Blindfold a Santa Barbara resident near a Chicken Ranch restaurant and, based on the alluring open-flame cooking aromas coming off the grill, they’ll be able to tell you exactly where they are.
“We get people all the time who say they came in because they smelled it from the street,” Tyler Benko, who, along with his brother, Brennan, serves as co-general manager for the family-owned restaurant. “The mesquite smell is pretty strong. It’s our best advertising. They smell it and say, ‘Whoa. What was that?’ And come in. There’s not a lot of places around that do it this way.”
Inside Chicken Ranch, the olfactory rush that spills out onto the street is soon overtaken by the sights and sounds of a very streamlined and prolific operation of cooking chicken and tri-tip over an open flame.
Chicken Ranch is emblematic of the Central Coast’s style of cooking. Work crews in the open kitchen come in and start building the fire of the charcoal-fueled open pit around 6 a.m. From the time the store opens its doors at 10:30 a.m. every day of the week, it’s a perfect dance on down a grill-centric assembly line, with meats being rotated and cooked to precision over the flame. It’s an art that Tyler, 30, said he and his brother, 29, haven’t quite mastered yet even though they’ve been around the restaurant since they were old enough to walk…