Seafood tavern Bar Le Côte ups the ante for the Santa Ynez Valley

LOS OLIVOS, Calif.  — There’s a rumor that Greg Ryan wants to clear up: The residents of the Santa Ynez Valley do, in fact, love seafood.

The restaurateur saw it in 2018 when he opened Bell’s, a French-leaning bistro in Los Alamos, with his wife and the restaurant’s chef, Daisy Ryan. They’d been warned against serving seafood; the locals, they were told, preferred meat and were set in their ways. But “every fish dish, every week, when we were an a la carte restaurant, sold out,” Greg said. “We put tinned sardines on the menu and we couldn’t keep them in. At a certain point we were like, ‘This just isn’t true.’”

Now, as the Ryans open Bar Le Côte — a modern seafood tavern along the main drag of historic Los Olivos, a former stagecoach town just a 12-minute drive from Bell’s — they, with chef and co-owner Brad Mathews, are banking on oysters, uni, octopus and gulf shrimp.

It could be that the success of Bell’s seafood can be chalked up to the influx of new residents or the droves of Angelenos heading for the destination restaurant. Perhaps longtime locals were misrepresented.

But one thing is certain: The Santa Ynez Valley is changing, and Bar Le Côte’s blend of old and new is, in a way, a microcosm of the area’s evolving identity, filling a 1901-built former mercantile structure along the old stagecoach route with new faces, new-school fish-aging technique and rising culinary talent. The rolling hills and acres of grapevines splayed out in the sunlight for miles along the Central Coast look, more or less, like they did decades ago, but the methods used at some of the wineries are leaning more low-intervention or experimental. Visitors are skewing younger and travel publications eagerly note each new opening.

After a summer of L.A. pop-ups and a month of walk-up lunch service, on Sept. 2 the team behind Bar Le Côte made it official — opening the doors to a place where patterned tile floors, green walls and an eclectic rock, indie and oldies playlist set the stage for line-caught fish and hand-harvested bivalves and urchins sourced from local farmers and fishermen. Seafood arrives freshly caught or dry-aged. Much of the produce gets picked up from nearby Finley Farms and delivered via the back of Mathews’ Volkswagen.

Bar Le Côte’s co-owner Greg Ryan, left, chef and co-owner Brad Mathews, co-owner Daisy Ryan and general manager Grace Gates outside the new seafood restaurant in Los Olivos.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

The Bar Le Côte menu includes meaty, fried, lemon-zested Pacific Gold oysters atop steak tartare, and dry-aged-kampachi crudos laced with saffron. Some dishes hint at Mathews’ early years cooking in Bar Pintxo, the Santa Monica tapas restaurant from the late and influential chef Joe Miller, whom Mathews reveres as a mentor; among those dishes are gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp); pulpo a la plancha (grilled octopus) with saffron aioli; vegetarian paella; and Little Neck clams with house-made chorizo — all on the opening menu.

Mathews, 37, continued to develop his love of seafood at Fishing With Dynamite in Manhattan Beach, where he worked his way up through the ranks to sous chef and found another mentor in chef-owner David LeFevre.

“It’s become my whole life,” said Mathews, who grew up fishing in the Finger Lakes region in New York state with his father. “There’s something that has always been so calming to me about water. … If you get great product and you treat it with respect and try to showcase the product — do it in its simple form — I think there’s something unbelievably romantic about that. [It’s] not that you can’t do that with a great steak but it feels more true to who I am with seafood.”

Bar Le Côte is a sequel of sorts to a restaurant heralded by Bon Appétit as “the reason you should visit Los Alamos, California.” Bell’s has spurred tourism in the tiny Old West town — even more so during the pandemic, according to Greg, 39. He attributes the increased interest in the bistro, in part, to a slump in air travel in the first few months; Californians were driving, not flying, to get away.

Praise for Bell’s continued to grow, as did its popularity. Daisy Ryan garnered a best new chef of 2020 accolade from Food & Wine magazine, which the pair saw not just as a win for her but as validation for the region, a signal that the Santa Ynez Valley’s cuisine, not just its wine, was entering the national discourse.

These days Los Alamos hotels and motels such as the boutique-y Skyview are booked weeks out, and the owners of Bob’s Well Bread Bakery rent out cottages on the grounds to help attract and accommodate some of the visitors. The nearby Danish town of Solvang also is experiencing a tourism boom, and a restaurant there just began renting out rooms too.