Sometimes food has the ability to take you home. The perfect combination of aroma and flavor can transport you back in time, to a different place; scent and taste trigger memory responses in the brain.
My husband had just such an experience while dining at Sides Hardware and Shoes, a Brothers Restaurant—the new modern wine bistro that brothers/chefs/co-proprietors Jeff and Matt Nichols opened in April at the former Side Street Café location in Los Olivos.
The Nichols brothers are longtime Santa Barbara County restaurateurs who previously owned Brothers Restaurant at Mattei’s Tavern, which closed in March after a decade of delighting the dinner crowd.
Their new venture is open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They describe the food as American craftsman cuisine.
“Our menu is nothing like the one at Mattei’s,” Matt explained. “It’s all new, and we’re all having a good time with it.”
“We’re having a blast,” Jeff added.
Matt and Jeff grew up in Iowa, where pork is king. So it comes as no surprise that at Sides, bacon is boss.
“Several months ago, we started playing around with making our own bacon, and it kind of evolved into this kind of centerpiece,” Jeff explained.
The brothers make their own bacon from scratch.
“You’ll find bacon at every service,” Jeff said. “Obviously it’s big at breakfast. We’re calling it the Brothers Bacon Steak. We buy the pork belly and we cure it, and cook it, and smoke it in house, and then we cut the nice thick slice. So it’s been very well received and people love it!”
The brothers spent a few months perfecting what Matt calls a cross between bacon and a pork belly dish.
“It’s pretty unique,” he said. “It’s definitely bacon-like, but it’s different from bacon. It’s hard to describe without trying it.”
When I dined at Sides in June, I ordered and was immediately smitten with a scrumptious dinner market special: the Brothers Bacon Salad, which is a long, thick slice of sizzling Brothers Bacon topped with cool, ripe peaches, arugula, and crostini, drizzled with vinaigrette. The contrasts in taste and temperature were quite exciting.
Another pork product on the menu: pork tenderloin, called the Hammered Pig. It immediately caught the eye of my husband, Michael. You see, like the Nichols brothers, Michael was raised in Iowa, where pork tenderloin sandwiches are as popular as Santa Maria-style barbecue is in Northern Santa Barbara County.
“It’s basically a childhood memory of mine,” Matt recalled. “It’s a total Midwestern thing, and it’s something I’ve always loved. … We tweaked it a little bit, but it’s basically the same.”
At Sides, the pork tenderloin is pounded, breaded, fried, and at lunch it is served on a ciabatta roll with red cabbage, apple, and mustard seed coleslaw. At dinner, the plate-sized pork tenderloin is served with a generous portion of mashed potatoes and a lemon caper sauce, in lieu of the roll.
At breakfast, choose from Huevos Rancheros, the Brothers Breakfast Sandwich with house-made sausage, the Kitchen Sink Omelet, and Cinnamon and Golden Raisin Beignets, among other items.
For lunch, entrees include fresh Albacore fish tacos; the Bacon Burger; Cobb salad with turkey, shrimp, or steak; and a white cheddar and caramelized onion tart.
At dinnertime, offerings include fried chicken with mashed potatoes; lamb sirloin with herbed gnocchi, goat cheese, haricots verts, and oyster mushrooms; Manila clams, chorizo, and fries; and salmon with fingerlings, pesto, and asparagus.
Pastry Chef Stephanie Jackson’s desserts change with the season and include blueberry cornmeal upside-down cake; white nectarine and plum crostada; macaroon sandwiches; and Mud Sundae.
The wine list is local—Santa Barbara County’s best. Sides Hardware and Shoes has a unique wine-on-tap system. Local wine producers such as Beckman, Margerum, Au Bon Climat, Melville, and Palmina deliver five-gallon, temperature-controlled kegs to the restaurant.
Sides offers a Rosé, three white wines, and four reds by the glass, by the quarter liter, half liter, and liter, giving customers a chance to share and taste several different wines.
“It’s just a really clean, efficient way to dispense wine. There’s less packaging. The wine is of the same quality you’d find in the bottle. And it’s pretty sharp looking in the bar,” said Matt, who manages the restaurant’s beverage program.
For the name of the restaurant, the brothers honored the history of the old building, which was founded in 1901 by Milburn Sides. His family operated it as a hardware store until 1976.
The Nichols brothers preserved the building and framed historical Los Olivos photographs for the walls. The ambiance is casual western; the restaurant’s staff wears blue jeans and plaid shirts.
Just two months after opening Sides Hardware and Shoes, the pair announced the acquisition of another Santa Ynez Valley restaurant: The Red Barn steak house in Santa Ynez.
“We’re super excited. We’re basically going to be doing Brothers Restaurant at the Red Barn,” Jeff told me. “It will be some familiar dishes from what we did at Mattei’s Tavern with some new items. We will have some of our classic Brothers dishes, and we will also evolve a little bit.”
They started renovating the building at 3539 Sagunto St. and hope to open Brothers Restaurant at the Red Barn in late summer or early fall.
If Sides is a complete departure from what the Nichols Brothers have done in the past, the Red Barn will be much more familiar.
“It’s kind of the best of both worlds. When the Red Barn opens, those people who really liked what we did at Mattei’s will be able to get those types of items, whereas Sides is a completely different feel,” Matt said. “The environment is different. The vibe’s completely different. The food is entirely different, but it’s still our quality, and it’s still all of those things that come with what we do.”
In a nod to that baseball film set in an Iowa cornfield, at the end of a meal here, it’s not too farfetched to imagine that someone might wonder, “Is this heaven?” No. It’s Sides Hardware and Shoes.
Sun food and wine writer Wendy Thies Sell has played catch with her dad at the actual Field of Dreams. Toss her a few story ideas at wthies@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 5-12, 2012.