The Cool Cats Keep Coming for Good Lion Hospitality

 If you consider a visit to a haberdasher prior to bar-hopping, you’d want a top hat before sashaying into The Lion’s Tale, and a pith helmet before slinking into Jaguar Moon. That’s relevant sartorial information as both establishments just celebrated their first-year anniversaries. The former, gracing Coast Village Road in Montecito since October 2024, offers a swellegant hotel bar experience akin to the finest one at The Connaught in London. The latter, livening up downtown Ventura since November of the same year, takes you to the tropical Yucatán. The two join the other seven establishments that comprise the ever-growing Good Lion Hospitality (GLH) group headed by couple in business and marriage Misty Orman and Brandon Ristaino.

Given Ristaino insists it “takes a year to take a first breath” when opening a spot, it seemed a good time to check in on all things lion to see if everything was good.

Not to give the game away one-sixth of the way through the article, but the answer is complex. Crowds have been great and locals supportive, so much so that Orman and Ristaino couldn’t even get IN to their own Lion’s Tale over the holidays. “It was so crowded,” Orman explains, “that we didn’t want to come in and stress the staff having to figure out where to put us.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site.

Good Lion Hospitality Roars Through the 10-Year Mark

 

When the Good Lion opened in December 2014, it not only reimagined the cocktail bar for Santa Barbara, but it also signaled the dawn of a Central Coast mini-empire. As they aptly put it on the Good Lion Hospitality (GLH) website, they have “a vision of exciting, comfortable, and dynamic eating, living, and drinking spaces featuring world-class hospitality.” That vision and hospitality begins with couple Brandon and Misty Orman Ristaino, curious, clever compadres in class and taste.

If everything goes to plan (and all “trying to open a business in these parts” warnings must apply), by year’s end, GLH will include the bars Good Lion, Test Pilot, and Shaker Mill in Santa Barbara; an as-yet-unnamed project in the Montecito Inn; Strange Beast, Bank of Italy Cocktail Trust, and Jaguar Moon in Ventura; and the “bed-and-beverage” Petit Soleil in S.L.O.

Turns out expansion was always the plan.

Care to read the rest then do so at the Independent's site.