You typically don’t expect to find fine dining in an industrial strip. Especially not in an industrial strip on a street called Industrial Way. However in Buellton, there sits an exception to the expectation. Or should I say, a pleasant surprise?
Terravant doesn’t just sit in an industrial complex, it’s literally tucked away at the end of the street, near a creek in a building that hides one of the Santa Ynez Valley’s finest spots to indulge in good eats and exceptional wine. It’s the only winery with a full restaurant on the Central Coast.
The restaurant is part of the Terravant Wine Company custom crush facility. Terravant produces the wine for about 300 custom accounts, including the house brands for corporations like Disney and California Pizza Kitchen. The company also works with Loews Hotels, Save Mart, Kroger, Albertsons, and other major brands. However, in the restaurant you’ll find some of the nearly 40 local wineries that produce their wine at Terravant, according to Joe Padilla, vice president of sales and winery services.
He said Terravant makes Santa Barbara County wines but also wines from areas up through Napa and Sonoma.
The selection of wine is one of the most attractive features of the restaurant for wine lovers. In fact when my husband and I snuck out for an early lunch one day we were so interested in the wine that we nearly forgot to explore the food.
What we loved the best, was the wall o’ wine. That’s not officially what it’s called, but that’s in essence what it is. Along the wall of the dining room are several self-serve selections of Terravant-produced wines. With a plastic card provided by the server you can simply choose a wine, and decide whether you want a taste or a glass. You place the card in the slot, place your glass under the nozzle and out pours wine like the slot machine of my dreams.
Padilla said they offer 52 wines by the glass and all of them are pristine. He said the wines are all pushed with argon. This nifty little process means that you can extract wine from the bottle basically without opening it.
“You can go to any bar, they open a bottle, they pour it, they put a cork in it, it could sit there for four, five, or six hours before they pour it again. It’s oxidizing,” Padilla said.
With the argon process the wine keeps as if the bottle was never opened. Padilla said they’ve even performed 90-day tests on the wines, and the wines showed no change in quality.
If all that custom wine becomes inspiring, Terravant also offers a blending bar that allows customers to blend their own wine. Aspiring winemakers will get four different wines and beakers and can experiment to create their own blend. Then they can bottle and label it.
Of course all that wine naturally needs pairing, and to start, the Yuppie Crack came highly recommended.
It consists of bacon wrapped dates stuffed with goat cheese, with a little bit of balsamic reduction and basil oil. It’s Terravant’s signature dish.
This to my ears didn’t initially sound all that appealing for the mere fact that it has dates, of which I’m not a big fan. However, after the first bite I was in love with the melty blend of flavors. It was subtly sweet, but just enough to highlight the smoky bacon and the bite of the goat cheese. Salty, sweet, smoky, soft, and crunchy all at the same time—my mouth didn’t know what to do. It was as wonderful as they said.
The name attracts the interest of diners and the taste hooks them. But the appealing appetizer didn’t start out with its catchy name.
“When we first opened the restaurant, I originally called it bacon-wrapped dates because of course that’s what it is,” Padilla said.
But when a writer came in and tasted them he compared the irresistible snacks to “crack for yuppies.” “I said, ‘Really?’ so I changed the name to Yuppie Crack and the rest is history,” Padilla said.
We followed our appetizer with the spicy Italian wood-fired pizza, with dried salami, hot capicola, pepperoni, pepperoncini, and pepper relish. We also got a very grown-up mac ’n’ cheese, with sharp cheddar, fusilli bucati, panko, and herbs.
Surprisingly, though we ordered simple dishes, they were fancifully good.
And because I never skip dessert, (and because we were promised we wouldn’t regret it) we ordered something sweet. Padilla told us, “Everybody starts their meal here with Crack and we finish with Chronic.” So we took his advice.
The Chronic is a bowl of white chocolate and cranberry semifreddo, Terravant’s house-made ice cream, which is aided in its deliciousness by folding in an egg-based cream. This is then topped with popcorn mixed together with white and dark chocolates and tied together with a white chocolate ganache sauce. One word: incredible.
In an area known for tourism, Terravant attracts Central Coast foodies, chefs, and wine industry members. Padilla said on any given day the restaurant is about 70 to 75 percent locals. Because of that local support Terravant also gives back to the community by doing work with the schools and alongside groups like Arts Outreach and People Helping People.
If you’re looking for a quiet meal, lunchtime is the time to go. Weekend nights can be a bit more crowded Padilla said. The restaurant features live music by local musicians Wednesday through Saturday. Wednesday night is Industry Night and anyone in the wine industry can show a business card and receive 40 percent off. Padilla added, “We consider everyone who has a Buellton driver’s license an industry person, of course.”
Editor Shelly Cone can be reached at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Dec 3-10, 2015.
