North Park’s restaurant scene just picked up a serious new contender. Chantelle and Crystal Godinez, the Chula Vista sisters behind Sunday Breakfast Society, have opened Carne y Hueso, a full-service Mexican restaurant that leans hard into indigenous cooking and regional specialties. The 3,100-square-foot spot sits in the newly revived Waldorf Television Building at University Avenue and Iowa Street and brings the siblings’ birria roots and polished front-of-house style to a much bigger stage, signaling a confident move into one of San Diego’s most competitive dining districts.
The restaurant fills a 3,100-square-foot ground-floor space in The Waldorf, a 1950s-era building at University and Iowa, according to Eater San Diego. That level also houses a Moniker General Outpost and other retail that came online as part of the building’s restoration, which added patio seating and 11 residences above, local neighborhood coverage shows. North Park Main Street ran an early profile when Carne y Hueso was first announced.
Menu and technique
Carne y Hueso’s menu mixes modern, polished plates with old-school techniques, with reported dishes like a huitlacoche tetela and cured nopal paired with heirloom tomatoes. The team brings in chiles from Oaxaca and leans on spices native to the Yucatán for its mole, according to FOX 5 San Diego. The sisters told FOX 5 they want to “bridge the gap between the sophisticated side of Mexico and its ancestral roots” by centering regional ingredients and time-tested methods.
From family birrieria to full-service
Chantelle and Crystal started out working at their parents’ Birrieria Don Rafa in Chula Vista, then stepped into the spotlight with Sunday Breakfast Society in Eastlake in 2023, milestones that helped prepare them for a larger operation, according to Times of San Diego. They say hands-on time running shifts, building schedules and handling marketing shaped how they designed both the front and back of house for Carne y Hueso.
Why North Park
North Park has evolved into a magnet for design-forward restaurants and adaptive reuse projects, and Carne y Hueso slots neatly into that wave. In the works for years, the Waldorf redevelopment and Carne y Hueso’s role were first reported in late 2023, underscoring how long this opening has been on the neighborhood’s radar.
The sisters told FOX 5 that the debut moved from an original 2024 target toward December 2025 because of permit delays and interior design decisions, a timeline they say ultimately gave them more space to fine-tune the menu and the room itself. “We were scheduling, managing the whole restaurant, creating relationships with customers, marketing, instagram, so pretty much running the whole show,” Chantelle said in an interview, per FOX 5 San Diego. For now, Carne y Hueso is seating guests and plans to rotate ingredient-driven dishes as seasonal changes and regional sourcing permit.
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