This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on September 8, 2023. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
The first time that I knew I was eating Jeff Olsson’s food was almost 20 years ago, when he served smoked-boar-and-roasted-pumpkin soup in the candlelit chapel of Mission La Purisima during a dinner to honor vintner Richard Sanford. I’ve written about that evening a couple of times, both in a 2012 piece about Sanford’s legacy and in a 2014 feature about the opening of Industrial Eats, which was the brick-and-mortar evolution of New West Catering, which Jeff had purchased in 2000 with his wife, Janet Olsson. In that latter story, I wrote that they were ”the best chefs for any event in Santa Barbara wine country … able to seamlessly blend boundary-pushing culinary creativity with the rustic, homegrown charms of the Santa Ynez Valley.”
As you may have heard by now, Jeff died on Saturday morning at just 55 years old, succumbing to an aggressive colon cancer that was just diagnosed in December. The outpouring of social media tributes that followed the news more than uphold my decade-old description of Jeff — I could have eaten his expertly balanced white shrimp with pancetta or his garlicky Caesar salad, with thick-as-glue dressing, every single day, and he even made pig brain taste good, as I learned during one of Buttonwood’s All-Farm Dinners years ago. But the heartfelt words from his friends and colleagues are even further revealing about how integral Jeff was to the rise of culinary culture in Santa Barbara County.