When I meet food entrepreneur, curator, and nutritionist Amy Isabella Chalker at El Encanto for drinks, she points out the coincidence that she’d started her career in Santa Barbara as a hostess at this hotel until it closed for renovations.
She lovingly recalls having her first celebrity sighting there, when she spotted Hayley Mills, star of The Parent Trap, a childhood favorite. It was her introduction to the Santa Barbara lifestyle.
Amy was born in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which she calls the Santa Barbara of the East Coast. She was accepted into Barnard College in New York City, but 9/11 happened 11 days after she arrived, so she transferred to Simmons College in Boston to major in nutrition and food science. “That’s when I discovered yoga,” she remembers. “I started a journey of health and wellness.”