Mattei's Tavern

A Building That Has Always Fed Travelers

Railway Avenue in Los Olivos is a quiet street now, but the two-story white building at 2350 has been receiving guests since the late 1880s, when it functioned as a stagecoach stop on the Santa Ynez Valley route. That origin story matters to understanding what Mattei's Tavern is today: a dining room that draws authority from place and time, not from manufactured atmosphere. The wide porch, the aged timber, the sense that the building preceded every trend currently running through California dining, all of it reads as context before you've sat down or ordered anything.

When Auberge Resorts took on the property, the renovation challenge was holding that historical weight while building something that could compete in a modern California fine-dining conversation. The result holds the 1880s bones and positions a live-fire kitchen and garden-driven menu inside them. That combination, genuine history, contemporary technique, is harder to pull off than it sounds, and Mattei's is recognized by Michelin in 2024 for the effort.

Where Shared Plates Meet the Live-Fire Tradition

The editorial angle that frames Mattei's most usefully is not the tasting menu movement in its strictest sense, the highly choreographed, single-path progression you find at Alinea in Chicago or The French Laundry in Napa, but a distinct California evolution of that impulse. The shared-plates format that Chef Rhoda Magbitang runs here is itself a response to the rigidity of formal tasting menus: it preserves the seasonal, ingredient-driven discipline of that tradition while restoring the table's agency to choose, return, and linger.

This format has found strong ground across California. Lazy Bear in San Francisco builds a similar communal intelligence into its progressive American menu. Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg integrates farm sourcing as deeply into the plate as any restaurant in the state. What Mattei's adds to that conversation is the live-fire element, a cooking method that connects directly to the building's pre-industrial origins while functioning as a serious technical discipline in 2024 California kitchens.

The on-site garden feeds the kitchen directly, a supply relationship that shapes the menu's rhythm by season. In California wine country, where farm-to-table has long been both aspiration and marketing claim, the on-site sourcing at Mattei's carries a specificity that most restaurants in the category cannot match. Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown operates on a similar premise on the East Coast, the kitchen's relationship to its land defines what's possible on the plate each week.

What to Eat

The menu opens with a dish that signals the kitchen's range clearly: braised abalone finished with abalone liver mousse over mushroom confit in white miso butter. That combination, California coast product, Japanese fermentation technique, French preparation discipline, traces the actual lineage of West Coast American cooking in 2024, where influence moves fluidly across Pacific traditions without requiring explanation. It is a more sophisticated opening than most shared-plates rooms manage.

Wood-fired sides deserve the same attention as the larger plates. Grilled wedges of cabbage over a tomato stew with spiced chickpea and salsa macha demonstrates the kitchen's understanding that live fire is not simply a heat source but a flavour-building instrument; the char on the cabbage and the layered acidity of the tomato stew make an argument for vegetable cookery that holds against any protein on the table. To close, the dark chocolate soufflé with crème anglaise and butterscotch is a classical technique executed at a standard that few casual-format rooms attempt. A soufflé requires timing, temperature discipline, and coordination between kitchen and table, its presence on a shared-plates menu is a deliberate statement of ambition.

Los Olivos in the California Fine Dining Picture

Los Olivos does not occupy the same position in the California dining conversation as San Francisco or Los Angeles, but the Santa Ynez Valley has earned a serious food-and-wine reputation, reinforced by the region's standing as a Pinot Noir and Chardonnay producer of note. Restaurants here price and operate against a wine-country comparable set rather than an urban one. Addison in San Diego and Providence in Los Angeles represent the formal end of Southern California fine dining; Mattei's sits in a different register, one where the historical building, the garden, and the wine country setting are as central to the proposition as the plate.

Bar Le Côte, operating a Spanish-California seafood format nearby, represents the other end of the Los Olivos dining range.

For comparison within the wider American fine dining conversation, Le Bernardin in New York City, Emeril's in New Orleans, and The Inn at Little Washington each represent the formal tasting menu tradition that Mattei's shared-plates format consciously diverges from. Closer in format and philosophy, Hilda and Jesse in San Francisco and Selby's in Atherton offer points of comparison within the California American dining tier.

Planning a Visit

Mattei's Tavern sits at 2350 Railway Avenue, Los Olivos, CA 93441, inside the Auberge Resorts property. The $$$$ price positioning places it at the upper end of the Santa Ynez Valley dining market.