Eats

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 […]

New leadership is guiding Santa Barbara County’s wine industry into a dynamic direction, and pulling out all the stops to promote the region’s robust winemaking community. The annual Vintners Festival is no longer just a one-day event; this year, it’s been expanded to four days, April 10 through 13. “The vision for the weekend is […]

Much has been written about the joy of discovery. French physiologist Claude Bernard went as far as to say it’s “the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.” However, one doesn’t have to discover a new country or unearth a dinosaur fossil to sense that exhilaration. Such a thrill can be felt simply […]

A good wine is one you like; a bad wine is one you don’t. It’s that simple,” said Wandering Dog Wine Bar’s CT Williams, who has co-owned and operated the wine shop in Solvang with his parents and wife Jody since 2007. They sell boutique wines from the Central Coast and around the world, and […]

For 13 years, pinot-philes have converged on the cliffs overlooking Shell Beach for the annual celebration called World of Pinot Noir—but not this year. That’s because organizers have decided to move the two-day event, held on Feb. 28 and March 1 this year, to coastal Santa Barbara County at 
the luxurious Bacara Resort & Spa. […]

With the New Year come new partnerships in the Santa Barbara County wine industry. Longtime Santa Ynez Valley winemaker Andrew Murray has started leasing the former Curtis Winery estate vineyard, winery, production facility, and tasting room from the Firestone family. Murray began his winemaking career 24 years ago, focusing primarily on the production of small-lot […]

From a culinary point of view, the rest of 2014 has the nearly impossible task of living up to the dinner I enjoyed on the first day of the year—an incredible three-and-a-half hour, 13-course feast. The fine folks at the dazzling Dolphin Bay Resort & Spa in Pismo Beach invited me and my husband, and […]