Vicious Novel Goes Viral in the Santa Ynez Valley

The Pretentious Boar & Ale House was just a lonely account on Instagram until President Joe Biden showed up in the Santa Ynez Valley last summer. When The Boar announced that the Bidens would be eating at their mysterious restaurant, the post went viral, attracting attention from across the country, triggering MAGA types to plot a protest, and even being reported (and then retracted) by the real media. Many people, including myself, scrambled to figure out where this place was, who was behind it, and why we hadn’t heard about it yet.

The Biden dinner was, of course, real fake news. But the IG account lives on, posting recipes for porky dishes, selling hats, and dropping anecdotes about other restaurants, chefs, and Adopt-a-Highway signs. As we became reserved to the idea that this was some sort of joke, the mystery persisted, leaving questions as to the point of such a charade and whether we’d ever get to try one of these dishes. I even got direct messages from the restaurant in recent weeks, urging me to stop by.

Spoiler alert: I solved the mystery, or rather, it was solved for me, when I arrived at the office one day to find a Pretentious Boar hat atop a copy of You Ate It, a novel written by Solvang resident Jamie Baker. I met Baker when writing about his virtual reality arcade back in 2018, so I’d seen his many posts about his work on the novel (and his recent fight against cancer) on Facebook.

With a brief flip through the pages, I quickly confirmed that The Pretentious Boar & Ale House is a fictional restaurant at the center of You Ate It. Based in the Santa Ynez Valley, the novel is a rather brutal ride with a cast of emotionally wrought characters through a barrage of heart-wrenching episodes, touching on the hot-button issues of today, from school shootings, drug overdoses, and the transgendered experience to legal cannabis, foodie culture, and music festivals.

“I’ve been gooning the Valley for two years now,” said Baker over lunch recently, running down the list of Pretentious Boar hoax responses, from someone calling the health department and wineries trying to get on the menu to self-important people trying to get reservations and would-be workers submitting résumés. He never planned to start an account until after the book came out, but then the publishing process stalled and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “So, I pushed the IG out and it gave me the narcissistic attention that I needed,” said Baker. “It made me laugh a little bit.”

The official big reveal will be on May 25 when Baker hosts a book release party in Los Alamos at Full of Life Flatbread. Albeit it being a real place, Flatbread is another central setting for the novel, and its owners, Clark Staub and Jill Davie, show up on the pages of You Ate It. In fact, while some sport fictional names, many Santa Ynez Valley residents — or at least their archetypes — show up in the book, from celebs like Pink and Jackson Browne to gun-loving Visitadores like the made-up Buck Lamstone. 

That combination of fact and fiction runs throughout the novel, which speaks to its greater theme. “The book is about gullibility,” said Baker. “It’s about a person who thinks he can provide safety and security so that people’s hearts don’t get hurt, that their bodies don’t get hurt. But all that happens in the book is that hearts are breaking. Eventually, chaos is gonna find its way, and you have to be ready for it.”

Though the book itself is quite troubling in plot and occasionally vicious in its lambasting of the people and places of Santa Barbara County, You Ate It proved to be very cathartic for Baker, a former playwright who left that creative career more than two decades ago for more stable jobs while raising his three children. “I kept calling myself a writer, but I hadn’t written anything in 20 years,” said Baker. “I fell back in love with writing with this book. It just kept writing itself and kept moving and kept taking on these really kind of magical elements.”

He’s already written a sequel and is nearly done with the third and final book of the series, though he’s waiting to gauge reaction and sales from You Ate It before the follow-ups are released. 

The May 25 release party at Full of Life Flatbread brings the book and its fake restaurant back home, in a way. While writing the book — at a clip of 2,000 words a day, in order to get a 120,000-word first draft in just three months — Baker would reward himself with a dinner at Flatbread every Sunday night. “Flatbread is my favorite restaurant,” said the Pretentious Boar’s creator. “Clark tells as many stories as I do, but he does it through food.”
Jamie Baker will release You Ate It on May 25 at Full of Life Flatbread in Los Alamos. See instagram.com/thepretentiousboar or visit bit.ly/44Chz17 to buy the book.