The Baby Grand

On our list of the best special-occasion restaurants in San Diego.

The building spent nearly seventy years as the La Avenida Inn, a roadside motel from 1957 built around a pool and a parking lot, before a six-year renovation turned it into a 31-room hotel designed with Post Company, the studio behind the Lafayette Hotel & Club. Rooms carry iridescent clamshell headboards, animal-print chairs, and bathrooms that take up nearly half the floor space, with clawfoot tubs set on gold feet. The old parking lot is now Night Hawk, a wood-fired Mediterranean grill built around a two-story waterfall, and a decorative sculpture in the lobby opens onto Fallen Empire, a mirrored oyster and Champagne bar.