An American Dream Fulfilled

An American Dream Fulfilled

As Cody’s Café Celebrates 30th Anniversary,
Owner Martín Renteria Reflects on Long Road to
Taking Over One of Santa Barbara’s Favorite Diners

By Ryan P. Cruz | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
July 3, 2025

On any given morning, the smells of freshly brewed coffee, pancakes, and bacon float across the cozy dining room at Cody’s Café. A hand-painted sign with a palm tree and a pink-and-orange sunset greets customers, saying: “Cody’s Café Is My Happy Place.”

The family restaurant at Turnpike Shopping Center, which is set to celebrate its 30th anniversary in July, is the type of place that feels like home — an old-school American diner where, if you’ve been there a few times, your server knows your name and can guess your order before you even sit down. Regulars told me it’s the kind of place where, when a waiter comes to your table and asks, “How ya doing?” they actually mean it.

Full disclosure: I’m a bit biased. Over the past 15 years, Cody’s Café has become a home away from home for my family. My uncle Martín Renteria, now the owner of the restaurant, first took a job at Cody’s as waiter-manager back in 2010, following a terrifying experience where he was nearly deported to Mexico. I also worked there myself before I picked up the pen professionally, at a time in my life when I needed a new direction and my uncle gave me a spot working busy brunch services in the kitchen.

As the Fourth of July approaches, a place like Cody’s Café is a reminder that the American Dream is still out there, that it’s still possible that my uncle Martín — who came to America from Guadalajara when he was an infant — can overcome the mistakes of his youth and go on to fulfill a family dream to run a successful business here in Santa Barbara.

A Family’s Hope for the Future

My family landed in Santa Barbara County in the mid-1960s after my grandfather Alfonso Becerra Renteria joined his brother-in-law to work at Pea Soup Andersen’s in Buellton. My grandma’s brother Fernando Palomino drove across the border at Nogales with my grandmother and her two toddlers in tow: my mother, Claudia, who was 4 at the time; and my uncle Martín, who was only 1 year old. They were coming to join my grandfather and start a new life in a country where a hardworking man could make enough money to comfortably care for his young family.

My grandpa Alfonso worked at Pea Soup Andersen’s and Birkholm’s Bakery, and he fit in naturally in the service industry. Soon, my grandparents had a pair of twins, Maria and Silvia, and then another daughter, Lucy. By 1972, they had their sixth child, Alfonso Jr. (known by everybody as Poncho), and the whole Renteria family moved into a house on Rancheria Street on Santa Barbara’s Lower Westside.

The family wasn’t rich, but my aunts and uncles all remember that the home was filled with love. And hard work. My grandfather worked several jobs, and my grandma worked mornings at La Bella Rosa Bakery, but it wasn’t long before Martín, their eldest son, was asked to take on his first job.

“It was about 4th grade when my dad said, ‘You got to start working with me,’ ” Martín told me as we sat at a table in the backroom of Cody’s Café. “That’s when I first got into kitchen life.”

They worked together at a Mexican restaurant where my grandpa Alfonso tended bar and Martín, then about 11 or 12 years old, washed dishes and prepped veggies.

Kitchen life was a double-edged sword my uncle Martín had to learn to wield firsthand. He was able to develop new skills quickly, and while he fell in love with the art of cooking, he was also exposed to the other elements — drinking, smoking, and nightlife — that would pull him down a destructive path.

Even with the distractions, Martín learned that he felt at home in the kitchen. “I always worked,” he said. “I went through junior high and high school, and I always worked on the weekends or whenever they needed me.”

By the end of high school, the bosses began to notice Martín as the scrawny kid always willing to put in extra work. “I got hired at the Biltmore in the employee caféteria, and there was a chef that came over and said, ‘You do pretty good. You want to come over to the main kitchen?’ ”

He then followed Chef Kevin Sherry from the Biltmore to take a job at the Harbor Restaurant at the age of 18. It was in this kitchen that Martín truly fell in love with the culinary arts as an escape from everyday stresses. “We had a lot of fun. I just loved going to work,” he said. “I enjoyed it. I really always have ever since back then. That would be where you let everything go.”

For a while, Martín tried to live a sort of double life, working extra hours in the kitchen and going out with friends after. “My friends would be upset because, no matter what, I wouldn’t call in sick,” he said. “They had to wait ’til I got off, then we’d go out and have fun after that.”

AN OLD-SCHOOL FEEL: Cody’s Café, with its cozy dining room and menu of classic American fare, has been a Santa Barbara staple for 30 years. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

In the Weeds

During a busy service, when the dining room is packed, orders are flooding in, and the waitlist keeps growing, it’s important to have someone that can keep you from drowning. Cody’s Café staff will tell you that “Just keep swimming” is like a mantra for Martín. When you’re in the weeds, he’ll drop this phrase from Finding Nemo to remind you to take a breath and keep trudging through.

When he gave me a job there, I was at a low point and felt lost. I had moved back after dropping out of art school in San Francisco and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I worked as a dishwasher and line cook around town, but I fell into the same temptations of late nights and drugs, eventually ending up in legal trouble and desperate for a new path. I had nowhere else to turn, and my uncle Martín gave me a spot at Cody’s Café, where he gave me the guidance I needed to get back on my feet, go back to school, and pursue my own dream in journalism.

Growing up, I was too young to understand that Uncle Martín was away in prison for six years. He didn’t talk about it much, other than sharing with us the lessons that he learned, and showing us by example how he wanted to make up for the pain he caused and for the years he lost trying to get his life back on track. The first time I saw him shed tears was when he told me about the remorse he had for not being there for his two older children, my cousins Netty and Matt, when they were young and needed him most.

When he got out, he tried to rebuild by working in beer distribution and going to business school with plans to do something in an office setting. He was in his twenties with two young children, and he was trying to be the man the world said he should be.

He says that there’s a long list of people who have helped him get back on the right path. But it was my grandmother Luz — who passed away in 2024, just a year after Martín took over as the new owner of Cody’s — who played the largest role in his turnaround.

“She was a very wise woman,” he said. “She knew how to feel, and she had this abundance of power and love. Her kind words pierced more than any harsh words.”

He remembers when she brought him back home to Mexico to meet his grandmother Mariquita Palomino, a trip where he had an experience that reset the course of his life. “They both grabbed me, and we would just sit there and talk,” he said. “It was one of the most amazing times of my life. And my grandma just told me, ‘We want you to know how much you’re worth to us, and we’ll always be here.’ ”

Martín said those words worked like magic. “Those were words I had never heard,” he said. “But I accepted them and built on that.”

He was 28 at the time, and said when he came back from that trip, the urge to drink again just vanished. “I don’t know how,” he said. “I just said I’d had it. And it just wasn’t going down my throat anymore. That was it. I never picked it up again.”

Martín spent the next few years getting back in touch with himself in a way he had never tried before. “I didn’t like myself,” he said. “There was a lot of dislike, a lot of pain, a lot of unanswered questions. A lot of damage that I had done — not to myself, but to other people. So that’s when the soul-searching started coming along — but it still took a while.”

He says he’s also forever grateful to John and Jerry Shalhoob, who took a chance on him and gave him a job in the meat business. He excelled at Shalhoob’s meat company and soon was offered a job by Chef Charlie Fredericks at the newly opened fine dining restaurant bouchon in 1998. “That’s when I realized how much I missed the kitchen,” he said.

For the next decade, he worked his way back up the food chain, going from the slaughterhouse to the Harris Ranch Inn, where he ran the meat department and became a sous chef handling high-end banquets. He got another job managing the meat department at Albertsons, where he worked for five years until the mistakes of his past unexpectedly came back to hit him with another setback.

Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

Christmas in Prison

In December 2009, ICE broke down my grandma’s door at 4:30 a.m. They handcuffed Martín and took him out to a facility in Lancaster, where he was held for months while our family fought to keep him from being deported. He was 43 years old, had been sober for years, and hadn’t been in trouble with the law since his youth, but an old charge of grand theft on his record from 1987 was being used against him to revoke his legal status in the country.

After several hearings with character witnesses testifying that he deserved a chance to stay in this country, he was released from custody in 2010. He still had to fight the case for 12 years before the old charge was officially vacated and he was legally allowed to retain his residency.

“It was a difficult process for everybody,” he told me about the immigration scare. “There were many times I wanted to throw in the towel. It taught me to fight for what you want and helped me understand the fighter I had behind my back with my mom.”

He said the incident really helped him finally forgive himself and move forward from his mistakes. “I was always on the search for others to forgive me,” he said. “But having remorse, wanting to right the wrongs, and then trying to reestablish yourself — it’s hard. You become a different person.”

Once again, he had to restart, but this time, he had a support system. He leaned on his mother, who helped him get back on his feet by selling tamales out of her home kitchen. “I didn’t know what I was going to do at the time, so she and I started selling tamales,” he said. “We would do Tamale Mondays, and we would sit and hang out in the kitchen together. That’s where the kitchen connection came back in.”

By the end of 2010, he landed the job at Cody’s Café through his old connection John Shalhoob. It was the first time in his life that he was asked to work the front of house, and while he wasn’t sure what would come of it, he threw himself into the job with his usual work ethic.

He married his wife, Lorena, that same year, and together they had a son, Aaron. Martín said he leaned into his role as a father, spending more time with his now adult kids and grandsons, and legally adopting Lorena’s youngest daughter, Lexi, as his own. He says he still had to process the guilt of not being the best father in his younger years, but it brings him joy to see both his older children thrive and to see his oldest daughter, Netty, be an amazing mother to her trio of sons. 

“I made a lot of mistakes, and they’re amazing kids,” he said. “Those are the things I fight for. Sometimes you feel that you don’t deserve all of this.”

Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

This Must Be the Place

As he learned to manage his new position at Cody’s Café, Martín began to build a relationship with the owner at the time, Dave Kellams, who was an open book and gave Martín the agency to run the restaurant as if it were already his own.

“That’s when I knew I wanted to take it over,” he said. “It made things a lot easier to actually care about something like it’s yours before it became yours. Working with Dave, he was always prepared for things to happen and always stayed calm. It’s part of business: You have problems that come up every day.”

Martín’s fine-dining background, his knowledge of distribution, and his ability to organize large-scale events all came together to bring the familiar diner style of Cody’s Café to the next level. Kellams allowed Martín to experiment with the weekend menu, do a special Sunday menudo and Friday barbecue, and work with the kitchen staff to make burger patties, breads, pickles, sauces, and anything else they could in-house.

“Dave allowed me to do all that stuff,” Martín said. “And we still keep changing and evolving as we go to keep the old classic diner food that people know and love and keep it really consistent as we go along.”

Martín’s relationship with his mother continued to grow stronger, and he made a point to go on regular one-on-one dates with her, where they would share everything with each other. He began to learn about the struggles she persevered through and about her dream for the family to have a restaurant of their own where they could share that feeling of being around a big, loving table.

“Regardless of what our parents went through and how much they suffered for us to get here, knowing that I had the mother and the father that I had — they loved us,” he said. “And with my mom, in my mind, it was about finding a way to reconnect to that electricity, to the umbilical cord that gave you your life, and going back there to that source to build that connection.”

Part of the Family

The staff and customer base at Cody’s Café is like an extended family. Many of the servers, busboys, and cooks have been there for decades, and the regular customers have been coming in for just as long.

Beau Yeakel, a regular who stops by a few times a month, says the restaurant has an “old-school” feel, where you can get a hearty breakfast and it feels like the staff actually care about your experience. “It’s not easy to find a place where you can come and know your server and they know what you want,” he said while making his way through a plate of bacon, hash browns, and eggs. “It’s notable, and it’s the effort on Martín’s part that makes it seem genuine.”

Kathy Miller and Lorraine Robinson eat at Cody’s Café almost every day. Robinson’s son was one of the first babies to eat at Cody’s back when it opened in 1995, and his high school graduation dinner was also hosted at the restaurant. Miller said the restaurant has become a community gathering place for all types of events, including her late husband’s memorial service, which was held there eight years ago.

“They’re there for you no matter what,” Miller said. “It’s definitely a family community. It’s our place.”

The kitchen crew is a close-knit team of longtime employees, many from Mexico, who found a home in the L-shaped kitchen of Cody’s Café. They’re fun-loving and hardworking, with nicknames like “Primo,” “Pancho,” “Don José,” “Puma,” “Nieves,” and “Don Felipe,” and they are the true engine behind the restaurant’s success, churning out comfort food that fills the soul as much as the stomach.

The core group of front-of-house staff — server Fermín Bello, busser Raymundo Salgado, and manager Christina Visueta — have been at Cody’s Café for 20 years or more. Bello, who came to Santa Barbara from Guerrero back in 1986, says he loves making sure his customers always feel like they’re family. “When they come in, I know who they are, and they know me,” he said.

Visueta started as a hostess 22 years ago when she walked across the parking lot from Vons, where she worked previously. Now the manager, she says she’s proud to be part of the Cody’s Café community, getting to know generations of families as they come and go over the years.

She says Martín injected a bit of fun to the workplace. “He always comes in singing,” she said. “You never know when he’s having a bad day. You’ll never see it.”

Visueta said that Martín’s strengths are his ability to know where to make changes, how to motivate employees, and how to show compassion when people slip up. “He puts the players in the spots where they need to be, and he gives you confidence,” she said. “It’s been a rollercoaster, but he’s such an anchor.”

She says his story is inspiring, and his experience overcoming hard times helped the restaurant navigate the uncertain years of the pandemic. When some businesses folded, Cody’s Café adapted, surviving on takeout orders until they could reopen with additional outdoor seating that doubled the capacity of the restaurant.

Martín says it was the staff and loyal customers who kept the place open during those pandemic years. He’s grown to love the regulars, the working-class lunch-timers, and the seniors who rely on Cody’s Café for a consistent meal. “Connecting with amazing customers in the community, and getting so close to them, and sometimes seeing them pass away — we’re part of it all,” he said. “It’s a challenge, but we don’t survive without these people.”

He says his wife, Lorena, has been his rock, and that she and the kids have been his motivation. Together, they’ve made trips across the world, visiting places he’s dreamed about seeing his whole life. “To be able to share that with her and go tour some of Thomas Keller’s kitchens and eat at the best restaurants I always wanted to go to when I was younger, it’s awesome,” he said.

A Dream Come True

Martín wells up with pride when he recalls the story of telling his mother he was taking over as the owner of Cody’s Café in April 2023. He took her out to eat with some of our family and gave her the good news. 

“She jumped out of her seat,” he said. “It was one of the happiest days of all our lives.”

Grandma Luz died a year and three months after Martín took over the restaurant, but in that time before she passed, our family had some great memories celebrating birthdays and holidays together.

“I remember Grandma wanted her own business, and I always wanted my own business, and we just went after it,” he said. “She told me, ‘You did it. I’m just so glad you’re gonna be okay.’ ”

It was the fulfillment of a family’s dream, something my grandparents wished about back when they crossed the border more than 60 years ago — that if they worked hard enough and gave their children a foundation to succeed, this family would become part of this country and this community. I think about it when I see what’s happening around us today, the families that came across the border just like mine did, torn apart and denied a chance to become part of this American Dream themselves.

Martín says he relied on the strength of my grandmother and that he’s grateful to be able to overcome all the struggles to make their dream a reality. “I think it gave her rest,” he said. 

“I couldn’t have done it without her,” he continued. “To always know that you could face the criticisms and to always know that she was there praying for you. Sometimes it’s hard to live with. There were days I didn’t want to move forward anymore. And I realized where I got that strength from, and that was from her, because she fought for all of us. She fought for all of us, and she was a living example of what fighting for yourself was.”

He says he’s humbled to take over a restaurant that’s such an important piece to the community, and he strives to build on the legacy created by the original ownership. “This place is an amazing place,” Martín said. “I enjoyed the fine dining, the catering, and all that stuff. But I love these customers like no other. To carry it on for what they started in 1995 and keep the place open for the community is an honor. Sitting here today from sitting in the jail cell years ago, it’s a long journey.”