When Lauren Herman and Christina Olufson came to Santa Barbara to
open Somerset Restaurant in 2016, they were two of the most important chefs in Los
Angeles — even though you’d never seen them on television cooking battles or splashed
on the front pages of magazines. The SoCal natives spent most of the previous decade
building a restaurant empire for Suzanne Goin, becoming humble yet integral forces
behind now iconic Southland restaurants such as Lucques and AOC.
Somerset didn’t last a year — Santa Barbara never quite embraced the
opulent settings, the expensive menu, or the owner’s open disdain for our existing
culinary culture — but the failure had nothing to do with the married couple’s delicious
food. They stayed on to transition the concept from glamorous to the more casual
Smithy’s, and then left in June 2018 to chart a new course. “It was a good stepping
stone for us to move up here,” explained Herman of the Somerset experience. “Without
that, we’d never have done this.”
“This” is Bossie’s Kitchen, a fast-casual, organic-leaning, farmers’-market-powered bistro-meets-deli-meets-neighborhood hangout at the corner of Milpas and East Canon Perdido streets. The restaurant sits in the original home of the Live Oak Dairy, whose Streamline Moderne structure was built in 1939 and is still topped by the busy corner’s famous cow sculpture, known by generations as Old Bossy.