Longtime writer and Solvang resident Jamie Baker pranked nearly all Santa Ynez Valley residents for two years with an Instagram account called “The Pretentious Boar & Ale House” — a restaurant that truly exists only within the pages of his new novel, “You Ate It.”
Baker’s new book focuses on a 15-year-old boy, Michael, who comes up with an idea that changes the world.
“This revelation leads him to a corner office in Silicon Valley, a bank account near a billion and being considered a very lucky man,” Baker told me.
When Michael is 27, however, a school shooting turns his life upside down. Finished with tech and big ideas, Michael reinvents himself as a chef, falls in love again and moves to the Central Coast, where he opens — you guessed it — a restaurant called The Pretentious Boar & Ale House.
“The food is incredible; the characters there are even better,” Baker said.
A real restaurant in Los Alamos helped kick-start “You Ate It.”
“Full of Life Flatbread in Los Alamos is especially important to me because eating there helped me overcome a 20-year writer’s block,” Baker said.
To reward himself for keeping up a pace of 2,000 words per day, or 10,000 a week, he’d have dinner at Flatbread on Sundays.
The restaurant became a location in “You Ate It,” and two of its characters are based on the eatery’s owners, chefs Clark Staub and his wife, Jill Davie.
“Clark communicates through his food — each menu is a story,” Baker said, adding, “My characters are real — at least to me.”
The novel will be available for purchase at Solvang’s The Book Loft starting Sunday with a signing at that shop on Monday, Memorial Day. “You Ate It” is available now for pre-orders through The Book Loft, Baker said.
Also on Sunday, Full of Life Flatbread will offer a pop-up dinner with The Pretentious Boar & Ale House, and Baker will sign his book. A third signing event will take place Tuesday at Eye on I in Lompoc, and a fourth on Saturday, May 31 at Saarloos & Sons Winery in Los Olivos.
Baker encourages buyers to support local and buy directly from The Book Loft, which will have copies available by Sunday for the regular price of $18.95.
I met Baker six or seven years ago, right about the time he and his wife, Devra Robin, opened Solvang’s Space VR on Alisal Road. In the years that followed, Baker campaigned for mayor of the city, but lost, endured the COVID-19 pandemic years with the rest of us, and beat back cancer.
Luckily for avid readers, Baker’s first novel, “You Ate It,” was coming together, word by word, during those rough and tumble years.
“With COVID, and then cancer, I had no excuse not to go back to writing,” he said. “All my excuses fell apart.”
The novel is full of love, “boy geniuses, girls of every persuasion, vineyards, pot farms, magical restaurants, sex and death, and coming to terms with one’s gullibility” — and a school shooting.
Once the story began to take off on its own, Baker lifted his own experience as “a dad of three kids and the owner of a business,” and pondered how his lead character also would be protected from the chaos inherent in daily life.
“On my way up and back to Flatbread every Sunday, I would work out the conflicts in my writing,” he said. “The drive became my therapy.”
While “You Ate It” is his first novel, for many years Baker wrote plays.
“Scripts is what I do, using dialogue based between the actors and the audience,” he said. “You can feel the audience on the edge of its seats.”
Reading, however, is silent and solitary, he said. In that light, Baker encourages readers to explore Reading Rhythms, whereby readers gather together for a “reading party.”
Such reading nights might take place at a tasting room, where readers could relax over “words with wine,” or on a summer evening in a park, he said. Baker checked out the Guinness Book of Records to determine whether a record stands for such a gathering, with people reading the same book at the same time on the same day.
Baker discovered that no such record exists and is determined to set one: “I hope to set a record, and we could document the event with a drone shot.”
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Baker wrote plays and a musical while residing in Seattle, Pasadena and Los Angeles, and studied acting at Santa Maria’s Pacific Conservatory Theatre during his first foray to the Central Coast in 1979.
In 2011, Baker moved from Los Angeles to the Santa Ynez Valley with his wife and three children.
Buellton Hitching Post, L.A. Loves Alex’s Lemonade Host “Sideways” Dinner
Another celebration for the 20th anniversary of “Sideways” took place May 2 at Buellton’s Hitching Post 2, where owner/chef Frank Ostini and a host of other chefs and bakers collaborated with L.A. Loves Alex’s Lemonade.
The dinner was sold last fall during an auction to benefit the Los Angeles-based organization that unites superstar chefs, brewers, vintners and mixologists to support Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation and the fight against childhood cancer.
Aaron Franklin, a barbecue legend from Austin, Texas, traveled to join regional chefs and bakers, among them Davie and Staub of Full of Life Flatbread; Bob Oswaks of Bob’s Well Bread; Jason Paluska of The Lark; and Nick Priedite of Priedite Barbecue.
Guests enjoyed wines from the Hitching Post, Foxen Vineyard & Winery, Au Bon Climat, Alma Rosa Winery and Fess Parker Winery.