Eats

It only took 10 minutes of chatting with Chef Conrad Gonzales about his new eatery for it to become abundantly clear that he was planning something bigger than just another restaurant.    The guy is passionate about food, but not just the end result on the customer’s plate. He talked about the varied, interconnected origins […]

As soon as I opened the door, I knew my search was finally over: I’d found my new go-to sushi place.  Atari-ya doesn’t look like much from the outside. The place sits sandwiched between shops among the rows of assorted strip mall businesses that make up the Stowell Center Plaza. The windows are too dark […]

When two co-workers at two different jobs offer unsolicited recommendations of the same restaurant in the same week, the universe was trying to tell me something. The message was loud and clear: Time to go get a burrito. I had received an email from a sales rep at the Sun saying she’d been to La […]

I’m not going to lie. I had my doubts when I first sat down at Magic Dragon Cuisine. The spacious restaurant was nearly empty, but to be fair, my wife and I had shown up at about 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon. Not a good sign, but I tried to give the place the benefit […]

How are wars still happening when we live in a world where brunches like this exist? I seriously don’t get it. What are we fighting about? Oil, that goopy black garbage?  For God’s sake, there are two rows of tables in Santa Maria where every Sunday, all manner of delicious food from heaven is artfully […]

Some weeks, you just need some ridiculously rich, stick-to-your-ribs comfort food to try and make the feelings go away. I’m not going to get into all the messy personal details here, but last week was just about my worst yet, filled with family drama, alcoholism, and deep despair. I’d never wanted a bottle of booze […]

It’s hard to say whether I’m generally broke because I’m bad with money, or if I’m bad with money because I’m generally too broke to practice using it wisely, but one thing’s for sure: If I’ve got extra money in my pocket, I’m about to spend it. Case in point, when I made the very […]

Any time you tuck some foodstuffs between two slices of bread, you’ve got the makings of a passable lunch. Sandwiches aren’t hard. I whip up the same one almost every morning, twice even, for my daughter’s and my daily grind lunches. And they’re not bad sandwiches. I treat myself to bread that’s one step above […]

Lompoc’s hottest club is Hangar 7. This place has everything—comfy chairs, card games, a bucket full of old propellers, Dan Cortese, and even fuzzy mustache mirrors (the thing where, like, when you go to the bathroom, there’s a bunch of gag shop mustaches glued to the mirror so you can line your face up and […]

I knew it would be good the moment I heard about it. My wife and I ran into her co-worker at Home Depot in Lompoc, and this good ol’ boy from Louisiana couldn’t stop himself from singing the praises of his new favorite restaurant. All we had said was, “Hello, how’re you doing?” I’m paraphrasing, […]

Have you ever avoided an entire cuisine out of pure spite? To be clear, I’m not talking about race-based spite here. I’m an idiot, not an asshole, and for decades my aversion to Hawaiian food has been based entirely on an unarticulated resentment from being too broke to visit America’s favorite tropical getaway.  Forget Hawaii, […]

As I’ve gotten older, and busier, and more addicted, my general discernment regarding coffee has waned considerably. Most mornings, I’m running late and chasing the fix—nuking whatever’s leftover from yesterday’s pot at home or swinging by McDonald’s to get three of their large $1 drips as if I’m doing the coffee run for the whole […]