••• Too bad: This weekend’s inaugural Santa Barbara Culinary Experience has been postponed for a year. (The next one will be March 12-14, 2021.) But: “several partners would like to move forward with their Julia Child-themed events as originally planned and they will contact you directly to be re-ticketed. We hope that you will support these small businesses during these trying times, as they have worked very hard to produce a memorable experience for you.”
••• In December, a “for rent” sign was spotted in the window of Foster’s Freeze in Carp, and now, in the latest issue of Santa Barbara magazine, photographer Dewey Nicks says the restaurant is “not long for this world.”
••• A neat idea: Greens & Roots is a company that “proudly designs custom non-alcoholic cocktail menus for bars, restaurants and hotels.” Private events, too: “We design theme-based menus to amplify the energy of the night, using locally sourced organic produce and ethical non-alcoholic spirits.”
••• A writer for the Independent went to Chick-fil-A for the first time. He found the food lacking, of course, and pointed out that the company could be doing quite a bit more about the problem of cars waiting on State Street: “Hire a security guard to move cars along before they can clog up the road, make people park in your big lot, or temporarily block off the entrance if the line and all the spaces fill up. […] The permanent solution will be to reconfigure your single-lane drive-through into two or three lanes. With an average of 358 seconds per transaction, compared to the 255 seconds industry-wide, you have the slowest drive-throughs in the country.”
••• The Independent profiles chef/owner Owen Hanavan’s new restaurant in Old Town Goleta, Lemon & Coriander. It’s now open for “breakfast, lunch, and the occasional pop-up dinner.” There’s still not much of an online presence, but a menu is at lemonandcoriander.com.
••• Mini profiles of three home winemakers: Companeros, Los Cinco Locos, and Pagan Brothers. —Independent
••• Now that Oliver & Espig has left the Montecito Village shopping center in the Upper Village, perhaps a café/wine bar could open there? And it could put tables on that underused terrace in the middle of the parking lot….
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