Food
Los Alamos Wine Tasting 2017 – Small Town Big Fun
This story originally appeared in California Winery Advisor. Los Alamos – One Single Block Offering Days of Fun
The town of Los Alamos is one block long. As you drive through the single main street, it will seem like you have entered an old pioneer town. It is almost like a movie façade. But look closely and you will see storefronts for wineries, restaurants and antique shops. This tiny town is a wine country destination.
Los Alamos was a former stagecoach stop on the edge of the Santa Ynez Valley. A twenty-minute drive north of Solvang, Los Alamos was a sleepy town until a decade ago when refugees from Los Angeles arrived. Music industry, entertainment industry and fashion industry executives left their hectic city lives for the calmness of this little town. The town that used to be called “Los Almost” is now sometimes called “Little Los Angeles.” Los Alamos has also attracted young winemakers/entrepreneurs to set up shop there as the town, for the time being, is an affordable destination with unlimited potential.
24 January, 2017
The Chicken or The Egg is a bright, welcoming space. With canary yellow walls and fresh greenery, it is hard not to smile when you walk inside.
Barbareño, a neighborhood restaurant located two blocks off of State Street, is a restaurant that honors the California Central Coast. It is owned by twenty-somthings Julian Martinez and Jesse Gaddy, who read a number of books, including historian Walter A. Tompkins’s The Yankee Barbareños: The Americanization of Santa Barbara County, California 1796-1925, while devloping the concept of the restaurant.
Like many restaurants today, Barbareño focuses on the farm-to-table concept and sources local and organic ingredients. But they also weave history into each dish on the menu. With all of the fun facts that they learned while reading books integrated into each dish, a meal at Barbareño is also a lesson of the history of Santa Barbara.
To begin with, the name Barbareño is an homage to the Chumash Indians. The local tribe had been named barbareños because of their language and over time, a barbareño is a person from Santa Barbara. 
