To say that Sissy’s Uptown Café in Lompoc has a loyal following would be an understatement.
“We have people who come for lunch and dinner on the same day,” said Steve Byork, who manages and co-owns the restaurant with his wife and chef, Janan; and her family, Dave and Dorothy Springer and their son Jon. The Springer family celebrated 10 years of owning Sissy’s in March.
“We get to know people that way. You get to become friends with the customers because I’m here all day,” Steve said. “And so I see them, twice.”
But that’s not all—Sissy’s Uptown Café has customers who come every day!
“Yes, every single day. I’m dead serious,” Steve exclaimed. “There’s a lady, in the back right now, who comes every single day!”
I spoke with that loyal lady, 91-year-old Gwyneth Ann “Gwinnie” Howard. Sissy’s is “undoubtedly” her favorite restaurant.
The longtime Vandenberg Village resident has lunch at Sissy’s “possibly five or six” days a week, and she goes there for dinner often, when family visits.
Howard likes the food first and foremost: “It’s consistently good. The staff is very efficient and friendly and attentive. The service is very good. The décor is very attractive and it provides a friendly and warm atmosphere, so it’s just a pleasure to go in,” she said.
She also raved to me about what she orders on the weekend: “On Saturdays, they have special hamburgers which are really deluxe. Oh yes! They are really, really good!”
Howard usually has a Sissy’s salad, but she also recommends the quiche of the day, “which is excellent, and of course their desserts are out of this world.”
The Springer family believes there’s another reason Gwinnie and other customers keep coming back 200 or 300 times a year.
“It’s a family restaurant,” Steve said. “You don’t see family restaurants anymore. Everything’s a chain or out of a box.”
Sissy’s, on the other hand, uses fresh, seasonal produce grown in the Lompoc Valley and vicinity.
“We don’t have a freezer in the restaurant. We don’t use one, because we don’t need one, because we have fresh ingredients,” Steve exclaimed. “You sit here long enough, and a farmer brings in a crate of artichokes and we’ll do grilled artichokes for a special. Or they’ll bring in beets or red leaf lettuce, and that’s on the menu the next day.”
He describes the food as “Central Coast-influenced casual American cuisine.”
Sissy’s lunch menu features a variety of salads, sandwiches, and entrees.
On the day I visited, one lunch special was the refreshing Tropical Turkey Sandwich: mango chutney, Granny Smith apples, red peppers, lettuce, and sliced turkey breast on grilled multigrain bread, served with homemade tomato soup for $10.95.
“We are in a meat-and-potatoes town in Lompoc. The fact that we have a tropical turkey [sandwich] with mango chutney is pushing it,” Steve said.
I observed lunch customers ordering Sissy’s signature dessert, coconut cream pie, which is normal dining behavior here.
Steve said some people order the pie and eat it first, and then order lunch.
“[The pies] are extraordinary,” he added. “You’re gonna have to go to the gym
immediately after leaving this place.”
Longtime Lompoc baker, 74-year old Norma Anderson, makes 10 pies a day for Sissy’s, on the premises. The Springer family considers her “a huge part of our business.”
Sissy’s is open for lunch every day except Sunday and for dinner Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
At dinnertime, white linen covers the tables and Sissy’s offers a full fine dining menu.
“Certified Angus beef, fresh fish, specialty salads. This weekend, we did a pork tenderloin with a brandy cream, chanterelle mushroom sauce,” Steve said.
What really caught my eye was the excellent local wine list, full of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties’ very best wine. In Sissy’s wine store, I spotted the almost impossible-to-find cult wine Alban Reva Syrah, and the highly sought after Sea Smoke, Loring, and Brewer-Clifton wines, and the finest wines from Paso Robles: Linne Calodo, Booker, and Saxum, which produced Wine Spectator’s 2010 No. 1 wine in the world.
Sissy’s has thousands of bottles of wine on site, offering 300 different wines by the bottle, and 20 wines by the glass. Ninety percent are Central Coast wines.
Steve said the local wine industry has been very kind to Sissy’s. Winemakers dine here almost daily, and the nearby Lompoc Wine Ghetto, home to 17 wine-tasting rooms, sends customers to Sissy’s all the time.
“The Wine Ghetto is huge!” he said. “It’s a big, big, big part of our business.”
Sissy’s sits one block off of Ocean Avenue on South I Street, in what’s considered downtown Lompoc.
“They consider it downtown now, because the hub is the northern part, but for a time … in the ’60s, this was the hub, they were going uptown,” Steve said.
Hence the name: Sissy’s Uptown Café.
The Sissy’s building has history: It was Lompoc’s post office in the 1940s and ’50s. Café customers still walk on the original wood floors and sit at the original post office counter. The long hallway connecting the two tropically decorated dining rooms once housed residential mailboxes.
Today, people walking in the door are a mix of locals and tourists, and with Vandenberg Air Force Base nearby, Sissy’s gets a steady stream of hungry military contractors; many come back again and again, day after day, year after year.
“That’s why we’re successful,” Steve said. “What you find is, if you do a good job, the word gets out.”
Sun wine and food writer Wendy Thies Sell now likes coconut cream pie at lunch. Contact her at wthies@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 10-17, 2012.