Welcome to Lily Belli on Food, a weekly food-focused newsletter from Lookout’s food and drink correspondent, Lily Belli. Keep reading for the latest local food news for Santa Cruz County – plus a few fun odds and ends from my own life and around the web.
… Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the Sunday Tasting Pavilion at Pebble Beach Food & Wine. The tasting concourse was the final event of the four-day festival, which stretched from Thursday through Sunday at the luxurious Pebble Beach Resort just south of Monterey. The preceding days were packed with more than 40 seminars, lectures, lunches, dinners and other more intimate experiences ranging from around $250 to over $600 a seat. The tasting pavilions on Saturday and Sunday afternoons were the largest and most diverse events, with different lineups on each day.
The pavilion is massive, with two huge tents filled with more tiny plates of food than any one person could possibly eat in a day – trust me, I gave it the old college try – and enough wine to drown a sommelier. After two hours, my head was spinning, and not just from all the Napa cabernet sauvignon and Aperol spritzes (not together, although my mind was opened to some unusual combinations).
I would go back again next year in a slow, artery-clogged heartbeat, but I’d do a few things differently next time to get the most out of it. Here’s my recap of the event, plus five things to know before you go.
… When chef Donnie Suesens created the menu for Food Talk, his restaurant at Ulterior, the speakeasy space on the second floor of Motiv on Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz, he wanted the food to be fun. In the swanky upstairs lounge, Suesans draws from childhood nostalgia to create dishes inspired by his grandmother’s holiday clam dip and Friday night trips to Taco Bell, and makes playful versions of traditional pub snacks.
His menu is lighthearted, but Suesens is serious when it comes to sourcing local ingredients. He shops at the downtown farmers market weekly, and purchases all of his meat and eggs from a small farmer in Corralitos.
This concept is a pivot from his previous restaurant career. Before Suesens took up residence at Ulterior last August, he was the chef and owner of Café Sparrow in Aptos from 2021 until its closure in April 2024, and had worked at the longstanding French restaurant for 11 years. Check out the full story on Food Talk here.
… President Donald Trump insists that his sweeping tariffs will ultimately bolster the U.S. economy, but three Santa Cruz-area winery owners told me that they will do far more harm than good in the wine industry.
The idea that these tariffs will support domestic wineries and increase national demand for American wines is false, Richard Alfaro, owner of Alfaro Family Vineyards & Winery in Watsonville, told me: “Absolutely not. It will just wreck the industry in general.”
Alfaro and other winery owners argued that the tariffs will hurt smaller businesses and fail to boost domestic wine sales, further exacerbating the industry’s already dire struggles. Read the story here.
ON THE MENU
The Pacific Fishery Management Council, a regulatory body that makes decisions about West Coast fisheries, met this week in San Jose to discuss management efforts for salmon, and make decisions about the 2025 salmon fishing season in California. The decision will likely be made public sometime this week. Both the commercial and recreational salmon seasons were canceled in 2024 and 2023, creating challenges for Monterey Bay fishers who rely on the lucrative fish as a core part of their annual income.
EVENT SPOTLIGHT
This Saturday evening, the DIYine Homebrewing Festival returns after a five-year pandemic hiatus. At this homebrew tasting event at the Veterans Memorial Building in Santa Cruz, amateur fermentation enthusiasts share their kombucha, beer, fruit wines, soda, mead and any other creative combinations they can dream up. A $35 ticket comes with a punch card for 10 tastings, access to a charcuterie snack board and live music.
LIFE WITH THE BELLIS
Attending Pebble Beach Food & Wine was such a delightful, overwhelming experience. I had so many delicious bites and tasty pours of wines and cocktails that it many ways it all feels like a blur, but a few things stand out: the pulled pork sandwich with chicharrones and a kicky pepper sauce made by barbecue great Rodney Scott; discovering the Tanqueray martini bar mixing up miniature drinks alongside black truffle french fries; and being given a wagyu beef handroll by a smiling chef. Needless to say, I hope I get invited back next year.
FOOD NEWS WORTH READING
➤ Urged by more health-conscious consumers, snack makers are working to remove artificial dyes from their products. Tens of thousands of packaged foods contain synthetic colors that add nothing to taste, nutritional value or shelf life, but can make unhealthy foods more visually appealing – or communicate that a chip is spicy by dying it bright red. The process could take years. (Bloomberg)
➤ High-end Erewhon grocery store – known for its $20 strawberries and $30 smoothies – temporarily closed its Santa Monica location last week after finding cockroaches in the coffee and juice bar area. Despite the bug infestation, the luxury market’s star is rising, with three more locations set to open in Southern California this year. (Los Angeles Times)
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