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While a plate and utensils suffice for most restaurants, The Drunken Crab, which has just opened at 416 State St. in Santa Barbara, provides patrons with gloves, a bib and no plate at all.
“The table is your plate,” said The Drunken Crab’s director of operations, Nani Liu. “It’s peel-and-eat picnic-style, which means everything comes whole — so the lobsters are full, the shrimp has the shell and head and tail on it.”
The restaurant, which sports a bar and an array of black-and-white portraits of elderly mariners, offers a wide variety of Louisiana-style seafood on Lower State Street, the restaurant’s second location after North Hollywood.
“This concept is really saturated in LA,” Liu told Noozhawk. “There are so many different types of crab shacks like this.
“We wanted to be the first in a different town, and why not beautiful, sunny Santa Barbara? Although there are other seafood restaurants, there’s nothing like this around.”
The Drunken Crab’s bar offers beer, wine and soju cocktails.
“It’s a very fun, loud atmosphere,” Liu said. “People come here, and it’s up to the staff to really give them that vibe of, not only are you going to get dirty, but you’re going to have fun while you do it. It’s actually one of our cornerstones — to have fun.”
K. Frank relocates to Coast Village Road
The clothing and fashion store K. Frank has reopened at 1150 Coast Village Road in Montecito after moving from 1023 State St.
In addition to men’s and women’s clothing, K. Frank, owned by husband/wife duo Kevin and Katie Frank, sells jewelry and apparel accessories.
It will open a kids and home branch at 1213 Coast Village Road toward the end of September, Kevin told Noozhawk. That store will be run by Katie’s mother, Kathy McCarthy.
More so than even Lower State Street, Kevin said, Coast Village Road is home to high-end retail shopping and restaurants that would bring in the type of visitors who would be more inclined to shop at K. Frank.
The new location, which has private parking, opened earlier this month, two days after the old one’s final day.
“We’ve had a lot of tourists just stumble in who are staying in the area, have come to Santa Barbara before, but never knew the store existed,” Frank said. “So we’re excited to find some new people and have them find us.”
The 2,300-square-foot store has a more modern, contemporary feel than the more rustic State Street space, Frank said, with floor-to-ceiling windows all along the front.
“We have about the same kind of product mix as we usually do, though we’re always changing that from season to season in terms of adding new designers or new looks and collections,” Frank said.
Lompoc-area apartments sell for $22 million
Apartments located on four adjacent properties in the Lompoc and Vandenberg Village area were sold to a single, private buyer last month for nearly $22 million, the biggest dollar value of its kind in Santa Barbara County in 2016, according to Steve Golis, the Radius Commercial Real Estate & Investments agent who represented the buyer and sellers.
The three apartment communities at 3910 Mesa Circle Dr. were sold for $13 million in 2014, and about $1.5 million of work were put into them between that and July’s purchases, Golis, a Radius partner and co-founder, told Noozhawk.
Those apartments, known as The Diplomat, total 122 units and went for $20 million. Fourteen units in the fourth contiguous property went for $1.85 million.
The area’s rental market is very strong, Golis said, which is enticing more big-name buyers to come in and make increasingly large purchases.
It was the largest transaction of its kind in the Lompoc/Vandenberg Village area, he said, since The Diplomat went for $13 million two years ago.
Yardi reaches 5,000 employees
Goleta-based tech company Yardi Systems hit a major employment milestone with the recent hiring of its 5,000th employee.
Over the past half-decade, the 32-year-old company has doubled in size, according to a press release.
Yardi develops and supports investment and property-management software for the real estate industry.
The continued growth of real estate as an asset class expands the demand for real estate management best practices, which contributes to the company’s rapid growth, vice president of marketing Brad Setser told Noozhawk.
Yardi’s development strategy of offering its clients the opportunity to consolidate a wide range of products and services onto a single platform has also facilitated its growth, he said.
Setser doesn’t foresee the growth stopping anytime soon.
“We are projecting ongoing consistent growth, and therefore we must expect to hire in order to be able to support it, particularly so that we can maintain our focus on customer service and product development,” he told Noozhawk.
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.