“That feeling of being up on a hill, next to the ocean,” says Brandon Boudet, seconds after I squeeze into a booth at his new Coast Village Road restaurant Bar Lou, “it reminds me of the South of France.”
Not that this cozy, welcoming Montecito bar-bistro sticks to just French food, as that stretch of coastal France sucks up Spanish influences from adjacent Catalonia before spilling east into the Italian Riviera and onto Greece, Turkey, and, well, the whole Mediterranean — even a bit beyond.
“It’s a little catch of everything,” explained Boudet, “but with local ingredients.”…