Full Belly Files | My Year in Writing Review

This edition of Full Belly Files was originally emailed to subscribers on January 5, 2024. To receive Matt Kettmann’s food newsletter in your inbox each Friday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Here we are at the end of another year, called to reflect on the 12 months that were.

The dawn of 2023 marked a significant shift in my role at the Santa Barbara Independent, where I started my journalism career as an intern in the spring of 1999. By that fall, I was getting paid $7 an hour as a proofreader and earning an additional 10 cents per word for writing all sorts of articles.

I then spent about five years as a news reporter before becoming the paper’s pop culture editor in early 2005. The next fall, I took a job as senior editor in order to, among other duties, build the editorial face and function of Independent.com. And there I remained in various management roles for the next 16 years, simultaneously building a freelance career on the side.

Helping to run a newspaper, or much of anything, during the pandemic proved quite taxing, especially when the societal impacts of COVID lasted far longer than most of us expected. By the summer of 2022, I was ready to stop being a boss. Thanks to the shifting interests and roles of colleagues, that happened at the start of 2023, when I went back to just being a writer, which was the original point of my whole career anyway.

As readers of this newsletter know, that job involves filing one of these Full Belly Files pretty much every Friday of the year. On top of that, I usually write another article or two per week, and am in charge of either writing or rounding up a cover story roughly once a month.

All told, as of this week, my byline was atop about 130 articles on Independent.com, all of which you can peruse at independent.com/kettmann. That’s right in line with the same number published in both 2022 and 2021, and doesn’t include the 200 to 300 wine reviews and feature or two that I write every month for Wine Enthusiast magazine, among some other freelance projects.

All said, while I was able to ditch some of the pesky management duties, I was still stupidly busy in 2023, without much room to breathe amid the endless line of deadlines. It was certainly a relief not to have to deal with editing anyone else for the first time since 2005, but it wasn’t exactly the free-as-a-bird dreams I envisioned would come with going back to just being a writer.

The benefit of not getting off the word treadmill is that I tend to have plenty of stories to be proud of by the time the year ends — if not that memoir or novel that I imagined myself pursuing. As usual, my favorite articles tend to be the ones I spend the most time on, namely those longer-form pieces that we run as cover stories.

In that regard, I bookended the year by writing about the dreams for Dos Pueblos Ranch on the Gaviota Coast in January and the ambitious project to commercially farm the native blue elderberry in December. I profiled rancher/author/TV star Elizabeth Poett in September — a tricky challenge, being that her mom owns the paper! — and penned this piece about the diversity of wine grapes in Santa Barbara County in April.

That latter piece was the nutritional core of our first-ever Santa Barbara Wine Week, one of the many special promotional collaborations we do each year. The others are Burger Week and Burrito Week, both of which have avid followings, and I also helped wrangle some content for Indy Hops, a month-long beer celebration.

Sticking with wine, I broke the story about the demise of the underwater-wine-aging Ocean Fathoms project, which got significant national attention a couple weeks later. Not long after that, I wrote about tasting underwater wine that was actually legally permitted as one of my newsletters. I was relieved to finally write about The Wild King Vineyard, since I’d been reporting on it for nearly two years, and curious to learn about the purchase of and hospitality plans for Buttonwood Farm & Winery.

I digitally attended panels on officially registering old vines and the wonders of indigenous American grapes and physically attended the Natural Coast Wine Festival. I reported on the possibility of a wine bar turning Guadalupe into the next Los Alamos, told the story of the adventurous couple behind Outward Wines, learned about the mother-son relationship that powers Terre et Sang in Los Olivos, and touched on the nonalcoholic adult beverage trend by writing about the Santa Barbara–based company Tilden.

On the restaurant front, I was excited to spread the word about Na Na Thai in Buellton, L’antica Pizzeria da Michelle on State Street, and the 10-year anniversary of The Lark in the Funk Zone. I met the folks who opened We Want the Funk in the Funk Zone; Chef Brad Wise, the brains behind Rare Society; and Lou and Louise Fontana of Oat Bakery, which spread to Goleta. Speaking of Goleta, I featured The Steward and Chef Augusto Caudillo and dove a bit deeper into the Good Land’s history by reporting on efforts to protect and restore the Main-Begg House.

We lost a few important food and drink players in 2023, including Jeff Olsson of Industrial Eats, Sanford & Benedict Vineyard cofounder Michael Benedict, longtime Moroccan cuisine star Chef Karim, and vineyard manager John Belfy.

I traveled quite a lot this year for a mix of fun, business, and family obligations. My trips included weddings in St. Augustine, Florida, and Denver/Estes Park and Crested Butte in Colorado. We had fun with the kids in New Orleans and Kauai/Maui, visiting the latter island as wildfires still smoldered.

Wine trips included S.L.O. County, Santa Cruz, San Benito, and Livermore, while my annual KIA dudes trip found its way to the kitchens and forests of Asheville, North Carolina in October. We finally celebrated my brother’s 40th birthday, three years pandemic-delayed, at Bandon Dunes in Oregon, had a quick holiday trip down to the Mandalay Bay resort in Oxnard, and will certainly remember sitting front row for a P!nk concert in L.A.  

Out of all these yarns, I tend to get the most satisfaction from the ones that relay meaningful parts of my personal life. There was my story about coaching soccer as a young parent, titled “I’m Not Santa Barbara’s Ted Lasso,” my humorous experience starring as myself in a television pilot, and a story about the lead-up and follow-through for my first colonoscopy. (Sorry, fans of fettuccine alfredo.) I asked AI to write parts of my column one week, and was pretty stoked to learn that Full Belly Files was named the best weekly newspaper newsletter in the state by the CNPA.

All in all, a year well spent. Cheers to 2023, and here’s to keeping your bellies full in 2024!