“With a place like this, you don’t know what it will become,” says Dudley Michael, discussing his latest restaurateur adventure, Gracie, named after his partner, Grace Austin. “Your customers will tell you, and you will evolve with them.”
This opening bears even more weight than many, as Gracie has reimagined what was the Breakwater Restaurant. “People are really nostalgic about this location at the Santa Barbara harbor,” Austin says. Michael adds, “Some of them have been coming here since they were kids.”
The couple took over the location last fall, but they didn’t do the revamp — and it’s an impressive one, especially the jewel-box bar that classes up the joint — until this year, so they got a sense of possible complaints about change. Just shifting from frozen food to fresh freaked out some folks, let alone the F-bombs they received about the farm-fresh eggs they started serving — some were shocked by the bright-orange color of the yolks.
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