Chef Brad Wise Reflects on Rare Society’s First Year

Though raised in New Jersey and based in San Diego, restaurateur Brad Wise credits his wife’s Central Coast roots for igniting his passion for wood-fire cooking, the grilling style for tri-tips and rib-eyes made famous by her hometown of Santa Maria. 

“You get a different fire every time you build and light one,” explains Wise. “That means no two cooking experiences are the same, and that you have to adapt and pivot in the moment to produce your dish. That’s a fun challenge to me, because I am obsessed with consistency, as any chef is. So how do you produce a dish that is going to taste consistent every time, while using a cooking method that’s different every time?”  

His dedication to mastering the technique is evident in the stacks of red oak and dry-aging cuts of beef on full display in the entryway to his Rare Society in Santa Barbara’s Funk Zone, which opened just more than a year ago. It was the third location of Wise’s upscale steakhouse concept — revolving around multiple cuts of beef shared with your table via lazy Susan — and is just one of 10 restaurants in this 38-year-old’s fast-growing portfolio, including a Rare Society in Mill Creek, Washington. 

“We have the smallest amount of turnover here,” said Wise of how Santa Barbara is going, committed employees being one hallmark of a successful enterprise. “It’s like a calmer, smaller San Diego.”

We met recently next to those woodpiles and New York strips during one of his monthly visits, when his wife takes the kids to see their grandparents in Santa Maria and he checks in on the kitchen. “We developed these restaurants to be self-sustaining,” said Wise of keeping standards high from San Clemente to Seattle, and he also adapts each to match its neighborhood. “Every place we open, we ask, ‘How do people dine around here?’”

In Santa Barbara, that meant balancing the desires of tourists with the needs of residents. “You see the ebbs and flows of business and demand based on who is traveling through, but we’ve been grateful in how receptive the community has been,” said Wise. “We have locals that are stopping by two or three times a week, neighbors where Rare has become their special-occasion destination, and industry folks coming in to hang at the bar, so it’s a good scene there. We look forward to continuing to grow and ingrain ourselves in this town.”  

Rare Society cocktails, from left: Rare Old Fashioned, the Flying A Studio, and the Spanish Tile | Credit: Courtesy

He fell into restaurant life at just 12 years old by working in the cheesesteak shops and pizza joints of Cape May, a vacation destination on the southern tip of New Jersey’s coast. (Don’t call that the Jersey Shore, by the way.) Then he was a prep cook at the iconic Washington Inn, where his teacher mom worked summers too, motivated by the spending money. “I liked to have things, and I had to pay for these things,” he recalled of motocross and other hobbies. “Little did I know that they were grooming me for my career.”

He went straight from high school to the Academy of Culinary Arts in Atlantic City, where he learned more fundamentals and the vocabulary of the professional kitchen. In 2006, his dad bought him a ticket to go visit a friend in Pacific Beach, and Wise quickly liked what he saw and moved out west. He found work with the Eat.Drink.Sleep hospitality group and was soon running The Padre Hotel in Bakersfield at just 25 years old, eventually becoming the entire group’s executive chef. 

By 2016, the 30-year-old was ready to do his own thing, and he opened Trust in San Diego’s Hillcrest neighborhood, one of the city’s first restaurants where the chef was also the owner. “Now it’s the exact opposite,” Wise said, explaining that, like in so many cities over the past decade, chef-owner-operators are San Diego’s norm. Always intending to scale up, he opened the live fire-focused Fort Oak in 2019, followed the next year by the Italian chophouse Cardelino and the butcher-sandwich shop The Wise Ox. 

They weren’t all home runs. In 2017, he opened Hundred Proof, but it barely lasted two years. What went wrong there? “Everything — I’m not even kidding,” laughed Wise. “But I had to have that failure to learn and get to today.”

In fact, that location became the first Rare Society, which immediately won rave reviews. “Once we saw that momentum, we realized that we’d struck a chord,” said Wise, who’s currently rolling out the model nationwide, with plans to open 10 more locations over the next five years.

Blending classical steakhouse decor and cuisine with modern flourish, Rare Society goes deep in all corners of its extensive but highly curated menu, where every item gets a jolt of creativity. The old-fashioned, for instance, uses bourbon that’s been washed in dry-aged fat, while the Caesar is showered in pecorino flake, the crab cake gets onion powder, the salmon crudo wears Aleppo-jazzed everything spice, and the simply named “Bacon” is a sturdy slab of pork belly awash in gochujang. Even the sides get a bump: truffles in the creamed spinach and the gratin potatoes, carrots glazed in miso with a garlic-peanut-mint crunch. 

But the star of every show is one of the chef-determined boards that are shared with the table. Whether you opt for The Associate at $123 or The Executive at $197, the lazy Susan comes with an array of pre-sliced cuts (rib-eye, Denver, N.Y strip, tri-tip, filet mignon, etc.) and your selection of sauces (including Santa Maria–style salsa). In an era when many of us have realized that we only need a few bites to scratch our beef itch — rather than endure the challenge of chewing down an entire steak, whose first few bites are the best anyway — the boards are a game-changer, opening multiple flavors and textures while likely saving you money.

“The board may be $200, but if it’s feeding four people, the experience is tremendously better than one steak,” said Wise, but he does hedge at least one bet. “We put filets on both boards so everyone is happy.”

Rare Society, 214 State St.; (805) 335-2088; raresociety.com/santa-barbara