Best New Restaurants 2015: #19, Montecito

By Mark Pupo | Photography by Dave Gillespie

The movie director Ivan Reitman owns a condo in the Festival Tower and wanted somewhere nice to eat, so he flew up his favourite chef, the venerable New York farm-to-table guy Jonathan Waxman, and pulled back the curtain on a two-storey, 280-seat restaurant named after his Californian home. The place is a lot like Reitman’s movies—flashy, goofy and shamelessly crowd-pleasing. The menu includes Waxman’s famous roast chicken with a caper salsa verde, possibly the finest cluck in town, and daily fresh pastas in simple but perfect sauces, sometimes no more than a slick of butter and a handful of parmesan. For dessert there’s even a riposte to Ghostbusters’ city-stomping terror: a baked Alaska under a drift of charred marshmallow.