WENDY THIES SELL

What some consider America’s ultimate “super food” is now ripe for the picking in Santa Barbara County. Chock full of antioxidants and nutrients, the blueberry is one of the best food choices one can make. It’s not only extremely healthful, but so tasty, too. The Santa Barbara Blueberries farm at Restoration Oaks Ranch between Buellton […]

One of my all-time favorite confectionary combinations is peanut butter and chocolate, but to make the pairing perfect, it must crunch. So imagine my delight when, in between tasting wines at the Santa Barbara County Vintner’s Festival last month, I happened upon a food booth offering exactly that! The pretty Ratcliff sisters welcomed me with […]

In Spanish, a bodega is a wine cellar or a small grocery store, usually in an urban area. In Santa Barbara County, the Buellton Bodegas is a building housing eight boutique wineries in an industrial area. The 30,000-square-foot building, located east of Highway 101 on Los Padres Way in Buellton, was sitting empty early last […]

The Market, a fine dining restaurant at the Santa Maria Town Center mall, is dramatically different than its predecessor, Central City Market. The stylish new restaurant and lounge quietly debuted a few weeks ago. The most visible change is the major renovation to the front room, where what used to be a deli is now […]

Six years after becoming the first Central Coast company to be certified as a “Fit Friendly Worksite” by the American Heart Association, Hardy Diagnostics has upped the ante. The Santa Maria-based company is the third largest manufacturer of bacteriological culture media in the United States. Hardy Diagnostics goes above and beyond when it comes to […]

On March 30, I attended The Garagiste Festival: Southern Exposure in Solvang, a two-day wine event celebrating cutting-edge small-production winemakers in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. These artisans buy premium local grapes or grow their own; they have a modest space to handcraft the wines; most don’t have wine tasting rooms, but some […]

Come for the food and stay for the art. Or vice versa. Café Quackenbush at The General Store is the kind of place you would expect to find in sophisticated urban areas like San Francisco or Paris. But the café opened for business in the small rustic town of Los Alamos in 1999. It has […]

We are witnessing an evolution in Paso Robles. Efforts to improve the region’s wines—and to get noticed for those efforts—are coming to fruition.   In January, Wine Enthusiast Magazine named the Paso Robles American Viticultural Area (AVA) its 2013 Wine Region of the Year, recognizing “not only excellence in wine quality, but also innovation and excitement.” […]

The sign above the door reads The Natural Cafe. So it’s natural that people might assume that the Southern California restaurant chain serves mostly green, leafy vegetables. While many salads are on the menu—and tasty ones at that—one might be amazed to learn that the ingredients in the best-selling dishes at The Natural Cafe are […]

  If Cheers is the place “where everybody knows your name,” Jack’s is the place where the owner knows every customer’s name.  “My goal is to memorize every one of their names, and I work on that all the time,” said Brian Kea, owner of Jack’s Restaurant in Old Town Orcutt. Jack’s Restaurant is named after […]