Built for the Line

Tara Monsod for Imperfects

The first thing you notice is how small she is in the doorway—4'11" in clogs, hair pulled back, eyes already tracking the line like a second clock. The next thing is the calm. Tickets start to chatter, oil whispers in a pan, a server glides past with a trout-roe crowned shrimp toast. Tara Monsod sets a pan, tastes, nods. The room exhales. She learned to move like this by swimming before she knew how, back when a trainer at Herringbone bolted mid-shift to the delivery room and a brand-new cook was told to keep the station alive. “I just started dodging,” she says. “I swam. Survived. Got the job that night.”

San Diego met her as the line cook who kept showing up and rising. Tender Greens to The Crack Shack, then into the fire of Animae, where she rebuilt herself again. When the city went quiet in 2020, her apartment filled with trays of sushi bakes—seafood tossed in spicy mayo, house eel sauce, furikake, green onion—an L.A. childhood memory reworked into a hand-roll you could eat on the couch. She posted, sold out, posted again. This wasn’t hustle for hustle’s sake. It was proof that flavor, comfort, and a bit of irreverence travel even when the dining room can’t.

Walk her dining rooms now—Animae’s moody glow or Le Coq’s polished classicism—and the food reads like handwriting. Kare-kare arrives as braised short rib with a glossy peanut sauce, the bones of French technique holding the warmth of a Filipino stew. Shrimp toast looks like a snack and eats like a thesis: crisp, fatty, saline, crowned with trout roe so it hums at both ends of the register. “Every dish is a dialogue between the French craft I trained in and the Asian flavors I was raised on,” she says. “It’s who I am. Honest, layered, whole.” She doesn’t present this as a mash-up. It’s fluency—two languages in one breath, especially after Le Coq ditched its French focus, shifting to an Animae-style menu drawing, once again, from Monsod’s culinary and personal heritage.

Fluency took time. Monsod tried nursing, white walls, and lab work, and could feel herself “bursting at the seams doing the right thing.” She quit at 27, traded scrubs for whites, and went hunting for a kitchen that felt like family. She found it in the racket and closeness: the way a tiny space can hold a dozen lives at once, how a Nat King Cole morning at her mother’s stove can echo across a Saturday rush. She built teams around that feeling. Half her cooks are Filipino. The rest stretch across the city’s map. “Never above, never below, always beside,” she says. If a station burns, she jumps on it. People stay for that.

Visibility followed. A James Beard semifinalist nod. Strangers stopped her during Comic-Con weekend just to say hey. The first international Filipino food festival invited her to cook in the motherland, not as a daughter visiting home but as a chef representing San Diego. She plays it down with a grin, but the weight lands. “I didn’t grow up seeing people on TV who looked like me,” she says. “So if I’m out there, maybe someone sees it and knows it’s possible.”

In the kitchen, even the uniform tells a story. For years, chef coats felt like penance: heavy, boxy, meant to endure but not to celebrate the person inside. Monsod had been buying Imperfects long before anyone at the brand knew her name—work pants that could handle a line shift and still look sharp at the bar down the street. The friendship with founder Mike Lynch turned into a working session over aprons. Not merch; not a logo drop. The thing you tie on when the fire starts and the thing you keep on when the night rolls into a last round with the staff.

They fussed with the weight of the fabric and where the pockets sit when you’re moving fast. They tuned the strap so it doesn’t rub your neck raw after six hours. They shaped the bib so it nods to a classic French coat without pretending to be one. Imperfects brought the durability and patterning they’ve refined in surf and skate gear; Monsod brought the choreography of a service—where a towel lives, how a Sharpie actually gets used, what a pan handle does to your hip when you pivot. “The apron is the one place we get to show identity when everyone’s in the same uniform,” she says. “If you look good, you feel good. And when you feel good, you cook better.” That’s not vanity. That’s performance design. It matters to the person on the line and to the dining room that pays to watch a team move as one.

The collaboration lands like her food: functional first, then romantic. Local dollars stay local. A San Diego maker outfits a San Diego kitchen, and both sides get sharper. The staff shows up in something they want to wear. Guests clock it without needing to be told. The apron turns into a small piece of armor—confidence you can tie around your waist—and a visible bridge between creative communities that usually orbit each other without touching.

What holds it all together is her way of paying attention. She keeps a notes app full of messy flavor trails: anise from a Chinatown broth, char from a taco stand in the Valley, the buttered sheen from a perfect Parisian sauce. She’ll stare into the middle distance at the pass, and you can watch the pieces snap into place: vessel, size, color, the first bite’s crunch, the second bite’s depth, the last bite’s reason to order another. She plates, passes a spoon, waits for the head-nod. No nod, back to the corner to tinker. Science in the timing, art in the result. 

Success is not an abstraction. It’s a cousin’s laugh over a family buffet in L.A. It’s a line cook getting therapy because the boss has normalized it and provided resources. It’s a young Filipino prep cook seeing a woman his height run two dining rooms and recognizing a future he couldn’t name last year. It’s a seam stitched into an apron in a Point Loma workshop, a purchase order that keeps a local brand hiring, a server who ends a shift feeling like part of the show, not just backstage. It is a dining room full of people eating kare-kare on porcelain with wine and service, and the same flavor they’d get in a cousin’s kitchen, because the person cooking never forgot where it came from.

Back in the doorway, tickets are still chattering. A short rib glazes to a shine. Monsod ties the apron once, twice, and steps in beside her team. The next evolution of Le Coq and Animae isn’t an announcement; it’s the quiet discipline of doing the fluent thing night after night until the city learns the language too. Emotional stakes, sure—the first time she cooks in Manila as a chef, not a visitor, will crack something open. Cultural stakes, absolutely—the proof that Filipino food belongs in every register of American dining. Economic stakes, too—the kind that ripple from a local factory to a full section to the tip jar at the end of the night. She’s already told you the thesis. Now she’s serving it: not a mash-up, a whole voice. And San Diego gets to eat it.