Please The Palate |

Santa Barbara: Wine and Art in the Funk Zone

Just east of State Street and sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and Highway 101, near the AmTrak station in Santa Barbara, the Funk Zone has popped up. Home to artisan shops, wine tasting rooms, microbreweries and eateries, this is Santa Barbara's hottest destination. The newest addition to the area is the McTavish Family's Santa Barbara Art Foundry. And, while there, stop for a wine tasting at the Fox Wine Company tasting room inside the Foundry.

The Foundry offers free tours to see how bronze sculptures are created. Featuring the artist Tim Cotterill, otherwise known as The FROGman, visitors can watch the entire process firsthand while artisans work on the "lost wax" method and create his original frog sculptures.

15 November, 2013

Scopa Italian Roots Sets its Roots in Venice

The team behind one of my favorite Valley spots, Black Market Liquor Bar, has come to the Westside with Scopa Italian Roots. Located in a former Szechwan Chinese restaurant space on Washington Blvd near Abbott Kinney, and next door to Sunny Spot, Scopa Italian Roots offers traditional home-cooked Italian food, inspired by Chef Antonia Lafaso’s upbringing. Steve Livigni, Pablo Moix and Antonia Lafaso have been busily working on this new project for months. At an event this summer, they were serving drinks under the name Old Lightening which is the name of the bar that is opening adjacent to Scopa in the coming weeks.

14 November, 2013

Pinot In the City: Willamette Winemakers Come to LA

In September, 66 Pinot Noir producers from the Willamette Valley Wineries Association came to Los Angeles for the first time to demonstrate what make this cool cool climate region one of the nation’s top producers of Pinot Noir. The Willamette Valley is located just outside the super-cool city of Portland, between Oregon's Cascade Mountain Range and the Coast Range, more than 100 miles long and spanning 60 miles. Due to its proximity to the Pacific Ocean (50 miles), Willamette averages 52-78 degrees in the summer and 35-47 degrees in the winter. It actually sits at the same latitude as the Burgundy region of France and has a similar climate in which the finicky Pinot noir grapes thrive.

13 November, 2013