For years, a certain kind of Montecito evening started with a 40-minute drive over San Marcos Pass. You wanted Luca Crestanelli's handmade pasta, you went to S.Y. Kitchen in Santa Ynez. You wanted a glass of something from a 35-year-old Santa Barbara County label without driving the length of the valley, you planned around it. That commute wasn't an inconvenience so much as a known cost of living somewhere without much late-model restaurant turnover. This year, both of those trips got shorter. One of them disappeared entirely.
Ancora Osteria opened August 13 at 1483 East Valley Road, in the space that spent thirty years as Via Vai Trattoria & Pizzeria before closing in 2024. The name belongs to Crestanelli again, this time with his brother Francesco and longtime Upper Village figure Norman Borgatello as partners. A few blocks away on Coast Village Road, Sunstone Wine Lounge opened as the Santa Ynez winery's first location off its own estate, open seven days a week to the public and to wine club members who no longer have to make the drive to taste it. Neither of these is a new concept parachuting in from somewhere else. Both are existing Santa Ynez Valley operations deciding the trip should run the other direction.
That's the part worth sitting with before the rest of the roundup: this isn't simply a wave of new restaurants. It's a specific pattern of businesses that used to require a drive out of the village choosing to move into it instead.
The Upper Village Finally Got Its Own Kitchen
Ancora Osteria had been rumored since at least November 2024, which means residents who read the food blogs watched this one crawl through permitting for almost two years. What finally landed on August 13 serves dinner Thursday through Monday from 5 to 9 p.m., with reservations opening 14 days out and walk-ins welcome at the bar. Appetizers run around $20, mains from $39 to $55, and the wine list stretches from Etna and Barolo down to growers here in Santa Barbara County, according to the Santa Barbara News-Press.
The kitchen carries over a few dishes from S.Y. Kitchen, including the beet salad and mushroom frittata, but Crestanelli has described this menu as more ocean-facing than its Santa Ynez sibling. In Italian, ancora translates to "still," "yet," or "again." Crestanelli himself prefers a simpler read: more, as in more food, more nights, more reasons to walk instead of drive.
The building matters as much as the menu. Via Vai closed after three decades in that spot, and the Upper Village doesn't hand out openings like this often. Borgatello has shaped that corner of Montecito's business community for decades, which is part of why the permitting moved faster than Upper Village projects usually do. A landlord who already knows the block behaves differently than an out-of-town operator paying rent to test the market.
One Wine Habit Ends, Another Starts a Few Doors Down
Merci ended its dinner service on August 22, redirecting its attention toward what the restaurant has described only as "exciting things." If you were meaning to order the chocolate soufflé, that window has already closed.
What opened in its place isn't a direct replacement but it fills a similar gap. Vic's Wine Bar started pouring earlier this month inside The Post Montecito, sharing a storefront with Little King Coffee in a genuinely unusual arrangement. By day it's still coffee. By 5 p.m., staff swap out Little King's menu boards for a five-piece canvas the owners painted themselves, and the shelves that held coffee grounds fill with bottles instead. The concept comes from Aleah and Ethan, two Westmont College graduates who hosted more than 100 dinners out of a 250-square-foot apartment last year before opening a real storefront. Their list runs through local names like Alamati Wine and Sea Creatures Wines, alongside a rotating selection that changes often enough that regulars are told not to expect the same bottle twice.
The Flats Are Running the Same Logic, Just With Vegetables
Down on Coast Village Road, Monte's opened in March at 1198 Coast Village Road, in a building that has cycled through Peabody's, Oliver's, and Bar Lou without ever quite sticking. Monte's is the first California project for Endwell Hospitality, a New York-based group, and its menu is built around Rincon Hill Farm, a former avocado orchard in Carpinteria that Endwell converted into a working farm supplying the kitchen directly, as the Restaurant Guy reported when the doors opened. Chef Daniel Kim, who spent time at Providence in Los Angeles and the Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa, builds the menu around whatever came off that field the same week.
It's the same instinct as Ancora Osteria and Sunstone, applied by an outside operator instead of a homegrown one. Shorten the supply line. Stop importing the thing residents actually want and put it a few miles up the coast instead of a few counties over. The deck that made Bar Lou's summer evenings memorable is still there, now with a roof over the trellis to hold heat in the evening and cut sun during the day, which tells you Endwell understood what it was buying when it took over that address.
Three Doors, Three Different Bets on the Same Block
Not every new opening is chasing the same idea, and the differences are worth knowing before you pick where to eat on a given night.
- Little Mountain, 516 San Ysidro Road, open Wednesday through Sunday from 5 to 9 p.m. Backed by resort operators Eva and Bryan Schreier along with Montecito resident Graham Duncan, with a chef whose résumé runs through kitchens in Lima and Bangkok before landing on vegetable-forward cooking rooted in what grows here.
- Clark's Oyster Bar, in the former Cava building, redesigned by architect Jeff Shelton. An Austin and Aspen import housed inside one of the most recognizably Santa Barbara buildings on the street, with a seafood-shack interior that has almost nothing to do with the architecture around it.
- RH's restaurant, in the Old Firehouse. Staffed in its opening months by transfers from Palo Alto and Palm Beach locations, with the kind of table service Montecito hasn't seen much of, silverware refreshed between courses, dishes split in the kitchen before they hit the table. It comes with complimentary valet, which turns out to be more than a courtesy. The owner of the Upper Village's two main parking lots has reportedly threatened to tow diners who park there, so the valet isn't a luxury add-on so much as the only reliable way to actually eat there without risking your car.
Three restaurants on the same short stretch, three completely different theories about what a Montecito dinner should feel like.
What Changes for a Weeknight
None of this shows up as a single dramatic shift. It shows up as a resident realizing, sometime in late summer, that the list of things worth a drive has gotten shorter. Free People opened on Coast Village Road this year too, notable mainly because national retailers have historically skipped this stretch in favor of Fig at 7th or Country Mart. The lease itself was the story. Read against everything else that opened in the same eighteen months, it fits the same pattern of a street filling in rather than turning over for its own sake.
One thing hasn't landed yet. Sally Boy's, a pizza concept from the team behind a Red Bank, New Jersey original, is slated for 1080 Coast Village Road, the long-vacant building most people still remember as Menelli Tile & Stone. Buildout was expected to begin by late summer, with a stated goal of opening before the end of the year, but as of this writing the doors are still closed. Worth checking before you plan an evening around it.
For now, the map looks like this: Ancora Osteria and Little Mountain in the Upper Village, Monte's and Sunstone Wine Lounge on the Coast Village Road flats, Vic's Wine Bar filling the early evening gap at The Post, and Clark's and RH's occupying two very different corners of the same short walk. The Santa Ynez drive that used to define a certain kind of Montecito night out is still there if you want it. It's just no longer the only way to get the meal you were after.
A neighborhood that fills its empty storefronts and gains a walkable evening circuit tends to hold its value differently than one that hasn't. If you're weighing what a summer like this one means for a property you own here, or you're trying to figure out where your own Montecito search should start, David Kim Group knows this stretch of Coast Village Road and the Upper Village block by block. Get your free home valuation and we'll talk through what's actually changed.
