The Upper Village's New Restaurants Aren't as New as They Look

Walk down San Ysidro Road toward East Valley on any weeknight this fall and you'll notice the valet stand outside the Old Firehouse fills up before you can find a spot yourself. Ask around and someone will mention the tow signs a block over, the ones warning that the lot you're eyeing belongs to a landlord who means it. Ask a different neighbor and they'll tell you about the new Italian place that just opened where Via Vai used to be, or the wood-fired restaurant behind San Ysidro Village that Michelin noticed within months of its debut. Three storefronts, three headlines, and one assumption almost everyone in the neighborhood is making without checking it: that this is outside money moving in and reshaping a village that used to run at its own pace.

That assumption is half right. It just applies to the wrong restaurant.

Three Storefronts, One Compressed Timeline

Via Vai Trattoria & Pizzeria closed its doors at 1483 East Valley Road in 2024, and the space sat dark for close to two years while permitting worked its way through the county. It reopened on August 13, 2026, as Ancora Osteria, a new Italian kitchen from East Valley Four, Inc.

A few blocks away, the building that most longtime residents still remember as an appointment-only antiques showroom became Little Mountain, a wood-fired restaurant helmed by chef Diego Moya. And the Old Firehouse, the handsome former fire station on San Ysidro Road, is now home to RH's restaurant, opened by the national home furnishings retailer as part of its Montecito gallery.

Three tenants, three very different origin stories, all landing within roughly the same eighteen-month window. That's a fast turnover for a village that has historically measured change in decades rather than months. The Upper Village didn't reach its current form until 1979, when Montecito Village South was completed under Charles A. Borgatello's direction, and several of the storefronts along San Ysidro and East Valley have carried the same tenant for thirty or forty years without interruption. Pane e Vino, for instance, has operated under the same ownership since 1988. Against that backdrop, three simultaneous openings is the kind of shift residents notice at the farmers market before it shows up anywhere official.

The Ownership Question Nobody's Asking

Here's what gets lost when a village changes its restaurant lineup this fast: everyone focuses on what's new and skips who actually owns it.

Start with Ancora Osteria. The business entity behind it, East Valley Four, Inc., is led by Luca Crestanelli, chef at S.Y. Kitchen in Santa Ynez, alongside his sous chef Francesco Crestanelli. Their partner is Norman Borgatello, whose family's Valley Improvement Co. has shaped the character of the Upper Village's business community for decades. That's not an outside operator testing the market. That's a Santa Ynez chef and a multi-decade Montecito property steward opening a restaurant together in a building that had already been theirs to lease for years.

Little Mountain tells a similar story from a different angle. Chef Diego Moya, born in Chile and trained in kitchens in Lima, Bangkok, and Paris, built the restaurant around what he can find at the twice-weekly local farmers market, and the restaurant's creative director, Eva Schreier, has her own ties to Mexico through Hacienda Los Milagros. One of the backers, Graham Duncan, lives in Montecito. Within a few months of opening, Little Mountain became one of a dozen California restaurants newly recognized in the Michelin Guide, a fast turnaround for any kitchen and a signal that the ingredient sourcing and the local relationships behind it were real, not a marketing gloss.

Then there's RH. Management brought in staff from the company's outposts in Palo Alto and Palm Beach to open the Montecito location, and the restaurant operates as an extension of a national retail gallery rather than a project built around a local chef's relationships. Nothing wrong with that on its own. But it's worth naming plainly: of the three, RH is the one without a Montecito or Central Coast principal standing behind the kitchen.

The One Newcomer Without Local Roots Has the Parking Problem

That distinction matters for a reason that has nothing to do with food and everything to do with where you leave your car.

RH has responded to its parking situation by offering complimentary valet, which sounds like a nice touch until you understand why it exists. The two main parking lots serving the Upper Village are controlled by a landlord who has made it clear that spaces in those lots are not for RH's overflow, and diners who skip the valet and park there anyway risk getting towed. One documented case involved a diner who parked near the former Cafe del Sol building at 30 Los Patos Way rather than pay the valet fee, only to return from lunch and find her car gone. She was directed to a tow yard on Haley Street, where she was told the lot's owners call in vehicles from that stretch multiple times a day and that several other cars had been towed the same way. Reported towing fees for these incidents run in the $400 to $500 range.

This isn't a county parking rule or anything posted in the Montecito Land Use and Development Code. It's a private landlord enforcing control over private property, and it exists specifically because RH's arrival added demand that the surrounding lot owners never agreed to absorb. Little Mountain, by contrast, offers validated parking as part of its own operation, tied directly to the restaurant rather than a neighboring landlord's goodwill. Ancora Osteria, still finding its footing after an August opening, hasn't generated the same kind of parking friction, likely because Borgatello's own company already controls much of the real estate around it.

Put plainly: the newcomer with the thinnest local ownership ties is the one creating a parking problem for everyone else on the block.

What This Means for Tonight's Reservation

If you're planning an evening in the Upper Village this month, a few practical notes worth carrying with you.

• Little Mountain, at 516 San Ysidro Road, is open for dinner six evenings a week and closed Tuesdays. Reservations are recommended given the Michelin attention, though the bar accepts walk-ins.
• RH's restaurant in the Old Firehouse offers complimentary valet. Use it. Parking in the adjacent lots without valeting is the fastest way to end your evening with a tow receipt instead of a dessert menu.
• Ancora Osteria, at 1483 East Valley Road, is the newest of the three and still settling into its rhythm after opening in mid-August. Expect some flexibility in hours and menu as the kitchen finds its footing.

None of this is really about restaurants. It's about how a village that prides itself on continuity absorbs three changes in a compressed window and what that reveals about who still holds the strings. The land, the produce relationships, and in two of three cases the ownership itself never left Montecito. The one arrival that did import its whole operation is also the one generating friction with the neighbors who were here first.

For the parallel version of this story unfolding a mile away, our earlier look at what changed on Coast Village Road this year covers the same pattern playing out along Montecito's other commercial spine.

If you're a longtime Montecito resident who's been meaning to ask what a shift like this means for your own property down the line, or you're simply curious what your home might be worth in today's market, Vince Caballero Homes is happy to talk it through. You can start with a confidential home valuation whenever you're ready, no obligation attached.