Marisella Is Molto Bella

It's not easy being a resort restaurant. Hotel guests can resent you as they feel Stockholm syndromed into loving you as you're the only game in town. Locals, ever on the lookout for snoot to bemoan, can feel excluded, starting with the valet parking fee. There's a lot to overcome to please both your possible audiences.

Maple Hospitality Group, out of Chicago, is the latest entity trying to crack this difficult nut at the Ritz-Carlton Bacara in the location most recently occupied by Angel Oak. It opens Marisella (star of the sea) to the public June 26th, but this weekend held a swank reception for some press (me!), people who probably call themselves influencers unironically, friends and family, and a heaping helping of rich folks. But I shouldn't be disdainful, as it was all lovely--I mean look up top, they are ice-luging shots and offering you a lot of oysters, shrimp, and uni backed by the Bacara's best quality--a killer ocean view. Of course one has to be wowed a bit.

And get a load of all that gorgeous whiskey behind the bar. They seemed to know what to do with it, too, offering some tasty bespoke cocktails and not flinching in the slightest when Chryss asked for mocktails. She was able to have two completely different ones, even, after the bartender asked about likes/dislikes. I left out photos of the folks pouring wines from the site's 700 plus label cellar, but they certainly knew their stuff and were kind, engaging, and talented at sabering champagne bottles. Plus willing to share one-offs from the cellar they wouldn't be able to put on the list, including a 2011 Arnot-Roberts Syrah.

The man above is the mastermind behind Maple Hospitality Group--the talented and engaging Danny Grant. While I will go on about the food we got to taste, you don't have to trust just me--he happens to be the youngest chef ever to win two Michelin stars in back-to-back years. Now his culinary empire extends to Scottsdale, Dallas, Miami, and...Goleta. (I kid, I kid.) One clever redo in the dining room, that overall seems lightened to rid it of steak-houseiness and make it be more Amalfi Coast-y, as the press release suggests, was to make the enlarged kitchen viewable from the dining room. That also means the kitchen can view the diners, and out past them to the Pacific. That's one lovely way to keep a kitchen crew happy.

That's beef that melts in your mouth, if you wondered. Simple, direct, beautiful. Not pictured, as it isn't the most Instagrammable dish in the world (so I give Grant even more kudos for still serving it--sorry, influencers!), is a salt-baked whole branzino, that flakes into moist not mushy delight, far from over salted, and then bathed in a simple, simply perfect brown butter, caper, lemon sauce. This kitchen has the ability to make foods taste like amped up versions themselves, the beefest beef, the fishiest fish (in a good way--I can see how that one doesn't work quite well). Soon a line formed so everyone could get in on the carving station, which eventually added some slow roasted bone-in short rib, again exactly what you hope it could be, but better. The same was true for the passed foods, especially a light, crispy fritto misto. Note that on the opening menu online, Marisella, in addition to apps and in-house pasta and entrees, is hoping to convince people to buy big for the table--that branzino, say, or a 40 oz. bistecca alla Fiorentina, or a Festa Del Mar of roasted lobster, prawns, Pacific clams, Calabrian chile, and tomato sugo. They hope you've come to party.

Maple Hospitality also brought out its big guns to make sure those working at Marisella are fully trained. That is, the top pastry chef was in town, and you could relish her skills in a wide variety of dessert bites, from petite chocolate cake to peaches & cream profiterole. 

From this first impression, if Marisella isn't a smashing success as a resort restaurant, the failure will turn out to be ours for not supporting them.

David Rosner’s Doughy Dreams at Rozzi Pizza

 When I pop into the new Rozzi Pizza for our assigned interview, chef-owner David Rosner instantly asks me, “Mind if I work while we talk? My 9:30 delivery got here at 1:30, so I’m behind.” Somehow, he could not only carry on a lively conversation with plenty of eye contact — he’s big on that — but he also kept methodically, smoothly measuring up and cutting to weight pizza dough balls, rolling each into a shiny globe set away for later. “This is my retirement job,” he tells me, “but I’m working 10 times harder than when I wore the white coat as executive chef.”

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

A Review of Marcy Dermanksy's "Hot Air"

 

In Marcy Dermansky’s engrossing novel of (mis)manners Hot Air, third person limited isn’t just a narrative technique, it’s a view of the world where solipsism holds all the cards. Her characters are self-involved, feckless, cruel, and what’s worse, two of them, couple Jonathan and Julia, are ridiculously rich. As their assistant Vivian considers it, “It was amazing how easy it was to solve problems when you did not have to worry about how much it cost.”

Of course, things can cost us more than money. A handful of pages into the tale, Jonathan and Julia, contentiously celebrating their anniversary on a hot air balloon ride, crash into Johnny’s pool, just as he and Joannie have had their first kiss on their first date. (Yes, four names that begin with J, which leads to some confusion, but also underlines how sadly similar everyone is deep down.) Joannie, the poorest of this foursome, is a divorced mom, eager to move up in the world for her and her daughter, Lucy. Although Joannie has written a semi-successful novel she has never been able to follow up on, and therefore perhaps is the closest to a stand-in for the author—who names each chapter after the character’s viewpoint we are privy to in those pages—Dermansky lets loose this zinger, “As a rule, Joanie didn’t like rich people, but she thought that could change if she were to become one.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on June 10, 2025.

An Avocado Junket Is Far from the Pits

I was somewhere around Camarillo, on the edge of the Conejo Grade, when the avocados began to take hold. This was late April, and I was one of “a diverse mix of journalists, content creators, and retail and foodservice professionals from across the Western United States.” At least that’s how the California Avocado Commission described us in their attractively presented Briefing Book. We were all on a junket to learn to love Big Green.

It seems everyone/thing needs representation these days. If Clooney and Saldaña need agents, why not Persea americana, in particular those from California (just grown from San Diego to Monterey)? The more-than-100-year-old nonprofit California Avocado Commission hypes its fruit as fresh and local, sustainably grown and ethically sourced, seasonal, and sure to bring that creaminess avo-heads crave. Another reason the association is needed: Even though California is on target to produce 375 million pounds of avocado this bumper-crop year — a figure that would be the equivalent weight of more than 31 million electric guitars, or a million giant kangaroos, a species thankfully extinct for eons — Mexico will produce two billion pounds of avos.

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

Dart Coffee Aims to Please

 

(photo credit Ingrid Bostrom)

Sometimes the interview questions write themselves. When I sat down with the team behind Dart Coffee Co. — David Dart, retired dentist; Erika Carter Dart, still a very active artist; and their son Carter Paul Hallman, winemaker and SBCC Culinary School grad — in Erika’s cozy Green House Studios, I had to open with, “How did painting and dentistry lead you to coffee?”

I knew it would be a lively chat when Erika deadpanned, “Isn’t it obvious?” The short answer turns out to be that art and science brew the best cup of joe. The longer, more fascinating answer involves Dart growing from its original Funk Zone location to a spot on the Santa Barbara harbor and, sometime very soon, a third outpost in Carpinteria’s much-awaited Linden Square complex.

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

A Review of "What Art Does" by Brian Eno and Bette A.

 

At a mere 4.5 by 6.5 inches, only 122 pages long, with a cover that’s bright white and soothing flamingo pink, Brian Eno and Bette A.’s What Art Does beckons with an easy-going, “See? Manageable.” That’s even with its subtitle “An Unfinished Theory” dragging along like tin cans attached to a car, startling everyone. That said, a quick peek inside is even more welcoming. Bette A.’s deceptively naive, you could almost draw them yourself, just beyond line drawings are full of childlike whimsy. The typography is also playful, changing size, color, font, and even fading away. Given the ultra-creative natures of its authors—Eno is a British polymath musician, producer, artist, activist, A. a Dutch artist, novelist, and art school teacher—of course this book about art is art itself.

But then what is art? That’s where the aphoristic writing steps in, each sentence a barbed argument posed as indubitable statement. You find yourself bobbing your head in agreement page after page. Take this run of claims, “We all make art all the time, but we don’t really call it that;” art is “the name for a kind of engagement we have with something;” and, “the art engagement begins where functional engagement ends.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on May 2, 2025.

Come on Baby Light My Ire

In light of the recent death of Val Kilmer and the recent announcement that I will be appointed Santa Barbara Poet Laureate for 2025-2027 (with no guarantee poetry, the country, or you and me will be here for the full two years), I recalled an op-ed I wrote while I was a lecturer in the English Department at Penn State way back in 1991. Thanks to the internets, everything you've ever written can eventually surface. I was young(er) then, so excuse my impudent tone, but I think this holds up.

Groove to the Beat, But Don't Call Rock Stars Poets

originally published May 1, 1991

 Ah, for the days of yore, when exams smelled of fresh mimeograph fluid, and the end of the semester had, as it should, its own distinct stink. To recapture some of the magic of those long-gone days, I thought I'd give Collegian readers a pop exam.

Name three living poets.

I'm waiting.

One living poet?

OK, I heard somebody whisper Jim Morrison. One: He's not living. Two: He never was a poet, so even if he is alive on that island of the Dead and Famous, it doesn't matter. In fact, Oliver Stone and The Doors movie did more to misrepresent poetry than anything since Dead Poets Society, which proffered the mind-numbingly regular metrics of "O Captain, My Captain" as the peak of Whitman.

As for The Doors, believe it or not, most poets don't see Native American dancing about when they write. Most poets do not do enough drugs to make their hearts explode at 27. Most poets don't have naked honeys groove to their words (yeah, here I'm bitter, as a sometime poet myself.) Most important, most poets don't write endless drivel to their diddle; Morrison was as phallocentric as a Maypole.

Yet, it's not surprising a director as heavy-handed as the aptly named Stone would find Morrison a worthy successor to Blake and Byron. Stone, who in Platoon reduced Vietnam to a facile struggle between good and evil father figures, only to decide that "we have met the enemy, and he is us" (too bad we killed lots of Vietnamese to find out.) Stone, who in Wall Street reduced the greedy grabbing of the 1980s to a facile struggle between good and evil father figures, only to decide that "we have met the enemy, and he is us" (too bad trickle-down economics left more people poor than at any time since the Depression).

Stone is simple-minded, and Morrison is a poet for the simple. Sure, he was a Sure, he was a magnetic rock star, and the band helped open up rock music to the influences of jazz, but to call Morrison a poet is ridiculous. Such a claim makes lines like "we need great golden copulations," "death and my cock are the world," and "mute nostril agony" something they aren't.

And, no, I'm not just saying rock lyrics are hackwork and poetry is ethereal. Rock lyrics can deepen music, can create emotion and mood, can even sparkle. But it's enough to call them good lyrics; we don't need to elevate them to the haughty level of poetry to bestow greatness upon them. It's fine for Elvis Costello to do his thing, and for Wallace Stevens to do another. (Costello is much better singing about blue chairs than blue guitars, and as for Stevens . . . well, studies have shown no insurance salesman can rock out.) As a teacher of mine once said, "The term art merely means 'I like it a whole bunch.'"

But, as Raymond Chandler wrote, "All good art is entertainment and anyone who says differently is a stuffed shirt and juvenile at the art of living." Following Chandler, I want to suggest something much more revolutionary -- that poetry is entertainment. That living people write it. That it takes work to do and isn't the product of lightning bolts or chemical muses. That if more people read poetry, the world might be a better place.

While the violins warm up in the background, and I climb a soapbox taller than Mount Nittany, settle on in. I'm going to make a pitch for poetry.

Poetry attests to complexity; as Valery said, "All lofty thinking ends in a sigh." Poetry is honest exploration in a television world where the only question is How to get laid and the easy answer is Have the brightest smile and the driest underarms.

Poetry is difficult; that's why we run from it. It allows for lines like Bill Knott's, "Ancestor-silencing is difficult when you you're the one/ who forgot to patent the dodo." The syllables pile up so that we are forced to slow down, to halt our rush to evolution.

Poetry not only makes us re-think, but think. Instead of chowing down Pentagon-pushed myths of heroism, we get Jack Gilbert telling us "the abnormal is not courage: The marriage, not the month's rapture." Instead of the America first military mentality that makes football another form of ground war (of thee Whitney Houston lip-synchs), we get Rodney Jones dreaming up death as the ultimate fullback in the poem "Sweep," in which he writes, "I have been home three days, listening to an obituary."

Poetry is a mirror in which we see ourselves in the brightest light. In a poem about something as everyday as a radio request, Maria Flook writes: "It is difficult to humiliate desire;/ that in itself is important to note,/ if it is late at night/ and someone is saying, 'This is for that girl/ on the island, God bless her.'/ The sea is the same. I am the same. Fish swim/ to the false surface of the searchlight." Poetry lets Flook embrace pop music and all its pathos, while seeing through the bathos, lets her hold love up to hope, yet lament.

Yet lamenting poetry is what this column must do. Now, only poets read poetry; everybody else reads Kitty Kelley. Somewhere in too many minds hides the ghost of a high school English teacher who was nearly a ghost himself, reciting Verse in a trebly voice. (He's the same guy who taught you the five paragraph theme -- hunt him down and kill him.) And read some recent poetry; it might be a moment like this one described by Denis Johnson: "As the record falls and the snake-band chords begin/ to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones."