Full Belly Files | Catching Up on My Memorable Meals

Beet salad and charred avocado at Convivo; home-cooked honey-soy salmon | Credit: Matt Kettmann

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on July 7, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

As I’ve been filling this year’s newsletters with stories about old vines getting official, golfing in Oregon, America’s indigenous grapes, artificial intelligence, the evolution of natural wines, and trips to the backroads of San Benito and culinary hotspots of Colorado, you’ve missed a lot of my everyday eating and drinking adventures around Santa Barbara County. So let’s take a trip through my most memorable recent meals in this week’s Full Belly Files.

As usual, some of these will be longer stories down the road, but many are just glimpses into the bites and bottles that were. I’ll write a more vineyard visit-focused roundup soon, which just didn’t fit here.

Linden Hall’s mango granita with sweet corn mousse and sugar snap peas in gribiche | Credit: Matt Kettmann

Linden Hall Speak Peek: This is not organized in any chronological order, but I will start with one of my most recent meals, because it was a total surprise. As I walked up to Satellite SB last Thursday for lunch with Wynne Sargeant, the winemaker at Peake Ranch (formerly Solomon — she just got married!), it didn’t look like it was open.

When I poked my head inside, proprietor Drew Cuddy recognized me and said, “Are you here for the lunch?” I was only wondering about lunch in general, but quickly learned that I’d walked into a five-course, omakase-style vegetarian test menu of sorts for Linden Hall, the Carpinteria restaurant-to-be from the Revolver Pizza squad.

Wynne and I obliged, smiling at our dumb luck as Chef Will Moon presented dishes that Cuddy paired with obscure-yet-fascinating wines: heirloom carrot and wheat berry salad in brown butter vinaigrette with a Bonnigal-Bodet Loire Valley rosé of pineu d’aunis; sugar snap peas in sauce gribiche, date, and breadcrumb with Spanish palomino from Muchada-Leclapart in Jerez; trumpet mushroom in a mushroom XO sauce alongside sansho yogurt with an Austrian furmint by Wenzel; butter bean atop onion soubise with a Cucamonga Valley palomino by Scar of the Sea; and, for dessert, a mango granita surrounding a sweet corn mousse atop pops of mochi with a Bordiga “Excelsior” vermouth from Piemonte, Italy.

Linden Hall won’t be a vegetarian restaurant — other popup test meals featured duck, crab. And beef tartare — but you can bet a few of these dishes will make their way to the big show. The crunchy-topped sugar snaps were especially tantalizing, and the sweet corn mousse could be an ice cream shop all its own. And I’m still looking for another bottle of that Wenzel furmint, the zippiest wine I’ve had in a while.