A view of Santa Ynez, Calif., on April 6, 2024.

For visitors from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, the Santa Ynez Valley is by no means an overlooked culinary destination. People come in droves for the wine, propelled to fame by “Sideways” and still relatively affordable, at least in comparison to Napa and Sonoma. They flock to Bell’s in Los Alamos for the valley’s only Michelin-starred cuisine. They line up out the door at Cold Spring Tavern, once a stagecoach stop in the San Marcos Pass, both for the Santa Maria-style barbecue and the weekend jam sessions. 

Ask the people who work in all of those places where they like to eat, and they’ll likely all say the same thing: On their days off from pouring the wine and cooking the food all the tourists post on Instagram, they’re all pretty much headed into Santa Ynez. 

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That’s for two reasons, really: Most of the weekenders don’t make it past Los Olivos and Solvang into the tiny town that’s tucked away between the two. Secondly, almost all of its restaurants are open on Mondays and Tuesdays, when tourist draws like the “Sideways”-famous Hitching Post 2 are closed. 

“We all know each other’s days off. We all ensure that we go support each other on their working days,” Alyce Barrick, co-owner of Santa Ynez’s Queen Cup Coffee, told SFGATE via phone. “It gives us an opportunity in the evenings to support each other and then also have exquisite food.” 

Catering to that local appetite is exactly what Alberto Battaglini had in mind when he opened one of the newest additions to the town, Pony Cocktails Kitchen. 

“The local community in Santa Ynez has this beautiful community-forward thing that everybody helps each other,” he told SFGATE via phone. “We have a sense of pride in what we’re doing here [that’s] a little bit different for some reason.”

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Battaglini came to the valley by way of Los Angeles from his native Verona, Italy. Originally, he helped chef Luca Crestanelli open S.Y. Kitchen in 2013, a rustic Italian-meets-California restaurant serving fresh pasta and wood-grilled steak that didn’t just put Santa Ynez on the culinary map, but was one of the earliest standard-bearers for the elevated cuisine the valley is known for today. 

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