From Napa To Santa Monica, Gott's Takes The Long Road To The Beach

SANTA MONICA, CA — Gott's Roadside officially opens in Santa Monica Friday, although the packed house Tuesday night suggested Santa Monica had already arrived.

At long communal tables beneath slowly turning ceiling fans, invited guests drank California wine and sampled a carefully edited preview of a menu that stretches considerably further than the burgers for which Gott's is best known. Ahi poke tacos, chicken tenders and salads circulated alongside cheeseburgers and chicken schnitzel sandwiches.

Fries and onion rings followed, along with sundaes and house-made cookies, while Joel Gott's own wines shared the bar with other California bottles, draft beers and a trio of spritzes. Rather than simply feed a roomful of people, the menu seemed designed to distill the Gott's experience into a couple of hours.

Tuesday's Community Preview Night at 401 Wilshire Boulevard gave Gott's a chance to introduce itself to the neighborhood, but it also offered a glimpse into the thinking of the man whose name has been above the door of a growing collection of California restaurants for more than a quarter-century — despite the fact that Joel Gott never particularly intended to become a restaurateur.

“I had no intention [of] being in the restaurant business,” Gott told Patch. “I'm in the wine business first.”

Food First, Business Later

In 1993, he and his brother, Duncan, bought Palisades Market in Calistoga, turning the small grocery store into a market specializing in prepared food and wine. Three years later, Gott launched Joel Gott Wines with an Amador County Zinfandel, made with the help of his then-girlfriend, winemaker Sarah, whom he married the following year.

The restaurant business arrived almost by accident. In 1999, the brothers took over Taylor's Automatic Refresher, a 1949 roadside hamburger stand alongside Highway 29 in St. Helena, initially with an eye on using part of the property for a produce stand. Instead, they found themselves running the whole place and learning a business that began not with a restaurant concept, Gott said, but simply with the food they wanted to eat.

“We got started 27 years ago by making food that we wanted to make, and we learned the business after the food,” he said. “We make stuff that we want to be eating. That's the reality.”

What emerged from that old Napa Valley hamburger stand was a particularly Californian contradiction: roadside food with wine-country standards. The concept gradually spread across Northern California before heading south, but for Gott himself, getting to Santa Monica has been a much longer journey than simply finding another place to put a restaurant.

Finding His Way To The Beach

“I've been coming down here for decades,” he said, recalling childhood visits with his parents and later regular trips through his wine business. “Whenever I can, I try to stay in Santa Monica. I love the beach, the vibe, running path. I love food in Venice.”

Gott had searched from Malibu down the coast for the right location, but his wish list was particular: plenty of glass and natural light, a substantial patio and communal tables, with the dining room ideally sitting slightly above the street rather than right alongside it. He found it at Fourth Street and Wilshire Boulevard, where the restaurant wraps around the corner behind broad walls of glass, with roughly 250 covers — about 150 inside and another 100 on the patio, by Gott's estimate.

When asked whether he personally selected the wines, there was barely a pause. “Oh yeah, of course,” he said. “I micromanage everything.”

The wine list is hardly where the micromanaging ends. Gott points out the ceiling fans because he likes airflow and explains how their design has changed from restaurant to restaurant; the plywood tables have their own lineage, too, borrowing from those first used at the company's Chase Center location because they proved, in his words, “bulletproof.” Santa Monica is less a copy of the Gott's restaurants that came before it than the latest draft, incorporating lessons learned one location at a time.

“That's half the fun of building something,” Gott said. “You screw something up and then you make the next one. Hopefully you don't screw it up. You screw something else up.”

Beyond The Burger

The menu has evolved in much the same way. Burgers remain at its heart, but over the years Gott's has wandered well beyond the bun, picking up tacos, chicken schnitzel, vegetarian dishes and a surprisingly serious collection of salads along the way.

“I love salads. My wife's an athlete. She loves salads,” Gott said. “When I go out and eat, what I want to eat — I don't always want a burger. I don't always want tacos. I want a variety of things, and I think that's why our model works, is we have a really big menu.”

Wine remains particularly personal. Gott chooses the list himself and, as a California winemaker, deliberately keeps most of it domestic, although he'll make room for something from farther afield if he thinks it belongs. Yet the longer he talks about wine, the less the conversation is about what's in the bottle and the more it's about who's sitting around the table.

“Come, bring your wine, drink wine, eat food. Bring your kids, bring your cousins,” Gott said. “We got to turn the wine business back on, and to do that, you got to get together and be social. Everybody's stuck on their phones, right? And pandemic didn't help.”

It's an ambition that arrives at an interesting moment for downtown Santa Monica. Gott has watched the city change over decades of visits and believes its recent direction has been encouraging, pointing to a cleaner and more organized downtown, increased police presence and the effort to draw people back to Third Street Promenade.

“I want to be part of revitalization, of more and more people out,” he said, adding that the soft-opening events held over the previous two weeks had been “pretty darn electric.”

By Tuesday evening, the communal tables were doing exactly what they were designed to do, as plates passed from hand to hand, glasses were refilled and conversations carried on around a restaurant that wasn't technically open yet. In a way, the preview had become a working demonstration of the philosophy Gott had spent the evening describing.

More than a quarter-century after he and his brother found themselves running an old Napa Valley hamburger stand without setting out to become restaurateurs, Gott's has grown considerably bigger and more sophisticated, but the proposition at its heart remains refreshingly simple: make the food you want to eat, pour something worth drinking and give people somewhere they want to spend time together.
After a long search down the Southern California coast, Joel Gott has found that place in Santa Monica.

Gott's Roadside is at 401 Wilshire Blvd, Santa Monica. For more information, visit gotts.com.