A LOCAL Journey: The Path from Tech Entrepreneur to Restaurateur

“I cooked my way through college. I was the cook in our fraternity for a while because our actual cook quit, along with a couple other guys. So I made meals for 50 guys, six days a week. That teaches you how to cook pretty fast.” Not to worry; “Frat House Epicure” does not define the vibe or the menu at Mike Sheldon’s place – the cozy “basement bistro” called LOCAL [1187 Coast Village Road]. And anyway, his culinary leanings evolved – to say the least… “When I left investment banking, my initial thought was to go to cooking school.” Renaissance Man? Restless Pilgrim? Yeah. “I’d enrolled in the French Culinary Institute in New York,” he continues. 

Mike Sheldon is an enjoyably emphatic guy who speaks the same way he seems to have lived his life: in a carefully articulated hurry. Here he continues his flashback. “I’d been to the institute’s orientation – I mean, I was going! Oh my god…” The guy’s arc has been an unlikely series of such moments, a whirlwind whose unlikely denouement (excuse me) was to deposit our hero onto our lovely Coast Village Road. Think Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz, but without the scary little witches feet poking out. By the time Sheldon realized he wasn’t in Kansas anymore… it was too late. “I found this spot on Coast Village Road,” he says. “And I literally just sat on the stairs for a while and stared at it. I stared and I stared. And I started thinking about what it could be.”

LOCAL Area Network

LOCAL is a gently roaring rendezvous, a conversation pit with a kitchen. Think Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette, minus the straw hats and petticoats. There is a big round bar, palate-seducing cuisine, and a patio whose feng shui eddies around and embraces the gathered guests as they sip libations and lean into each other in warm fits of laughter. This is LOCAL: a lamplit divot right in the middle of the world’s coziest main street; the suspiciously marvelous Coast Village Road. You descend a staircase to enter LOCAL, which like any respectable meal-and-martini cave is set back and below street level. The place is a self-contained world unto itself down there – an effect reinforced by relaxed cuisine, a heady cocktail, and the company of your pals. 

LOCAL’s story flows from Mike Sheldon’s story; from his “journey,” to invoke the wandering pilgrim. We all know from public television that the hero’s journey includes taking on many exotic guises. Here’s an early one called Starved Jock. “Beginning in high school I started to cook,” Sheldon says. “Mostly because I was an athlete. I liked to eat, and I ate a lot.” Okay. Rome wasn’t built in a day. After college (and his galloping gourmand frat house period), Sheldon worked for a derivatives-trading investment bank for nine years. The summation is pure Mike. “I was living in New York and then lived overseas in London and Switzerland for a little while and moved back to New York and got married, and there was a lot going on.” His rapid-fire locution does begin to grow on you. Sheldon isn’t amped so much as excited in the moment. I mean, every moment. Here he describes a crucial fork in the road. “In ‘99, 2000, 2001, you had the dot-com crash and you had Y2K… and my wife and I decided that it was a good time to make a change.” This was that brief window where Sheldon the financial wizard considered a fresh slate at culinary school in Manhattan. “And then… it’s not so much that I had second thoughts. An opportunity arose that I thought was probably the best chance I had to get back to the West Coast.” 

LOCAL Time

Having grown up in Hermosa Beach, Mike Sheldon was coming home, from the Old World to a California garage startup. Sort of. “In 2001, I joined a small technology company that was started by my brother and my father.” Founded on a shoestring in 1989 as Strand Computer Resale (how much technological progress do we owe to garages?), the company later rebranded as Network Hardware Resale, and ultimately Curvature. The once-plucky family startup had exited the garage, reporting revenues of $20M the year before Sheldon arrived to dig in. “We sold pre-owned networking and computer hardware. The work had a lot to do with trading, so my background on Wall Street was a good fit.” Mike became CEO in 2004. 

His tenure as Curvature CEO saw Sheldon head back to The Continent where, as business traveler and gastronome, he truly acquainted himself with the wonderfully various eateries of a hospitable Europe and Asia. In 2017 he retired from Curvature. “When I joined, I was employee number 18, and when I took over as CEO, we were 80. When we sold it, we were 780. More than half of that growth happened overseas in Singapore and Amsterdam and Tokyo and other places.” The retiree took a breath (like this guy ever takes a breath) and chose a next move. This is where we Locals enter the picture. 

“I really love food,” Sheldon says without adornment. “And when I was back East, I really dove into wine and cocktails and mixology.” The restaurateur idea had also been furtively tiptoeing around in the back of Sheldon’s mind. “I started looking around at spaces, thinking that if I found the right spot, I’d go for it.” Spoiler – he found the right spot. “That huge patio is such an attractive place to get people together outside. And then the fire pit and big open doors and a big circular bar…” 

LOCAL Favorite

“Adam (Sanacore, formerly of The Lark) and (Jason) Carter are the head chefs and have been with me since the beginning. Adam is very familiar with Santa Barbara dining and Santa Barbara seafood. Carter brings a Southern comfort food flair, and his work in catering means he’s very comfortable with high-volume cooking. The two of them run the kitchen.” Sheldon’s love of music – and secret identity as a musician himself – may be felt more acutely in LOCAL’s future. He wouldn’t mind creating an after-hours music experience befitting the place’s setup as a sunken alcove. What would that look like? Lucky patrons heading downstairs to sigh as one under a canopy of stars as musicians hang notes on the fragrant evening air. More or less. 

“People love the music but don’t necessarily want to hear it while they’re eating,” Sheldon says. He has been reading the room. “They want to listen to the music, so let’s make that change. From a decor perspective, I think LOCAL is already quite beautiful, but we’re going to refine the artwork, and support and really highlight our local artists.” LOCAL is growing and relaxing and becoming (frankly) cooler, an evolution spurred by the “natural selections” of guests. “People love the food, but they’re also inclined to more approachable dishes. We’ve arrived now at a formula for bistro comfort food with a Santa Barbara flair.” The guy grows suddenly animated. “You have to try our Chicken and Dumplings, Braised Beef Cheeks, Jumbo Crab Cakes, Barbecue Baby Back Ribs…” We get it; unpretentious good eats perfected. 

Guest Chef? Yes, Chef.

Here’s an idea: to make the menu even more dynamic, LOCAL occasionally surrenders its Sunday kitchen to an adored guest Chef de Cuisine from the area. Sheldon explains the complex strategic research required to launch the idea. “We thought ‘why not?’” Asreported in these pages, Chef Mollie Ahlstrand – of the long-cherished Trattoria Mollie on Coast Village Road (undone by the 2018 debris flow after 30 years) and the current Mollie’s Italian Deli on Casitas Pass Road in Carpinteria – inaugurated the program on December 10 and 17. LOCAL diners on those evenings ordered Mollie’s approachable and delish Italian dishes – comfy cuisine in which Montecitans of a certain vintage have delighted for 30 years. Sheldon is enthused about regularizing the “guest-chef” model. Hell, he’s enthused about everything. And we’re all the beneficiaries.

Is any of this what Mike Sheldon foresaw back when his derivatives-addled brain saw fleeting images of a plated future? “I guess it’s everything I hoped and feared it would be,” he says, laughing. “It’s fun seeing a lot of my friends and new friends come back week after week. I hope that five years from now, LOCAL is a place where a big cadre of Montecitans congregates on any given evening, get to know each other, and really enjoy themselves.”