Dom’s Taverna Connects Santa Barbara to San Sebastián

San Sebastián bears a striking resemblance to Santa Barbara. The seaside Basque-Spanish city is casual yet cool, sophisticated in style while welcoming in vibe, and full of residents who prioritize good food, good drink, and living the good life over everything else. I recognized that on my first visit nearly 20 years ago, and it’s only reinforced each time I return, further amplified by friends who visit and think similar things. 

Cue our collective intrigue earlier this year when we learned that a Basque restaurant called Dom’s Taverna would soon open on East Victoria Street in the former home of Pascual’s and Trattoria Vittoria. But as much as I longed for the pintxo party to open, I’ve seen ambitious eatery ideas go widely awry here, so I kept cautious in my excitement. 

Can modern Basque — one of the world’s most revered cuisines today — be properly done far from its homeland? Could anything replace the down-home soul of Pascual’s and Trattoria Vittoria? And would a chef who’d spent the past decade of his life cooking in the big city of Los Angeles be the right one to make this formula work in small-town Santa Barbara? 

My initial impression is a resounding yes. Not only is Dom’s Taverna just a fun and tasty place to hang out, but its threads already feel neatly sewn into the fabric of downtown Santa Barbara. Not even two months old, it’s becoming that sort of neighborhood joint where we’ll go not just once a year, but monthly, even weekly — becoming tight with the staff, ordering our favorites, finding that feeling of home away from our homes. 

Granted, I’ve only eaten there twice so far — once for a long, multicourse dinner with a friend, and once for a shorter shrimp-cocktail-with-sandwich lunch at the bar alone. But each time featured delicious bites — both classically simple and inspiringly innovative — as well as chance encounters with different friends I hadn’t seen in a while. Plus, I’ve had deep conversations with both owners, Chef Dominique “Dom” Crisp and tech-pro-turned-food-importer Raj Nallapothola, and they say very encouraging, educated, and empathetic things in refreshingly open and honest manners. 

“You can just feel it tonight — our dream is coming true,” said Nallapothola on the electric Thursday evening that I ate there, two weeks after Dom’s August 21 opening. When I talked to him last week, he was just as pumped. “It really hasn’t stopped,” said Nallapothola. “It’s amazing to see the number of repeat customers. That makes me the happiest. People are coming back.”

Paris. Portland. Provence. Pasadena.

The earliest spark of this shared dream first flickered in Wren, Oregon, where Crisp’s professor grandfather purchased a former dude ranch that his dad turned into a vineyard. With his parents divorced, Crisp split his time between the farm — which became the home estate for Lumos Wine Company — and his mom’s place in nearby Corvallis. She too was an educator but also a musician in the Balafon Marimba Ensemble. (Look ’em up — they’re fun.) 

“It was basically a bunch of white folks that built their own giant African marimba — it’s the most Corvallis thing ever,” laughed Crisp. “But Santa Barbara is kinda like that too, in the sense that people like good art and they’re not afraid to do it.”

As he got older, Crisp gravitated more and more to the farm, explaining, “It was my happy place.” He studied French at Oregon State, but college didn’t stick. What he enjoyed was playing soccer for the Beavers and working at the American Dream pizza parlor. “I realized that I really like executing with a team,” he recalled. “That just shot me into this career.”

He went to Paris, then Portland, where he found a mentor in Tuscan-born Davide Filippini at Gallo Nero. “I really liked the savoir faire of being a chef,” said Crisp. “He’d show up in a cardigan and nice Italian boots and immediately go into the kitchen and start twisting up tortellini while taking orders. He was the star of the show, but he didn’t make it a big deal. He just wanted to serve people because that’s all he knows.”

Crisp went back to France, moving to a village near Forcalquier in the heart of Provence. “Everything is the most farm-to-table experience you could possibly imagine,” he said, explaining that farmers would drive their tractors right up to the restaurant where he worked. “You feel the antiquity, the Roman influence, the influence of the Catholic Church. You feel the proud and dignified way of the Provençal farmers.”

While visiting a girlfriend in Marseilles, he peered into the kitchen of a Michelin two-star and was transfixed by the “surgical cleanliness” of the space. “That’s when I was radicalized to be a chef,” he explained. 

When he got back to Portland, it felt too small. He’d reconnected with his high school sweetheart (now wife), who lived in Los Angeles, so moved to California, quickly finding a job at L&E Oyster Bar. That was around the time they took their first trip to Santa Barbara together. 

“What is this magical place?” wondered Crisp, explaining that the pull of moving to Santa Barbara became a “background noise” that only grew when they had a child. “It reminds us of where we’re from,” he said, “but we still get the sunshine and the beach.”

In 2021, Crisp opened Saso, a Basque-inspired courtyard restaurant at the Pasadena Playhouse. It closed two years later, but not before he met Nallapothola, who’d left his successful (though stressful) medical tech sales career to embark on a new venture importing truffles from Spain. 

“Dom was my first customer,” said Nallapothola. “He sees hospitality the same way I do. He cares for people first. The food and everything else is secondary. It’s the people who matter. We hit it off.”

Tech to Truffles 

Raj Nallapothola’s earliest memories are of living in earthen structures in Dubai, where his dad worked as a telecom engineer as that city was erected out of the sand. When Raj was 16, his father didn’t follow the other indentured workers back to India, instead bringing his family to Vancouver, British Columbia. 

After finishing high school and college there, Nallapothola pursued a masters in computer science through USC, which is how he first found California. After writing software for the first companies to shift x-rays from film to digital, he became very successful in medtech sales. 

When the pandemic struck, he was involved in pharma tech that supported vaccines. “It was 20 hours a day of going hard, trying to make sure people stay healthy — it burned me out,” said Nallapothola, who spiraled into depression. “My lovely wife said you have to make a change. I wanted to be a good dad to my kids.”

A tour guide he met in Barcelona was building a truffle business there, so Nallapothola bought his own small farm there, partnered with the guide, and launched an import company called Toronix Gourmet. That connected him to Crisp but also famous chefs such as Josiah Citrin and headline-fetching restaurants like Vespertine. That led to more imports, like tinned smoked fish from Basque country, as well as to an award-winning vermouth brand called Laie. 

When Saso closed, Crisp became the head chef at The Lonely Oyster in Echo Park, but stayed in touch with Nallapothola. They agreed that opening a restaurant together would be the natural extension of Nallapothola’s import concern and Crisp’s extensive network of domestic fishers and farmers. 

They nearly signed deals in Santa Monica and Silverlake (twice), but Santa Barbara’s appeal remained strong. Nallapothola started coming to wine country here many years ago, honeymooning in Los Olivos in 2011 and getting to know the scene around Industrial Eats in Buellton, where he befriended the late chef-owner Jeff Olsson. 

They almost bought the old Metropoulos deli location in the Funk Zone, but that fell through. Then came word about the East Victoria location through their Realtor, a high school friend of the building owners’ daughter. 

Nallapothola spent a full year working on deals to buy the property and the restaurant business together, cognizant that the previous restaurants were integral to Santa Barbara’s spirit. “This has been a community gathering place and we need to preserve that,” he explained. 

When the ink dried this past February, construction started immediately. “In April of this year, it was bare,” he said. “Four months later, we have a restaurant. It’s surreal.”

More surreal, and certainly more tragic, was the Crisp family’s timing of leaving Los Angeles to come here — just three days after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades and Altadena, where they were supposed to have a going-away party. “It was a tough way to leave,” said Crisp, who gets emotional talking about it. “It really tore me apart.” 

Like he’d done during COVID, he made meals for those in need, which included many restaurant people close to him who lost everything. “It makes you want to live better and be kinder to people,” he said of the tragedies. “Real hospitality actually stems from that. We are gonna make sure people can eat and have a good time and forget about whatever they’re going through for a minute.”

Oysters ’n’ Hongos, Shrimp ’n’ Sandos

“I was Basque-leaning before,” said Crisp, referring to his former spot Saso. “We’re unapologetically Basque now.”

To him, that means utterly fresh ingredients, straight from the sea, farm, or ranch. “I try to deal with as few middlemen as I can,” said Crisp, who’s building on direct relationships to keep costs as low as possible. “We want our customers to come back all the time and not feel like they’re gouged.”

Explained Nallapothola, “Both of us are on this quest to squish down the supply chain so you take out all the waste and deliver a better product at a better price.”

Dishes are seasoned only enough to bring out each ingredients’ inherent flavor. That doesn’t mean just salt and pepper, though. The hongos, for instance — an ode to the famed San Sebastian pintxos spot Ganbara, which also serves a grilled mushroom dish — are wiped in a garum made from whitefish in Minnesota, then paired with raw yolk, bottarga, and roe. The relish-like Tomat salad features both snappy-fresh and confit tomatoes with Marcona-cashew butter, olives, and capers. Even the simple-looking Txuleta Frites hits the N.Y. strip with an Ancho Reyes demi-glaze.

I ate all of those and much more during that first dinner visit, which included oysters with mignonette in a doll-sized eyedropper; tuna two ways (fatty belly crudo with oily olives; a poke-like mix with mayo and furikake); a croketa, whose chicken was delicately stringy like crab; a crab rice with squid ink and saffron that achieved socarrat crunch in a tiny cast iron; and a whole white fish, roasted in the Josper oven. 

The kicker — or more like a sucker punch at that point — was an irresistible black truffle cheesecake, featuring truffles from Nallapothola’s farm. “This cheesecake is blowing me away,” said the friend I came with. Another friend two tables over said it made her cry.

Menu highlights include truffle potato chips with a surf & turf tartare and Dom’s Louis Salad, with tuna belly, crab, and poached shrimp. | Credit: Stan Lee

I was back for lunch last week, sitting at the bar, the top of which is white oak from Crisp’s family vineyard, the same tree he was married beneath. The shrimp cocktail was plump and piquant (I almost drank the sauce), and my Submarino Española — Crisp’s take on an Italian grinder — was one of the best sandwiches I’ve had in a while, its D’Angelo’s baguette the perfect frame for piles of Spanish meats and cheeses, all set off by a slow-burning spice. 

I’m running out of room to talk about the drinks: vermouth spritzes, vermouths straights, zesty txakolinas, expertly designed cocktails, Lumos Wine Co. aligotés, chardonnays, and pinots. Nor have I had the 9 to 11 p.m. bar bites, like the Chistorra Glizzy (a long Basque hotdog) or the Taverna Smashy burger — both just $12. And there will be soccer and other sports on the two TVs when appropriate, just like Pascual’s used to do. 

Like I said, we’ll all be back. 

“It just feels right, I don’t know how else to say it,” said Crisp. “It feels like what the community needs.”

Dom’s Taverna, 30 E. Victoria St.; (805) 724-4338; domstaverna.com;@domstaverna