The Ellwood, coming to 905 Sandspit Road in Goleta, the former home of Beachside Bar-Café, will undoubtedly be the South Coast’s biggest restaurant opening in 2025. Late January is the current target date. Today The Restaurant Guy sat down with General Manager and Sommelier level 3, Antonio Gerli.

TRG: People are very excited about The Ellwood. I get emails from readers all the time about it.

Gerli: It’s been three years that people have been waiting for this restaurant, so I’m going to assume we are going to be busy.

TRG: What can you tell me about wine at The Ellwood?

Gerli: I’m a Sommelier level 3. Chris, the director of operations, is a Sommelier level 2 and my assistant General Manager, Lauren, she is a Sommelier level 2. So we study really deep in the wine list. We’re going to have a great BTG program, wine by the glass. We are going to have close to 20 wines by the glass. We are trying to cover all the possibilities, all the needs of our customers with the pairing with our food. When I worked at the Bacara as the lead Sommelier at Angel Oak, we didn’t have 20 wines by the glass. I think we had 12. So, this is a huge wine program. Regarding the wine by the bottle, we are focusing on the local ones because we have great wineries and great wine from Santa Barbara County. Plus we will have Italian wine and French wine. The program for wine is going to be intense so I have prepared all the materials for the servers to study, with a matrix for pairing and descriptions of the food.

TRG: How is hiring coming along?

Gerli: We started training. We already hired 60 employees for the front of the house for dinner, we need just 60, but for lunch, we’re going to hire another 40, so we’re going to get to 100 people. It’s going to be a big operation We had two job fairs and had a bunch of people that came during that period and it was was good. It was good. And to be honest, I’m also happy about this staff. It’s not easy to find qualified people. It’s a nightmare. But we have been lucky. We hired some people from UCSB, so it’s close, it was easy, and we have hired professionals from other restaurants that they came here. I’m really happy. We are still hiring. People can visit our website theellwood.com to apply to work here or just show up here between 9 a.m. and 3-4 p.m.

TRG: When should I tell people The Ellwood will be opening?

Gerli: It’s hard to give you a date because they’re rarely right. I think that a good estimate is the third week of January, but again, it’s better to be general.