Quick Take
Bad Animal will reopen its restaurant in January with former Hanloh chef de cuisine Nick Hahn, ending its long-running residency model and shifting the menu from Thai food to a modern Parisian bistro style influenced by both California ingredients and Hahn’s Korean heritage. The wine bar and bookstore on Cedar Street downtown is also planning a 2026 expansion next door, adding a gallery space to showcase rare books, art and ephemera tied to Santa Cruz’s cultural history.
After the closure of Thai kitchen Hanloh at Bad Animal earlier this month, the celebrated natural wine bar-slash-rare book store on Cedar Street in downtown Santa Cruz is set to reopen its restaurant in January with a new chef at the helm.
Nick Hahn, the former chef de cuisine at Hanloh and an alumnus of Michelin-starred n/naka in Los Angeles, will lead the restaurant. The menu will change substantially from the Thai cuisine offered over the past three years. In this new era, it will channel the modern Parisian bistro scene, with roots in traditional French cuisine influenced by California ingredients and Hahn’s Korean heritage.
“We’ve always considered ourselves something of a Left Bank institution,” said a Bad Animal post on Instagram on Sunday announcing the transition, referring to Paris’ famed intellectual district, “… but left of the mighty San Lorenzo, not the Seine.”
“We’re trying to get away from the idea of rustic French country cooking,” said Andrew Sivak, who co-owns Bad Animal with business partner Jess Mackay. They’re still in the revision phase of creating the menu, but said Hahn plans to bring Asian flavors to the French concept. Sivak anticipates that guests will see dressed raw oysters, Korean fried chicken, handmade pasta and “a beautiful steak,” among other additions.
Hahn’s tenure will also mark a return to operating the restaurant in-house after a series of temporary partnerships with chefs, known as “culinary artists in residence,” over the past four years. The residences were always meant to be finite, but were so successful that they stretched for several years, said Sivak. From 2021 to 2022, chef Katherine Stern operated her former farmers market stall, The Midway, at Bad Animal before opening her restaurant, also called The Midway, on Soquel Avenue at the end of 2023.
Chef Lalita Kaewsawang operated her former pop-up Hanloh at Bad Animal from October 2022 until Dec. 14. Over the past three years, their partnership drew national attention and notable accolades. In June, the food critic at the Los Angeles Times named the Bad Animal/Hanloh collaboration one of the best 100 restaurants in California for 2025, in addition to features on KQED, in Food & Wine magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others.
In 2026, Bad Animal will operate the restaurant in-house for the first time since 2019, when former chef Todd Parker – who went on to establish Bookie’s Pizza in Santa Cruz – led the kitchen.
“When we started the residency program, we were still in that precarious period at the outer edge of the pandemic where no one really understood what the restaurant culture was going to be once people started coming back to open spaces,” said Sivak. “The partnerships with Hanloh and The Midway were so encouraging that we kept on with it, but it became time to evolve into something else.”
Another project long in the works is hoping to be ready for the public in the first half of 2026. Bad Animal is preparing to expand next door, adding 1,000 square feet of usable space. The area will feature an art gallery that can also accommodate wine bar and restaurant guests as needed, as well as private parties.
“If you like the stuff that’s on the gallery wall in the dining room at Bad Animal, the art gallery will have a lot of that same flavor,” said Sivak, including rare print material, maps, broadsides, literary ephemera, things that celebrate arts, culture and history of Santa Cruz and silver gelatin photographs.
Like the eclectic books available on Bad Animal’s shelves, the gallery will house unusual visual creations. “People ask us where the books come from, and the short answer is that these are the best books from the best collections in Santa Cruz as they come available,” said Sivak. “I’ve been opportunistic about buying beautiful things off the walls of these homes, so I’m excited for everybody to finally see it.”
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