San Diego Business

sandiego.com interviews Ingrid Croce

Pioneer of San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter
By Mark S. Burgess
Posted on Mon, Aug 25th, 2008
Last updated Tue, Aug 26th, 2008

Croce's Restaurant anchored the renaissance of San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter. Ingrid Croce founded it in 1985 as a tribute to her late singer/song writer husband Jim Croce who was killed in a plane crash while on tour in 1973. While Jim and Ingrid Croce launched a joint album and drove 300,000 miles touring in clubs to promote it, it wasn't until the meteoric rise of Jim's work after he signed a three record deal with Capital Records in 1972 that his music reached broad national attention but he died just before the release of "Ive Got a Name", the third album.

Before their fame and after growing discouraged with the music business following their "Jim and Ingrid Croce" album tour, they setup house in the Pennsylvannia countryside. It was there they grew their own vegetables and baked their own bread, feeding fellow artists and developing a love for cooking and the germ for the idea of their own restaurant.

After moving to San Diego, Ingrid says "we came downtown for our first date in two years, we had AJ our son and he was just about to turn two" just before Jim went out on Tour and "we stood on the corner at fifth and F and said, you know, we should open our own restaurant."

Croce's Restaurant occupies the corner first floor of the historic Keating building which was built in 1890. Frommer's calls it "a loud, crowded, and mainstream gathering place where you'll find a variety of jazz and rhythm 'n' blues stylings 7 nights a week." When doing research for a simlar event in Florida, the Palm Beach Post referred to Ingrid as a "driving force behind that city's 3-year-old San Diego Restaurant Week" in article published this week.

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