Santa Barbara’s Hospitality Game-Changers

Santa Barbara’s
Hospitality Game-Changers

How the Acme, Companion, and
Good Lion Restaurant Groups
Changed Our Dining Culture

By Matt Kettmann | December 12, 2024

The spirit of hospitality has long pulsed in the veins of Santa Barbara, from when the Chumash capital of Syuxtun shared in the region’s natural abundance, to the colonial and Californio eras, when genteel formalities reigned. In the modern day, hospitality is more of our lifeblood than ever, with tourism and its associated industries leading the way when it comes to jobs, revenues, and the social scene. 

Restaurants are the backbone of that culture, and yet for many decades, there were merely a handful of solid spots that satisfied residents and appeased tourists. “It wasn’t like you would want to drive to Santa Barbara and have dinner,” said Jannis Swerman, a veteran marketing professional who spent 20 years with Wolfgang Puck and then 20 more representing the top restaurateurs in Los Angeles. “You didn’t walk around and get excited about eating there. I would never stop.”

But over the past decade, that’s completely changed, as our sunshine-lulled, historically slow-to-evolve region shifted its hospitality machine into high gear, so much so that we’re now considered an epicurean hotbed. Back in 2012, one would be hard-pressed to spend a long weekend with eating out as the primary goal. Come 2025, you’ll need more than a week of steady indulgence to even scratch the surface.

“It was so quick,” said Swerman, who watched the turnaround up close as a consultant to a few restaurants here. “Suddenly, Santa Barbara was definitely on the map as a culinary destination.”

Plenty of factors played into this — amplified attention to cuisine nationally and shifting demographics regionally, to name two — but there are three restaurant/bar groups that deserve credit for igniting this fire and continuing to fuel the blaze. Though independent of each other, the three companies are each run by impassioned, hardworking, rather inspirational leaders who share a similar set of defining values dedicated to excellence, to service, and to people. Less sexy but equally impactful, they’ve developed backend systems and exhaustive training protocols to power operations across multiple establishments, leveraging the data and experience necessary to let the creativity soar. 

Acme Hospitality’s Sherry Villanueva, who was previously a marketing executive with no restaurant experience, set the spark by opening The Lark and its neighboring establishments in 2013, only to be followed by multiple concepts (Loquita, La Paloma, and more) in the years to come. The Good Lion’s opening in 2014 by Brandon Ristaino and Misty Orman brought contemporary cocktails to the forefront, followed soon by Test Pilot, Shaker Mill, and more outside of city limits. 

Then in 2018, Greg and Daisy Ryan brought our northern reaches into the fray by opening Bell’s Restaurant in Los Alamos, which won the region’s first Michelin star in 2021. The Ryans’ Companion Hospitality Group steadily expanded into Los Olivos (Bar Le Côte) and Buellton (Na Na Thai), with further growth in “little L.A.” as well (Priedite Barbecue, Bodegas Los Alamos). 

These are not the first or only multiple-restaurant companies in town. There are numerous examples in Mexican and Asian cuisine as well as in the seafood and classic American café categories. What sets these three restaurant groups apart is the distinct variety of each of their establishments — never adhering to the same food, drink, or design offerings; often individually driven by specific chefs and/or co-owners; and always with an authentic story to tell. Both Acme and Good Lion are now in the hotel business as well.

Nor are they the first or only restaurant groups, an ownership style that’s proliferated globally over the past 20 years. Due to the inherent efficiencies, the format is often more profitable than just owning one restaurant. But groups do catch flack for being the next generation of “chains” by another name, prone to rely on reputation over quality.

I’ve seen that in bigger cities, where a celebrated group’s hot new place is more trendy than tasty. That’s not yet happening with these three Santa Barbara groups, and, based on the meticulous ways and intimate attention of their owners, it probably won’t anytime soon.

Having known many of these people and places since they started, with both Acme and Good Lion recently eclipsing their decade marks, I thought it was about time to see what makes them tick. I wanted to see the action from morning prep sessions to their pre-service staff meetings and family meals to the kitchen chaos during dinner rush. So that’s what I started doing in September, eventually talking to more than 30 people at various levels of each company and getting behind the scenes at more than a dozen establishments.

This is what I found. 

Morning Shift

The ovens are running by 5 a.m. at Helena Avenue Bakery, where head baker Jessica Bambach — who started here two years ago after working for Bob’s Well Bread and Bree’osh — is tossing one of more than 40 different loaves and pastries they prepare daily in the oven as Sherry Villanueva kicks off my long day of Acme visits. 

When Villanueva boldly ditched her successful marketing career to become a restaurateur — developer Brian Kelly asked her what she’d do with his Funk Zone properties, then asked her to do it — she didn’t just open The Lark. She also opened Lucky Penny pizzeria, a wine bar called Les
Marchand (now Pearl Social), a comingled tasting room called the Santa Barbara Wine Collective, and this bakery — an instant restaurant group, essentially by necessity.

“We want this neighborhood to be a neighborhood; we don’t want it to be an entertainment zone,” Villanueva said of how they plotted what to open. “That means dogs and kids and grandmas and wholesome daytime programming. That’s how we came up with the bakery.”

Emilie Sandven, a pastry chef by training who now manages both the bakery and the attached collective, is empowered by access to critical cost, profit, and visitation data, allowing her to plan each breakfast and lunch service with as little waste as possible. “This is the company where I’ve had the most transparency on the numbers,” she told me. Said Villanueva, “There’s some risk. You have to trust your managers, which we do.”

Sandven reflects a core Acme value of letting team members express themselves, like putting a brisket taco on the menu by line cook Nico Perez. “It’s a good way to keep your team fired up and engaged,” said Sandven. “They can actively contribute.”

Upward mobility for employees is the true superpower of a restaurant group. The ceiling for growth of skills and income at one restaurant is pretty low; with many establishments, plus administrative positions, “There’s no limit of what they can do with us,” said Skyler Gamble, Acme’s director of restaurant operations.  

“We work with a lot of young people, and for many, it’s their first job,” said Gamble, who arrived from Denver’s restaurant scene just as The Lark was opening 11 years ago. “Many are trying to become the professionals of the future. You take these young people and you help them learn skills that transcend whatever they’re going to do in the future.”

Going into hotels, namely The National Exchange in Nevada City and the Holbrooke Hotel in Grass Valley, only enhanced those opportunities. (Good Lion’s hotel is Petit Soleil in San Luis Obispo, where the reception desk doubles as a bar.) “Acme has been super awesome to work for, and such a big reason is because of the internal growth and that willingness to advance people,” said Lunden Desmond, who started as a floor manager at The Lark and is now the Holbrooke’s GM. “When you invest in your employees, there’s always the chance you might lose them because they outgrow what you’re doing. The openness and integrity that Acme has to take the chance on investing in their people is what makes it so special.”

The first investment is the initial training, which is incredibly intense for each of these companies. On a Saturday morning in October at 11 a.m., Slovakian sommelier Lenka Davis stands in the middle of Lion’s Tale — the bar just opened two days before by the Good Lion team — and explains to the assembled cast of servers, from wine experts to neophytes, how to open a bottle of champagne, polish a wine glass, and deal with unhappy customers. Some are brand-new to the Good Lion team; others are veterans who came from the flagship on State Street, or Test Pilot, or Shaker Mill, or the newer properties down in Ventura.

Good Lion co-owner Brandon Ristaino compares staffing new places to the solera method of aging sherry. “You take a little bit from the previous batch and move it to the next batch,” he said. “You’re able to carry some of the positive attributes of company culture and drop it into the next venues.”

When people do leave these companies — which is really quite rare, by industry standards — they often do their own amazing things. Chefs Peter Lee and Felicia Medina opened Secret Bao, for instance, and Wine Collective/Loquita manager Alejandro Medina is behind Bibi Ji.

One of Companion’s graduates is Grace Gates, the Los Angeles–raised, Cate School–educated owner of Buellton’s Little King Coffee. She came back to town to open the Los Olivos seafood tavern Bar Le Côte in 2021, lured by what Greg and Daisy Ryan were doing during the pandemic, like founding a hunger-focused nonprofit called Feed the Valley. 

Gates and her husband/business partner, Ryan Dobosh, both come from theater backgrounds, and she believes running a restaurant is a lot like putting on a play. “We’re all doing something together,” she said. “Everyone is on the same page, working toward the same thing.”

Companion’s culture amplified that, and Little King — which is opening a second location in Montecito soon — pays it forward. “People who are good at hospitality are community nerds,” she told me while whipping up a rosemary-orange latte. “We’re constantly asking how to make something that’s so transactional be actually nice.” Like walking a drink out to the customer, rather than just bellowing names from the bar.

Another successful spinoff is Rusty Quirk, a South Carolina native who became a pastry chef in New York City, moved to the Central Coast to open the Hotel S.L.O., and came to Bell’s in 2021. “I was looking for something that had a real sense of place, and was not just technically perfect in culinary, but also sending a message through their food,” said Quirk. “Kitchens can be very cutthroat and very competitive. That is important to keep things really high quality. But in a lot of ways, a high sense of collaboration and creativity can do the same thing. That’s what I experienced from Daisy.” She’s doing the same now at Linnaea’s Café, the historic coffee shop that she and her partner, Alex Quirk, bought in downtown San Luis Obispo in early 2023. 

Though dinner isn’t until 5 p.m., the kitchens at both The Lark and Loquita are buzzing by 6 a.m., with folks like Hector Xolop, Juan Diaz, and Cecelia Alonzo Picon chopping Brussels sprouts, boiling potatoes, and making corncob stock. “They really make the whole thing work,” explains Villanueva, whose crash course in running a restaurant led to a lot of surprising lessons.

“The way you design a kitchen can directly impact profitability,” she said. Though they’re the same size and revenue, Loquita — which was her second major restaurant, opened in 2016 — is “way more efficient” because it takes fewer steps for chefs and servers to get around the space. That means fewer employees, and more profit. 

Focusing on employee welfare is tantamount to Villanueva, who offers all of hers a 50 percent discount. “There isn’t a night that goes by when I don’t see an employee eating in the restaurant,” said Villanueva. “That’s the proudest thing, that they want to spend their time here and bring their parents or their girlfriend.”

The owners’ employee-first attitudes are what largely attracts and drives the staff at each company. “It’s her passion, it’s her vision, but she has that willingness to get her hands dirty,” said the marketing consultant Jannis Swerman of Villanueva, who enlisted her services when opening The Lark back in 2013. “That sets the tone for everyone who works with her.”

Echoed Emily Blackman, Companion’s beverage director, of Greg and Daisy: “They have a certain magnetism that has really pulled the right people to them, and a lot of that is because they lead by example,” she said. “Neither of them would ever ask anyone to do something that they wouldn’t be willing to do themselves. When that fryer oil has to be emptied, it’s Daisy who does it.”

Midday Duties

After finishing my latte and cookie at The Little King, I’m off to Priedite Barbecue, where Nick Priedite’s smokers, grills, and food truck are now permanently parked in the back of the Bodega Los Alamos property. Priedite’s move from bartender at The Lark to nationally recognized barbecue expert came because he texted Greg Ryan after a sold-out croissant-and-barbecue popup in Santa Barbara. (He also won one of this newspaper’s grilling contests years ago, clearly a fundamental step to success.) 

Ryan hosted Priedite for a Labor Day barbecue in 2019, and then the pandemic hit. Ryan suggested Priedite ditch his plans to move to Texas and instead cook every Saturday in the lot next to Bell’s, and the rest is lore, including the recent recognition as one of the country’s best barbecues by Texas Monthly.

But when Priedite first asked his friend Brendan Dawn, then a bartender at The Boathouse, whether he’d help him start a business the Ryans were itching to support, Dawn was incredulous. “They just want to help you out?” Dawn asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

Their intentions were noble, confirmed Priedite, an exchange of administrative expertise for a small partnership percentage. “This industry is cutthroat,” said Priedite. “It’s not often you find people who just genuinely want to help you out.”

Priedite BBQ continues to grow, now serving “Bandito” burgers and tacos Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, with their keystone “BBQ Round-Up” menu offered until it sells out every Saturday. “They provide a huge amount of backend support,” said Dawn of Companion’s role, which helped with the website, the point-of-sale systems, the marketing, and so on. “They have so much knowledge of this industry, it’s a huge thing,” said Priedite while slicing tri-tip in his truck. “They’ve got so many resources that we’ve used to build our business. It’s pivotal.” 

A week later, I’m slurping brothy khao soi at Na Na Thai in Buellton, which is another Companion partnership, this time with Ashley and Nick Ramirez. The couple moved to Thailand after meeting in Santa Barbara’s fine dining scene, and opened their street-food-inspired restaurant in 2023 after working for both Acme and Companion. It’s a slow Thursday lunch, but they already banked a $3,000 catering order and fulfilled a Feed the Valley donation that morning. Balancing all types of service is key to survival, which is why the dinging DoorDash alerts are awesome, not annoying.

Using technology provided by Companion, Ashley constantly tracks her labor costs and sales trends on an app called Upserve. “This thing, I am constantly on,” she said, using that data to decide when to call off a server, since labor is 60-plus percent of overall costs. Companion also provides human help in the form of Steve Dobozy, the team’s outreach/R&D chef who floats from restaurant to restaurant as needed.

Even with that backing, Na Na Thai is a challenging dream. “This is the hardest restaurant I’ve ever worked in,” said Ashley, who often turns to Greg for emotional support.

The Ryans’ motivation for such partnerships is rooted in a genuine desire to uplift the entire scene. “You aren’t making decisions on the concept; you’re making them on the people — ultimately, it’s Nick and Ashley that you’re investing in,” said Greg. “We want to keep these people in our community.”

Cross-pollination between these groups is inevitable. When Priedite was at The Lark, for instance, he learned from Villanueva about being efficient with cocktail recipes. Then he inspired The Lark’s Texas-born, San Francisco–trained chef Jason Paluska to add more barbecue to the menu.

“I’ve always been on a search for who I am, like a lost Texas,” said Paluska, recalling the day Priedite first brought in his ribs. “He made me understand it. The menu now has more of that influence because of Nick.” That drive in his team is what makes Paluska tick. “I love having people around me who are excited about creativity,” he said.

Across a dusty, dead-end street from The Lark’s backdoor is the Acme Resource Center, the group’s headquarters. After a decade of operating out of a glorified garage a block away, Acme’s administrative brain trust moved here a little more than a year ago, and employees are encouraged to stop by whenever they’d like, perhaps for a quiet lunch or to use a computer.

That’s where I met Acme’s president Jens Baake, who was born and trained in Germany, then went onto work for Disney in Florida and some of the largest restaurant groups in the world. “I love to work in an environment where you have multiple concepts, from a small popcorn cart to a fine dining, Michelin-starred restaurant,” he said. “That’s become my niche.”

He’s had a front row seat to America’s dining revolution. “We grew up in the ’70s and ’80s when food was standard and bland across the board in the United States,” he said. “Now we’re looking for farm-to-fork and local, and part of local now is how diverse and different the restaurants are where you live. We have to bring that to the table.”

That table includes special events, which is the topic of a meeting that afternoon about holiday plans at the Wine Collective. Each Acme establishment meets with the marketing team every quarter to plot parties, one-off dinners, and the like, which are good for income while attracting attention and new guests. 

There’s no shortage of these across the Companion and Good Lion calendars either, from winemaker nights to, in Na Na Thai’s case, omakase and Spice Club dinners. They’re a morale booster too. “It lets us scratch a different itch,” said Ashley Ramirez. 

I see this in action a few days later at La Paloma Café, where chef Jeremy Tummel is hosting a Sideways anniversary dinner for nearly 80 people, the largest they’ve ever done. That’s been causing a bit of anxiety for GM Kristy Lombardo. “This dinner is all I’ve thought of all week,” she tells the staff as they prepare for the dinner, which will have nine members of the media in attendance. “We have a lot of eyes on us today.”

Unlike Acme addresses concentrated in the Funk Zone, La Paloma — which took over the old Paradise Café in the fall of 2020 — is an outpost. “We’re on an island over here,” said Tummel. “They’re here when we need them, but this is a very DIY place. If you can do it yourself, you do it yourself.”

Like every other chef I spoke to, he thrives due to the combination of structure and freedom that Acme offers. “The systems are what you’d find at a chain,” he said. “But the identity and vibe and mood and experience at each restaurant is unique.”

Family Meals

The Michelin star posters hanging in the kitchen never dampened the down-home nature of Bell’s Restaurant, Companion’s first and flagship location that Greg and Daisy Ryan opened in 2018. Guests are greeted as “friends,” and Daisy doesn’t even frown when someone orders a steak medium-well. 

“Whenever you go to Bell’s, it feels like the most important place in the world, even though you’re in the middle of Los Alamos,” said their former pastry chef Rusty Quirk, now co-owner of Linnaea’s Café. “Every person that passes you greets you. You feel like it’s somewhere you belong.”

As egg salad, caviar-topped French fries, and beef tartare sandwiches fly out of the crowded kitchen, Micah Fendley pours me a glass of aligoté and tells me how he met the Ryans in Austin and followed them here. As the bread gets scored for the evening service, cook talk banters from anteaters to snow tigers, and chef Diego Tejeda breaks out the day’s family meal — pasta salad with feta and pepperoni, though it’s often more elaborate, like bulgogi short rib — Fendley lets me in on the secret.

“To make people feel really well, you treat them like you’d do in your own home,” he said. “There’s no more rocket science to it than that.”

Like the family meals, the daily staff meeting before dinner service is a glue for these restaurants. Bell’s is called “The Lineup,” during which Daisy explains the menu — it’s the last night for rabbit, push the tomatoes on everything, in brodo is her favorite way to eat pasta, and has everyone seen a passionfruit before? — and runs down the farms being used. Everyone takes notes as each reservation is detailed — who they are, why they’re coming, whether they have preferences or allergies.

I was surprised every guest got such attention. “People don’t just come to this restaurant,” said Greg, sitting next to me. “We’re a town of 1,000 people. We have to assume that people are coming here for a reason, and we have to meet them at that.”

Tejeda is asked about his recent experience eating out in Santa Monica, and explains what was similar and different than Bell’s. “I walked away very proud of the way we do things here,” he confirmed.

“Go out and enjoy yourself, and try to find out why you’re enjoying yourself,” Greg encouraged the rest of the staff. “Get outside your orbit.”

With that, they yell, “Bon service!” and the evening begins. I dined alone there that night, perhaps the best meal of a very indulgent year, then hung out with some wine industry folks — there’s always at least one winemaker poking around Bell’s — before sitting at the bar to watch it all wind down. The music had shifted from faster techno to deeper bass lines and, amid the clanging and constant dishwashing of the kitchen, Daisy calmly tweezed flower petals to garnish the last plates.

It reminded me of what Greg told me earlier, that someone had once told Daisy, “You have a great concept here.” She replied, “This is my life.”

The next afternoon at Loquita, the family meal of spaghetti and smashed cucumbers is followed by what they call the “Pre-Shift” meeting. About 15 servers are listening to GM Shani Pelletier go over guests with birthdays and allergies and, in one case, an allergy on a birthday. As the sommelier explains the new sherry, one server excitedly chimes in with some extra intel. “That’s a dream interaction,” said Villanueva of such engagement. Another is applauded for passing her training, having come to Loquita from The Lark solely to learn more. “That happens a lot,” said Villanueva.

I’m late for the family meal at The Lark, but the liquid cheese is still warm on top of the pork-jalapeño nachos as their Pre-Shift begins. They talk about fixing the recent spotted glassware problem (“but keep an eye out!”) and run down the guest list. “It’s an elopement” on one table, said the manager Joakim Eriksson. “How do we make that special?”

Chef Paluska challenges the servers to explain various flavor profiles, almost like a rehearsal for inquisitive diners. “Our stone fruit season is coming to a bitter end,” he said. “But we’re celebrating bluefin tuna season! Get your tables excited about it when they walk in the door.” He asks one server to describe the way fisher Travis Meyer kills his catch with the ikejime technique. “It’s like giving the fish a neural massage,” replies the studious server. 

Dinner Rush 

Though Bar Le Côte’s family meal looked the tastiest — spicy beef with mint on rice — I’m too full from Na Na Thai to indulge. But I don’t hesitate when Chef Brad Matthews, who co-owns the Spanish-influenced seafood tavern in Los Olivos with Companion, hands me a freshly cut slice of yellowtail in the kitchen.

He butchered 10 of them that morning, using the collar for a pork-like roasted dish, the belly for crudo, and the skin for chips that he serves with caviar and crème fraîche. “I love having three versions of the same fish,” said Matthews, the son of a butcher from upstate New York who spent 15 years cooking in L.A. before heading north. “They’re all killer, sexy dishes.”

That night, as servers and cooks are flushing in and out of the kitchen yelling “Behind!”, “Corner!”, and “Hands!”, Matthews stands in front like a conductor, yelling out orders — “Lettuce, sturgeon, yellowtail!” — that the entire kitchen staff repeats in unison. It’s like the military, and everyone is focused as if in battle, but the mood is supportive and the flow is butter-smooth.

“Nice pace, guys, nice pace!” says Matthews, who tells me later that he involves his staff in developing new menu items and is taking one cook down for a pop-up next week. “These kids are always watching,” he said of trying to be a role model. “How do we keep them interested?”

Matthews never regrets leaving the big-city restaurant hustle, cherishing the direct relationship he has with fishers and farmers, something other chefs envy. “It’s this experience of looking at the world around you and seeing how lucky we are to be right here,” he said. “We’re doing this because this is the way it’s supposed to be done. My friends come up here and say, ‘This is real.’ ”

Down at The Lark, GM Piero Zelli explains the dinner-rush flow to me; it involves 10 servers, four bussers, three hosts, three bartenders, and three food runners, to say nothing of the many cooks and dishwashers in the kitchen. (Dishwashing could be its own story.) The hot cocktail of the evening is a bourbon-fennel blackberry mashup that was co-developed by the bar and kitchen teams together. 

Inside the kitchen, one dish was already too popular. “Eighty-six the tuna toast!” hollers Paluska, while looking like a tennis referee, his head bouncing from side to side as he stands erect in the middle of the stations. He started working for The Lark when it opened, on his 31st birthday — April 3, 2013 — and has developed a menu of staples with seasonal shifts. 

“I try to find things that work, and I have to consider the volume as well,” he said before serving me a perplexingly delicious bluefin atop corn risotto, my favorite dish of the year, eaten while standing in the kitchen alongside that cocktail. “We have to create a system that works to keep consistency.”

That matters, because there is no way to predict what will happen on any given Sunday. “We don’t know if it’s going to be a ribeye night or a chicken night or a tuna night or a pasta night,” said Paluska. “The law of averages is out the window for dinner service.”

His team of 10 cooks are responsible for ordering what they need at the end of each night alongside an extensive list of closing duties that are pasted to the wall. “This weeds people out,” said Paluska. “This attracts people who have high standards.”

One problematic employee can severely rock a restaurant boat, so each group is careful in their hiring, intense in their training, and demanding forever. “We have a philosophy that largely helps mitigate that,” said Ristaino of the Good Lion. “The philosophy is to hire on heart and kindness and empathy before hiring on skillset or résumé. We’re able to sift through bad apples before they get hired.”

When one slips through? “You get rid of them,” said Villanueva, before polishing her sentiment a bit. “You encourage them to find a job that’s more suited to their individual talents and motivations. But in all honesty, we lose those people pretty early. This job is way too hard. That’s fine for the rest of us who are really serious about what we do. It’s important that we surround ourselves with colleagues who are all on the same mission.”

Ristaino is direct with the Good Lion team, “You’re gonna work harder for every tab here than you do at most other places,” he said. “But ultimately, it’s incredibly fulfilling to learn this craft, and it’s a skill you can take around the world now.” Added Orman, “You really can make a living. Bartending has developed in a way that people can survive and thrive and do this forever.”

Closing Time

Not everything each of these companies turns to gold. Acme has reenvisioned its bar space — originally Les Marchands, now Pearl Social — multiple times and closed its Asian street food spot Tyger Tyger due to the pandemic. Good Lion’s Venus in Furs wine cocktail concept on Cota Street didn’t make it, and Companion recently pulled out of a partnership in The Other Room. 

“It was super painful. We just couldn’t recover the financial damage,” said Villanueva of Tyger Tyger. “If it’s not working, you have to make difficult decisions that affect people and all this investment you’ve made.”

The Good Lion still stews on Venus in Furs. “It was really hard to lose that one,” said Orman, who worries about her establishments like they’re children. “I would go by myself and eat and drink. I felt really comfortable there. I miss it so much.” Ristaino puts a positive spin on it. “Ultimately, we don’t look at it as a failure,” he said. “We learned a ton and are still really proud of the wine program and the food. It might be our best cocktail work ever.”

Even more important is saying “no” when presented with opportunities that don’t pencil out. Good Lion has passed on more than 100 ideas, and Companion declines ideas 99 percent of the time.

Often, people just want them to open an existing concept in a new place. “If I had $10 for every time someone said, ‘Come to fill-in-the-blank city and open The Lark…,’ ” Villanueva said of her flagship, which is named after an overnight passenger train that ran through Santa Barbara from 1910 to 1968. “There is one Lark and it’s here, and it’s here because it makes sense here. It’s honoring the roots of something that had been here a long time. You can’t replicate that.”

It would be easier to say yes. “We make it hard on ourselves with every brand, every detail,” said Skyler Gamble of Acme. “If we had six Loquitas or a bunch of Lucky Pennys, it would be easier.”

But that’s not the point. “Maintaining that originality and that ingenuity is really important to what we do, even though we could make more money,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s just not as fun. I’m not gonna do stuff that’s not fun.”

Each group has more in the works, from Companion’s emerging vision for the Bodegas Los Alamos to Good Lion’s expansion of their Petit Soleil hotel project in San Luis Obispo. Acme is taking the biggest bites, opening a modern Spanish restaurant in Culver City and a massive revisioning of the “Bakery Block,” the entire Funk Zone block that Acme partner Brian Kelly recently purchased. 

Villanueva sees the latter project, which will repurpose rather than demolish buildings, as her “swan song,” and calls the L.A. project “my big-girl restaurant,” which is a bit scary. “It’s one thing to be a big fish in a small pond, but that is the big show,” she said, before adding confidently, “We have the team to do it.”

And they’re ready, as opening new spots is a favorite thing, at least for Gamble. “You have to have that ambition to create something that is momentous and memorable,” he said. “When you’re in the dining room and watching the staff serve the room, it becomes this whole full circle. It’s an amazing view into the wonderful world you crave. I love it.”