Welcome to Lily Belli on Food, a weekly food-focused newsletter from Lookout’s food and drink correspondent, Lily Belli. Keep reading for the latest local food news for Santa Cruz County – plus a few fun odds and ends from my own life and around the web.
… In a former pub in downtown Santa Cruz, set back from Pacific Avenue, owner Max Turigliatto has achieved a slam dunk with his new cocktail lounge, the Alley Oop. Over the past three years, he transformed the rough-edged The Poet & The Patriot Irish pub, which closed in 2020, into a glittering jewel box, and finally opened on Feb. 13. The name is a nod to the slim “Jazz Alley” that runs alongside it, and is fitting considering the space’s transformation and the painstaking effort it took to complete.
Read my review of Alley Oop here, and get a peek inside.
… A Santa Cruz mom launched Village Foods to help people solve the nightly dinner dilemma, and the meal delivery service has quickly taken off. Less than a year in, the business is expanding into its own Live Oak storefront as founder Kelly Langstaff seeks to support busy families like her own.
Langstaff is capitalizing on a national trend locally, with a focus on nourishing meals that feel as though they were made by a friend, and on the ability for customers to personalize their orders based on what they want to eat that week rather than a set menu. Delivering on Mondays allows people to jumpstart their week with a fridge full of food, she said.
That turned out to be a critical step. “We actually became something dependable, a real pillar that people could count on,” Langstaff told me. Here’s the story.
… I’m still swooning over olive-studded fougasse at Melo Bread, poppyseed focaccia French toast at Melrose Café, a kicky kimchi pie at Pogonip Pizza, and silky orange-marzipan gelato at Gran Gelato Caffè. Read up on the best things I ate in March.
… One of Santa Cruz County’s most stylish lunch spots is open for the summer season. Little Beach, the al fresco daytime service at Mentone in Aptos, is open on Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 2:30 p.m. This is chef David Kinch’s Italian-meets-French Riviera spot, and guests will find familiar items like artfully blistered Neapolitan-style pizzas, fresh seasonal pastas and deceptively simple small plates like gooey stracciatella with Manresa Bread levain ($19).
One of my favorites – the mortadella sandwich with stracciatella ($17) – returned to the opening lunch menu alongside new eye-catching additions, like a French omelette with caviar ($48). Mentone’s iconic frozen Aperol spritz ($17) is always a must-get. View the menu here.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
More than two dozen restaurants countywide are debuting new plant-based dishes as part of April’s inaugural Santa Cruz Vegan Chef Challenge. The event, organized by Vegan Outreach, aims to expand vegan options and encourage broader interest in plant-based eating, with a winning restaurant to be announced in May. Read up on it here.
EVENT SPOTLIGHT
Cabrillo College Culinary Arts students and Santa Cruz Mountains wineries are teaming up for The Perfect Pair, an annual event where chefs-in-training and wineries try to create memorable matchups of wine and food. The event takes place on April 25 from noon to 4 p.m. at the Sesnon House at Cabrillo, with a lecture on local microclimates by viticulturist Prudy Foxx, followed by the wine and food pairing tasting. Tickets to the seminar only are $40, and tickets for the Perfect Pair tasting only are $85. All-inclusive tickets are $120.
LIFE WITH THE BELLIS
My family visited my parents in Angels Camp, California, over the weekend for Easter, and on the way there we met up in Columbia State Historic Park. It’s a historic Gold Rush town and the main street is filled with little museums, shops and restaurants. I grew up about 20 minutes away and came here all the time as a kid, but it was the first time my son, Marco, and daughter, Cecilia, had been.
The highlight of the visit is a stop into the Willy Wonka-esque Nelson’s Candy Kitchen, an apothecary-like candy store filled with homemade treats. My children’s choices said so much about their personalities: Cecilia chose a swirled lollipop the size of her head, and Marco picked out shark-shaped gummies. And while I was tempted by the “bacon and eggs” made with ribbon candy and molded white chocolate, I went with a chocolate coconut haystack.
FOOD NEWS WORTH READING
➤ Farms on Oahu’s north shore are beginning to rebuild after a series of mammoth storms in March flooded fields on the Hawaiian island. In addition to crop losses, the water washed away vital nutrients in the soil, and the hard work of cleaning up debris, damaged roads and thick mud will take a long time. “It could take years to get back to where we were,” one farmer said. (The Guardian)
➤ Thieves stole a 12-ton shipment of Nestle KitKat bars as it traveled from central Italy to Poland, but the Swiss company’s response showed that no news is bad news if you have a public relations team with a sense of humor. “We’ve always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat. But it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tons of our chocolate,” a spokesperson said. (CBS News)