The Hotel Californian has a new restaurant. The Knock Kitchen + Cocktails has opened in the space that Blackbird occupied for years, arriving with a different name, a looser menu and a theme running through it.
The room is the same address at 36 State St., still at the edge of the Funk Zone, still a few minutes from the waterfront. What has changed is the premise.
The concept is Alfred Hitchcock, or more precisely, a technique borrowed from him.
The Knock bills itself as a cinematic coastal gastropub, which is a lot of adjectives for what is essentially a very good hotel bar with ambitions.
But the framing is not arbitrary. Hitchcock spent a career proving that ordinary sounds could carry an entire scene — a telephone ringing at an hour when nobody should be calling, a latch turning, footsteps on a staircase, a knock at a door you were not expecting.
He was always less interested in the thing itself than in the stretch of time before it arrived. That turns out to be a strangely apt idea for a restaurant, where the best part of an evening is often the waiting: the pause after you order, the drink that lands before the food, the plate you can hear crossing the room before you see it.
A restaurant named for a knock is making a claim about anticipation.
Whether a restaurant can actually deliver on that is a fair question, and The Knock mostly answers it by not trying too hard.
The room itself was designed by Martyn Lawrence Bullard, the same hand behind the hotel’s Moorish and Moroccan-leaning interiors, and it has been left largely intact — dark, low-lit, tiled, generous with pattern.
The theme lives in the hallway, in the naming, and in a general willingness to put something unexpected on a plate that looks familiar.
That restraint is the smartest decision here.
You see it most plainly in the menu language.
There is The Honey Trap, a crispy chicken thigh sandwich on a milk bun with chipotle and honey glaze, slaw, avocado and blue cheese.
There is The Wedge Alibi, which swaps the expected blue cheese dressing for green goddess and piles on heirloom cherry tomato, bacon and pickled onion.
A beet salad arrives under the name Smoking Beet, with crisped beets, goat cheese, hazelnut and plum.
These are gastropub dishes with espionage titles, and the joke is light enough that it does not curdle.
The food itself is more legible than the branding suggests. The opening section is built for sharing: pull-apart rolls dusted with everything bagel seasoning and Parmesan; Belgian fries with roasted garlic aioli; barbecue crisps with whipped blue cheese; deviled eggs finished with red pepper jelly and ikura.
Bone marrow served alongside steak tartare with capers, shallots and pickled mustard seeds is the most serious thing in that stretch, and the most obviously designed to be eaten slowly with a drink in hand.
Ahi tostadas with crushed avocado and shaved radish, short rib croquettes with corn and chipotle aioli, and moules frites with chorizo and fennel sofrito round out a first course that could easily become the whole meal.
West Coast oysters come by the half-dozen or dozen with charred lemon and a champagne mignonette.
From there the kitchen moves into territory that is deliberately unfussy.
Fish and chips uses local rock fish in beer batter with herbed tartar and malt vinegar. The burger is a straightforward proposition — bacon marmalade, charred onions, cheddar, tomato jam — and there is a portobello version with Havarti and espelette aioli for anyone skipping the beef.
Shrimp and grits gets a Calabrian push from ’nduja and smoked gouda. The larger plates are where the room’s fine-dining past still shows: steak frites with wagyu skirt and truffled béarnaise, a bone-in tomahawk built for a table of three or four, a whole roasted chicken served with charred tomatoes and pickled onions.
Cocktails carry as much of the concept as anything.
The Pleasure Garden takes its name from Hitchcock’s first feature and drinks like a rosé-forward warm-weather drink with passion fruit and vanilla behind it.
Monkey Shines is an espresso martini nudged sideways with crème de banane.
Dessert has been given the full theatrical treatment in a flaming baked Alaska, which is either too much or exactly right depending on how the evening has gone.
What The Knock is really doing is repositioning. Blackbird asked to be treated as a destination; The Knock asks to be treated as a place you drop into.
The bar is the center of gravity, weeknights carry their own specials, and the menu is structured so that two people can eat well without committing to a full evening.
The Hitchcock business gives it a personality, but the concept underneath is simpler and more durable: a hotel restaurant that wants locals to walk in without a reservation.
When You Go
The Knock Kitchen + Cocktails is at the Hotel Californian, 36 State St. in Santa Barbara. It is open from 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
