Restaurant Week is not for the lazy. At least, not until now.
When I first heard news of the Santa Ynez Valley Restaurant Week, I’ll admit I was practically giddy. From Jan. 22 through 28, the annual event offered diners the chance to sample three courses from local restaurants for the bargain price of $20.17.
It’s a perfect event for people like me who like to toss around the word “foodie” so we can feel a certain kind of self-importance when gorging ourselves on piles of braised short ribs, artisan pizzas, Kobe burgers, and the like. (See, I’m not a glutton, I’m a “foodie,” so leave me alone and pass me another plate of avocado toast.)
But it also takes a little bit of work. When I laid out the list of all the restaurants I wanted to try that week, it seemed like an utterly unavailing task. By the beginning of the week, I had promised myself we would try at least 10 of the restaurants listed. But as the week’s frenetic schedule caught up to us, that dwindled down to five. It wasn’t until a lazy Saturday morning, wiping the sleep out of my eyes, that I realized the week was almost gone and we hadn’t actually experienced any of this special event.
What could we do at this point? Squeeze in three dinners back to back? I didn’t want to spend the rest of the weekend nursing a tummy ache.
As I scanned the menus of participating restaurants, suddenly it jumped out at me. Restaurant Week didn’t have to mean just “dinner.” For some area restaurants, many of which don’t specialize in dinners, the event offers an opportunity to showcase options many diners don’t get to see until the weekends.
So we pulled on our weekend lazy pants (you know you have a pair too) and headed down to Los Alamos, to sample some of their midday offerings.
Over at Bob’s Well Bread, diners were spread out on the patio, enjoying mimosas and warm pastries under a welcoming sky free from the clouds of the previous week.
As Bob Oswaks casually leaned back in his chair on the patio, talking about the restaurant’s history, it was almost impossible to imagine him in his former life. Oswaks worked as a television executive who once headed worldwide marketing for Sony. When he found himself laid off at 50, he turned to baking while he waited for job prospects, which were bleak and scarce. Eventually the baking became his full-time hobby. He enrolled in the San Francisco Baking Institute and returned home with a business plan for a new kind of cafe and bakery.
“I really wanted to do this because we had a house here [in Los Alamos],” Oswaks said. “It had had yet peaked in terms of its popularity. Los Alamos is exactly halfway between Santa Barbara and San Luis. Once you leave Santa Barbara there’s not another place like this until you get up north.”
It was the perfect place, Oswaks explained, to try out his unique plan.
“We created a concept of a bakery that’s also a cafe, and the cafe uses our bread in unique ways,” Oswaks said. “It’s all about the bread. All the dishes we make are curated to be showcasing some kind of bread that we make.”
During Restaurant Week, the challenge for Bob’s Well Bread was to devise an actual three-course meal from a bakery’s menu.
“We’re not like some of the fancy restaurants where you can have a salad and entree and a dessert or something like that,” Oswaks said. “So this is our twist.”
The twist is a pared-down brunch of sorts, featuring mimosas for the first course, a pastry for the second, and eggs Benedict on an authentic English muffin as the third. Oswaks estimated that he’d already seen between 25 and 30 customers taking advantage of the Restaurant Week deal by the time we popped in.
“It’s all about creating something that serves the community and drives new customers and hopefully keeps them coming back,” he said.
Another venue we visited in Los Alamos was Bell Street Farm, where owner Jamie Gluck is easy to spot inside. Vivacious and welcoming, Gluck was eager to talk not just about the success of Restaurant Week, but also about the first ever Bell Street Farm wine.
“I owned a vacation house in this town first and couldn’t believe what some places around here were doing. I was really impressed,” Gluck said. “We’d go wine tasting and see people eating out of Trader Joe’s bags. There was such a missing element to picnicking in this area.”
Five years ago Gluck bought a former biker bar housed in what was once a 1916 Bank of Italia building and has since turned it into one of the most thriving and well-known spots in Los Alamos. Like Bob’s Well Bread, Bell Street Farm doesn’t offer the formal three-course dinner some participants might expect in a typical Restaurant Week offering.
“It’s always a funny thing for us because it’s not dinner so much that takes a little getting used to for my customers,” Gluck said.
One of the real challenges for Gluck was picking menu items to highlight out from a crop of popular items, he said.
“I feel like there’s an opportunity to do something different than what we usually do,” he said. “But our clientele is looking for their favorites on the menu. In the future we might mix it up a little bit because I like to do that.”
At Bell Street Farm, participants savored a starter plate of olives, followed by a choice of either salad or sandwich. Trying to be good, I selected the Farm Salad, because two of my favorite words in the English language put together are “roasted beets.” Candied walnuts, apples, Point Reyes blue cheese, arugula, butter lettuce, and house vinaigrette round out the salad, which I found a bright and refreshing choice.
My fiancé, always a willing dining partner, had no intention of sticking to the low-carb side and jumped at the chance to try the rotisserie porchetta sandwich. Described by Gluck as “life changing,” the ciabatta sandwich includes crispy pork topped with an apple and jicama slaw, house mayo, and pickled onions. I’ll admit that the bite I sampled made me regret ordering the salad for one brief moment.
On that last day of Restaurant Week, Gluck also took the opportunity to introduce customers to the restaurant’s first-ever namesake wine.
“It is 100 percent grenache, grown at Demetria Estates,” Gluck explained as he poured me a glass. “It’s really bright with a burst of fresh fruit but still has a dry quality to it.”
But don’t expect them to become the next high profile winemaker in the region.
“I’m not interested in competing with winemakers so I don’t think there’s a lot more in store as far as different wines,” he said. “I think this is it; I think it’s fun. I’m only participating as an amateur and a worshipper. I’m not interested in the wine business.”
So while my busy week and lazy tendencies kept me from sampling some of the best dinners in the region (we’ll always have next year), I still managed to get the most out of Restaurant Week, even if it was just for one breezy, beautiful day.
Rebecca Rose can be found eating breakfast at noon most days. She can be reached through Managing Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 9-16, 2017.
