16, 2025 tornado.
So, Ben Poremba is the chef/owner of 3 restaurants on Delmar: Esca, Nixta and Florentin. Each is a different style of restaurant.
Esca is geared toward Mediterranian food. The restaurant is very small. The inside only holds 12 tables. There is a nice patio with another 8-10 tables, but on the night we visited, it was 95 degrees outside, so most people were inside.
Mike and I both commented that the menu may be Mediterranian, but there really is nothing inside that distinguishes the space as any specific type of food. It is just a typical city restaurant in a fixed up old building...wood floors, exposed brick. The semi-open kitchen is nice. Mike enjoyed watching the dessert station.
We started with cocktails and an order of their signature bread and butter (which you have to order and pay for, by the way). Then Mike ordered a salad. We ended up splitting this as it was actually too big for one person.
They have a sommalier who we think was also in charge of some other aspect in the kitchen most of the time. He did come out and present our wine. Speaking of the wine...their wine list is all French and Italian. We ordered an Italian whose region we were familiar. It was fine. It just would have been nice to have a regular old Californian cabernet.
For dinner Mike ordered the special, which was lasagna. It was a very pasta forward lasagna. There were about a dozen layers of pasta! There was meat (beef and sausage) in there and there was ricotta cheese, but there was almost no sauce. Maybe it had all been absorbed by all that pasta. Mike said it was good. I would have needed a lot more sauce.
I got the grilled octopus entree. It is served with chickpeas, celery, oregano and chili spices. It had an celery/olive oil drizzel on the plate. The octopus was very good. It had been grilled well and wasn't chewey at all. The rest of the dish didn't have a lot of flavor and there wasn't much to it. I liked the dish but yearned for a more substantial side dish.
After dinner we each decided to get dessert. Because the restaurant is small we had been very near to a singular girl who dined alone and then had 2 desserts at the end because she couldn't decide which one she wanted. Both of her desserts looked good, so we decided to each get something and not split one.
I got an olive oil cake with strawberries that had been masurated in balsamic vinegar. There was a quenelle of a sweet almost frosting like substance on top. It was also topped with fresh cracked black pepper. It was really yummy. The cake was a little dry but the strawberries really helped with that.
Mike had an ice cream sundae with cocoa nibs and chocolate sauce.
Overall this was a nice dinner. The food was interesting but not amazing enough to make us feel like we need to come back. The menu is very small and doesn't seem to change that often.
Also, on a side note, they add 16% to the bill for an automatic tip and then ask you to please add more. Just a little pushy.
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