Café Mare, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
I hate restaurant reviews that breathlessly announce that Restaurant Whatever is a “hidden gem.” Basically, this is a humble brag, demonstrating that the reviewer knows more than you do, is…
Santa Cruz
Pacific Thai, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
Pacific Avenue is Santa Cruz’s main street. It’s a fascinating place to go for a walk – there is a lot of street theatre, both deliberate and accidental, and always…
Tortilla Flats (Soquel) – Restaurant Review
In Mexico, one of the big holidays is the Day of the Dead, or in Spanish, Dia de Muertos. It’s a three-day holiday during which people remember and pray for…
Michael’s on Main, Soquel – Restaurant Review
I liked this place a lot – it’s sort of the Goldilocks of restaurants in this area. It’s not too big and not too small. It’s sort of tucked away…
Café Gratitude, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
I have always been kind of uncomfortable with the while concept of obligatory gratitude. All the treacly demands that I practice daily gratitude, that it’s some kind of moral obligation,…
Pearl of the Ocean, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
After you’ve done it enough, reviewing restaurants becomes, unsurprisingly, a little predictable. Preparing and serving food is, after all, a business. There are best practices, like in every business, and…
Ideal Bar and Grill, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
Santa Cruz is a town with a split identity. Wow, that sounds like the beginning of a detective novel, doesn’t it? One personality is Beach. Sun, sand, surfing, families, Monterey…
Center Street Grill, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
One of the things I find profoundly irritating about restaurants is the unfortunately common practice of Trying Too Hard. This entails dressing up what ought to be straight-ahead dishes with…
Hollins House, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
This place is a hidden gem, and an unbelievably romantic throwback to a whole other era in the history of the Bay Area. A little background: Santa Cruz is overwhelmingly…
Lago di Como, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
Lago di Como is an odd place. The food isn’t bad, and everyone’s friendly and everything, but you get the impression when you go there that they’re just kind of…
Palapas, Aptos – Restaurant Review
Palapas may be the best Mexican restaurant in the Santa Cruz area. The food is terrific, the atmosphere is lively, fun and smart, and the staff is great. Here’s…
Aquarius, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
Santa Cruz is an unusual town. It has an amazing, and slightly unreal list of world-class things to do and see – the Boardwalk, Big Basin, Monterey Bay, surfing. But…
Kabul Palace, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
This was a very, very good meal. A few completely random thoughts: Afghanistan has basically been at war for the past three decades. The life expectancy there is 45 years.…
The Crow’s Nest, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
If you walk down the breakwater in Santa Cruz towards the lighthouse on a summer night, you often can look across the harbor and see an enormous party going on…
West End Tap & Kitchen, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
As John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island.” First of all, what other restaurant review have you read, ever, that quotes John Donne? Second, no restaurant, apparently, is…
Caruso’s, Capitola – Restaurant Review
Caruso’s is, if not the very best Italian restaurant in the Santa Cruz area, damn close. It and La Casa Nostra are neck-and-neck, although they’re as different as two places…
Assembly, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
Assembly is the new “it” girl of Santa Cruz restaurants. Located in the former Aqua Bleu, Assembly has been packed since the night it opened. The day we reviewed it,…
La Posta, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
We tried out La Posta on Oscar night, 2014. Maybe, as Patrick O’Brian put it in one of his novels, I’m turning into a cantankerous old dog rather than being…
The Tyrolean Inn, Ben Lomond
This place is fantastic. No beating around the bush – it is just plain great. I never really had any idea what German food was, or could be, so maybe…
Hula’s Island Grill, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
Santa Cruz is one of America’s capitals of surfing. According to history, three Hawaiian princes who were in town to attend a military academy had crude wooden boards milled…
Malabar, Santa Cruz
In a little spasm of curiosity, I googled the word “Malabar” before beginning to write this. Turns out, “Malabar” is a Spanish word that means “juggling.” Which is appropriate. This…
The Red Pearl, Boulder Creek – Restaurant Review
The Red Pearl is a dump. For ambience, it is easily the worst place I’ve reviewed in the Santa Cruz area. It’s cold, not especially clean, and decorated like an…
Oswald, Santa Cruz
Oswald is a great little place, with exceptional food, but interestingly, it’s located in a seriously unglamorous part of Santa Cruz. It’s kind of a food fortress – there is…
Suda, Santa Cruz
Suda is a great, big, huge, giant surprise. It looks like it’s going to be sort of run-of-the-mill. The restaurant is one big concrete box, with some arty touches for…
Bittersweet Bistro, Aptos
An initial word of caution, please, or a recommendation for a grain of salt. When I went to Bittersweet, I was sick. I mean, really sick. Like, people sitting nearby…
Booka Restaurant and Bar
In many, many ways, I am a complete sucker for a pretty face. For obvious reasons, this has gotten me into real trouble on more than one occasion. However, at…
Café Sparrow, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
The Stranger: Beer… and a bottle. Lutie Naylor: Ain’t much good, but it’s all there is. [brings drinks] Lutie Naylor: You want anything else? The Stranger: Just a peaceful hour…
Café Rio, Aptos
This place wasn’t actually bad. I have had bad. I know bad. Sometimes it makes you physically sick, or sometimes it makes the entire act of eating seem sort of…
Bantam, Santa Cruz
They always mess up the coffee. Every restaurant I have ever eaten in, that I can remember, always serves mediocre coffee at the end of the meal. It’s either watery,…
Santa Cruz Restaurants Reviews
[easy2map id=”25″] (Click on the map icons to know the Address, Contact No. & Rating of a Restaurant.) Santa Cruz has established itself as a beach resort community. It is…
Bella Roma, Capitola – Restaurant Review
Capitola is a little seaside resort town that’s kind of an extension of Santa Cruz. Downtown Capitola, such as it is, is wedged into a tiny little spit of land…
Oyunaa’s, Santa Cruz | Restaurant Review
I sat and did a little sobering math before writing this review. If you multiply the number of meals per day (3) by the number of years I’ve been eating…
I Love Sushi, Santa Cruz
I Love Sushi is fun. There’s really no other way to describe it. When you think of Japanese culture, at least as an American, you think of seriousness. Tea ceremonies.…
The Point Chophouse, Santa Cruz
There are steak places in every major American city where the whole point seems to be excess. The steaks are wonderful, but they’re incredibly expensive. The side dishes are all…
Yolo, Santa Cruz
I am a huge fan of the remade Ocean’s Eleven series of movies. In the third one, Ocean’s Thirteen, a man goes into a restaurant in a fancy Las Vegas…
El Palomar Restaurant, Santa Cruz
Something that not a lot of people realize (there’s got to be a more elegant way to phrase that) is that California and Mexico have been, for hundreds of…
Chocolate Restaurant
I have this personal preference for food that, for want of a better term, tastes like something. I like strong flavors. I like unusual ingredients – sometimes I will go…
Gabriella Cafe, Santa Cruz
Gabriella Cafe is a funky, classic little French bistro located in downtown Santa Cruz. The décor is eclectic – the tables don’t all match, the interior is a series of…
Solaire Restaurant & Bar
Not that long ago, what is now the Paradox Hotel, in Santa Cruz, was, to put it sort of gently, a dump called the University Inn and Conference Center. Described…
Shadowbrook, Capitola
Dinner at Shadowbrook, in Capitola, is not an undertaking to be, uh, undertaken lightly. It’s a big deal – expensive, sprawling, and really, really good. It is going to take…
Louie’s Cajun Kitchen & Bourbon Bar, Santa Cruz
I have to admit, the entire mystique built up around New Orleans leaves me a little cold. I’ve seen The Big Easy, I’ve eaten at some Cajun restaurants, but ultimately…
Lillian’s Italian Kitchen, Santa Cruz – Restaurant Review
I spent the first part of my adult life living in South Philadelphia. South Philly is a somewhat rundown part of the city that once was solidly – like, completely…
Soif Wine Bar & Restaurant
This part is easy. As far as I can tell, Soif is the best restaurant in Santa Cruz. I may be wrong – there may be others I haven’t discovered…
Johnny’s Harborside Restaurant
The Santa Cruz Harbor is home to several hundred boats – everything from stand-up paddleboats to the Chardonnay to every kind of boat in between. Particularly in the summer, it’s…
Cafe Cruz Rosticceria & Bar
One of the fascinating things about review restaurants is that along with being a place to eat, a restaurant is also a business. It has a number of different moving…
Paradise Beach Grille
I hardly know where to begin to review the Paradise Beach Grille, in Capitola. To say that it was bad is an understatement. It was bad in a way that’s…
Laili Restaurant
There is a lot – I mean, a LOT – of mediocre Middle Eastern food out there. Here’s your hummus, here’s you falafel, here’s your pita, thanks a lot, pal.…
Cafe El Palomar
There’s a certain mystique attached to the California beach restaurant. A lot of the myth about California is attached to the beach scene, and places right on the water almost…
Stagnaro’s – A Santa Cruz Classic
Stagnaro’s is a Santa Cruz classic. It’s been in operation since 1947, and is still run by the original family. It’s right on the Municipal Wharf, and in good weather,…
Akira, Santa Cruz – A Review
Akira is not the place to go in Santa Cruz if you are either a) in a hurry; or b) hard of hearing. Otherwise, it’s fine. The restaurant is located…
515 Kitchen and Cocktails
I increasingly have a real problem with restaurants that are not, at the end of the day, comfortable. When I go out to eat somewhere, I am not interested in…
The Crepe Place – Santa Cruz
Soquel Avenue in Santa Cruz is a busy, relatively unglamorous commercial part of town. Tire repair shops. A supermarket. A dance studio. And lots of busy traffic. The Crepe Place…
Cueva de las Manos, Argentina
Deep within the silent valley of Pinturas River of Argentine Patagonia lies Cueva de las Manos or Cave of the Hands. This cave is a unique testimony to the culture…
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Read More