Coffee Week 2026: Renaud's Patisserie

Renaud’s Patisserie: Drip Coffee & Croissant ($5); Drip Coffee & Croissant BLT ($10) 

Be honest — so often, a BLT promises way more than it delivers. Flimsy bread, soggy lettuce, limp tomatoes, a surfeit of bacon strips, so 50 percent of your bites are sadly pork-less.

Now meet the BLT of your dreams. It starts with Renaud’s well-renowned croissants, the area’s best since the first of Renaud Gonthier’s spots opened back in 2008 in Loreto Plaza. There’s a rich aioli and not some dull mayo. Poor lettuce, so often a sandwich’s lackluster wallflower, here dances up a crisp, crunchy storm of bright green. The tomatoes have flavor. And then not just bacon, but also thinly sliced ham, lightly grilled for more richness and ancillary pork crunch. There’s red onion for those unafraid to partake of the pungent lily. You will make a happy, delicious, finger-licking mess.

Or go classic and order “only” a croissant, a celebration of lamination, baked butter, and fragile flake.

And either eats gets washed down with Peerless Drip Coffee, from one of the country’s premier roasters for more than a century. You can even choose from Hawaiian, French, or Guatemalan roasts, depending on how much bite you’d like.

Don’t be surprised if you also leave with a gorgeous chocolate Easter bunny for the kids. (Sure, for the kids.)

If you want to read about all the other Coffee Week deals, then do so at the Independent's site.

Dinner Comes to Renaud’s (Well, Briefly It Did)

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Just days after this article published, Renaud’s stopped serving dinner at the Montecito location, choosing to focus on breakfast and lunch.]

If you think of the Coast Village Plaza complex as a sort of mall, it now features two anchor tenants, with Khao Kheng (somehow even better than sister restaurant Empty Bowl) on the west end and Renaud’s on the east. That’s especially true since the latter began serving dinner right before the New Year. “Guests have been asking me for dinner service for a really, really long time,” says founder Renaud Gonthier. “And I wanted to give it a shot.”

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

What A Tasty Nation You've Got There

Not too much time for details, so I'm hoping some visuals will do. First, a menu from a brilliant dinner last evening:

Click on it to make it bigger, and if you do, your eyes will get bigger too. That menu doesn't include the beet, fresh ricotta, truffle tartlets and pheasant rillettes that Chef John Pettitt from Cadiz prepared, either.

This photo is to prove that a salad on a menu might not prepare you for what you'll get on the plate. You might not think a chef would slice apples on a meat slicer, then dehydrate them in a low oven for 4 hours, then form a crown with them for your salad greens. At least I sure didn't think that. Thanks, Chef Pilar Sanchez from Root 246 (which is obviously in good hands even with Bradley Ogden now gone).

And then a photo of dessert, as its menu name doesn't prepare you for all the crazy goodness and vanilla bean antennae of this. Thanks, Chef Renaud Gonthier (who else?). Obviously you can't go back in time to eat this dinner (sorry), but you can go to the Share Our Strength's Taste of the Nation event May 20 at the Montecito Country Club. You will never eat and rink as well while fighting hunger (all proceeds go to the SB Foodbank, and they turn each dollar of donation into $17 of food).