What do you actually do with a Sunday morning in San Diego when the weather is perfect and you have nowhere to be? The correct answer, if you live anywhere near Hillcrest, is that you walk to the farmers market on Normal Street and spend an hour doing exactly nothing useful.
The Hillcrest Farmers Market runs every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the DMV parking lot off Normal Street, which sounds less appealing than it is. By 9:30, the lot has transformed into a sprawling grid of produce vendors, prepared food stalls, flower sellers, and the kind of artisan cheese booth that will absolutely destroy your grocery budget if you’re not careful. The whole thing draws somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand people depending on the weekend, and it has the relaxed, slightly chaotic energy of a neighborhood that has been doing this long enough to not try too hard.
The produce here is genuinely good. Several vendors work directly with small farms in San Diego County — strawberries from Carlsbad, citrus from Fallbrook, avocados from a guy in Escondido who will talk to you about soil pH for as long as you allow. Prices are fair, not cheap. A flat of strawberries runs around eight dollars. Nobody is pretending this is a bargain operation.
The food stalls are where most people end up spending their money. There’s a tamale vendor with a line that forms before 10 a.m. for good reason — the red chile pork is straightforward and correct, the kind of thing that makes you question why you ever eat breakfast elsewhere. A crepe stand does both sweet and savory, and if you go savory, the spinach and goat cheese option is worth the five-minute wait. There’s also a Thai food truck, a falafel stand, a vendor doing excellent empanadas, and at least one booth selling overpriced juice that people buy anyway because it’s Sunday and they deserve it.
The Hillcrest market has a character that other San Diego markets sometimes lack: it is visibly, unremarkably queer. The neighborhood is the neighborhood, and the market reflects that without announcing it. You’ll see dogs in bandanas, older couples shopping for the week, twenty-somethings nursing coffee, families with strollers, a man selling homemade hot sauce who has very strong opinions about vinegar ratios. It is a cross-section of people who actually live here, which is not always true of farmers markets that have become destinations.
Parking on Normal Street and the surrounding blocks fills up fast after 10. If you’re driving from anywhere nearby, park a few streets over and walk — the neighborhood is flat and easy to navigate. Better yet, bike. The market sits along a relatively calm stretch of the city and there’s usually room to lock up near the entrance.
Budget somewhere between fifteen and forty dollars depending on whether you’re shopping for produce, eating breakfast, or both. The flower vendors near the center of the market are worth a slow pass even if you’re not buying — somebody always shows up with something unexpected, dahlias in November, ranunculus in February, buckets of eucalyptus that make the surrounding air smell inexplicably correct.
It’s the kind of morning that doesn’t make for much of a story afterward. You went, you ate a tamale, you bought some strawberries, you walked home. That’s the whole thing, and it’s enough.
