From Verona with Love

Julia Child spent her final years in Montecito. Her words could almost serve as a blessing over Ancora Osteria, where Chef Luca Crestanelli has built a restaurant, and a life, around much the same philosophy of taking the chance, working hard, and doing things properly.

Luca was 23 when a friend from his summer restaurant job on crystal blue Lake Garda suggested he try the United States.

“Do you want to go try work in the U.S.?” he said. “I’m like, Sure.”

“I had no idea! I didn’t even bother researching anything. It could have been Ohio. It could have been Hawaii. It’s far away, it’s an opportunity. I’m gonna take it.”

He landed at LAX with no English and an address scribbled on a little piece of paper.

That was it?

“That’s plenty,” he said. “I was young. I would have slept under a rock.”

Before California, there was Stallavena, Luca’s tiny hometown outside Verona, surrounded by farms and close to Valpolicella wine country.

But his first lessons in food began even closer to home. Asked who in his family gave him “the heart” for cooking, Luca answered immediately. His Aunt Virginia.

What did it feel like walking into her house?

“Comfortable.”

She would be cooking at the stove when he came over, and that memory, of food and comfort as inseparable, stayed with him.

“I want them to feel at home in a way,” Luca said of his guests at Ancora. “I want them to be really comfortable.”

For Luca, food, service and decor, must work together.

“I think it has to be a complete picture.”

His cooking follows the same philosophy.

“We’ll do a few things and we’ll do them the right way.”

That approach appears on the menu, from Blistered Cherry Tomato Pinsa to Tagliata with arugula and Parmigiano.

And the seasons get the final say.

“What’s the point of ordering tomatoes in December?” Luca asked. “Why should I eat a summer melon in January?”

Years earlier, California had begun leading him toward a landscape that felt familiar, like Verona.

“The first time I went ‘wine tasting’ with my cooking friends, we drove up from L.A.,” he recalled. “We got to Santa Barbara and wondered where all the vineyards were.”

They ended up on the end of the pier and finally asked someone.

“They said, ‘Oh, you guys have to drive to Santa Ynez!’”

So they piled in the car and kept going, over the mountains into rolling country and vineyards that echoed the countryside around Verona and Lake Garda.

“God, this is a beautiful place for a restaurant,” he said.

Private-chef work, and later his wife’s family, kept bringing him back, and he opened S.Y. Kitchen in Santa Ynez, with Kathie and Mike Gordon, of Toscana in Brentwood.

“Life kept pulling me back to the area,” Luca said. “I love it here.” He now works with his brother Francesco Crestanelli.

Ancora doesn’t recreate Verona. It feels more personal, Verona translated through California farm ingredients and a Santa Barbara way of life.

At Tutti Frutti Farms, Olive Cadwell said Luca calls or texts about what he needs and what is tasting best.

“Knowing your farmer is very important,” Olive said. “The farmer can also be honest and just say, ‘I like these more,’ or ‘this didn’t do that well this year.’”

For Ancora, they settled on softer red cherry tomatoes for sauce.

When Olive talks about heirlooms, she sounds almost like she’s describing wine. Cherokee Purple and Chocolate Stripes tomatoes, she said, can be “earthy and smoky,” with extraordinary depth of flavor.

The Cadwells have farmed for eight generations, and Olive’s father, Chris Cadwell, began growing heirlooms in the early 1990s.

“My dad started with regular tomatoes, and heirlooms weren’t popular because they look weird, lumpy and bumpy,” Olive said. “But he’d give every customer a free sample, saying, ‘Just try it.’ And people started coming back for them.”

Today the family even saves its own seed from its best Chocolate Stripes tomatoes for quality.

“I’ll be sitting there with music playing, hunched over, cutting them open and squeezing out seeds into buckets,” Olive laughed.

That same no-shortcuts integrity carries from the farm into the interior design.

Blair Moritz and Jacob Gerhardt work from a 100-year-old barn studio across from S.Y. Kitchen. Luca began wandering over years ago to see what they were working on.

“He would always come over and hang out,” Blair said. “‘What are you working on? This is cool,’ he’d say.”

When he asked them to work on Ancora, she said, “It was a no-brainer. Easy.”

“I think that’s sort of what Montecito is to me,” Blair said. “Having it be relaxed but interesting. You want beautiful art to look at. You want to see details, things that are crafted of quality. And we want people to feel at ease too.”

Their design ethic matched Luca’s cooking.

“Our design integrity is similar,” Blair said. “There are no shortcuts with anything.”

Jacob made the solid black walnut tables by hand. They chose Verde Guatemala marble, custom Venetian plaster walls, vintage Murano glass pendants from the ’60s, and hand-painted signs from local artist Tosh Clements. They collected objects from Europe and carried them home in their luggage, for nearly two years, including a vintage rope mirror from a street market in Nice.

“He wants things to feel like it’s been there for a long time,” Jacob said.

Longtime Montecito resident and Fashion Executive Terry Pillow, of Ralph Lauren and Tommy Bahama fame, knew the room well in its Via Vai days and returned during Ancora’s opening.

“I thought it was very well done,” Terry said. “They kept a lot of the nice things about the space and changed some things for the better.”

“I used to drive up to S.Y. Kitchen just to enjoy his cooking. Now we can enjoy it right here in our little town. It’s fantastic.”

His sliced rare steak over arugula?

“Fabulous and prepared perfectly.”

Somewhere between Verona and Montecito, Ancora found its language.

Julia once said, “Dining with one’s friends and beloved family is certainly one of life’s primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal.”

Perhaps Ancora began long before, in Aunt Virginia’s kitchen in Stallavena, where Luca first learned that food and comfort belonged together. Today, Tutti Frutti grows the tomatoes, Blair and Jacob shape the room, and Luca cooks, all so guests can come in, sit down and feel at home.

More than twenty years ago, Luca stepped off a plane with a piece of paper and an instinct to take the opportunity in front of him.

“You work hard and you make opportunities,” he said. “And then you take them.”

Luca did. And now there’s a table at Ancora, waiting for you.