“We just said today that we need to find the next location,” Cat Cora explained to me last month, less than a week after she and business partner Chris Chiarappa opened Mesa Burger across from Lazy Acres on Meigs Road. “We want to make 100 of these, go public, and ring the bell on Wall Street,” she continued, exuding the commerce-savvy confidence that only a celebrity chef can have. “We’re the new Shake Shack.”
Though a resident of Santa Barbara’s Mesa neighborhood for the past dozen years, Cora, who first hit television screens in 1999 and rose to become the Food Network’s first female Iron Chef, consciously avoided opening her own restaurant in town. “It’s been my oasis away from everything else,” she explained.
But then came a unique burger concept from Chiarappa, whose kids went to Washington Elementary with Cora’s brood. A medical device salesperson by day, the San Diego native — who moved here in 2008 with his S.B.-born-and-raised wife — was “literally swinging in hammocks” on a surf trip outside of Mazatlán with his friends a couple of years ago when they realized the Mesa was missing a burger spot. “I know nothing about restaurants,” he readily admits, but he dove into the research, trying burgers from New Orleans to Los Angeles.