The Healthiest Thing About This Restaurant Isn’t on the Menu

This may sound like an ad for a restaurant. I promise you it is not.

Nobody paid me to write this. Nobody offered me free appetizers. I have not been secretly compensated in Portuguese wine, although I remain open to reviewing that arrangement should anyone wish to propose it. Maybe I’m just entering my food-influencer era. “Oh wow, look at this sandwich…the bread has texture.” Next thing you know I’ll be standing over a plate with a tiny microphone saying, “The acidity really cuts through the richness,” as if I haven’t eaten the same chicken 400 times.

I’m writing this because I think we should support the places that are doing something right, and Barra Santos, in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, is doing something that I think we have lost almost everywhere else.

The ingredients are good. The menu is interesting without requiring you to Google seventeen ingredients before ordering. The prices are reasonable enough that dinner does not require a brief consultation with your financial advisor. And somehow, every time I go, it seems to get a little better. But after enough visits, I realized the food is only part of why I love being there. The real reason is much harder to manufacture:

We live in a world that is increasingly optimized for convenience and increasingly terrible at connection. We can have groceries delivered without speaking to another human being. Dinner can arrive at our front door after three taps on a phone. We can work from home, exercise from home, watch movies from home, order coffee from an app before we even enter the coffee shop, and theoretically live an entire Tuesday without making eye contact with anyone except the Amazon driver. Very efficient. Possibly not the pinnacle of human civilization.

And I think we feel it. We have lost some of the places where people simply know each other. Places where you sit for a while. Places where your kids are not treated like small disruptive adults who have somehow violated the restaurant’s terms of service by existing. Places where somebody remembers your name, your order, or, in our case, that your child apparently has the palate of a 52-year-old French grandpa and loves frisée salad.

That is one of my favorite things about Barra Santos. They know my child loves the frisée salad. Sometimes they send an extra one just because. There is no loyalty program. No QR code. No “collect nine salads and your tenth is free.” Someone simply remembered. It is such a tiny thing, but I think tiny things are often exactly what create community.

There is also something about the atmosphere that reminds me of Europe in the best possible way. People sit outside or at the bar. Someone has a glass of wine in the middle of the day. Nobody appears deeply concerned that the wine is occurring at 3:17 p.m. You can order a few small plates, sit for a while, talk, have another bite, talk some more, maybe order something else because apparently you have now moved in. It feels less like, “Your table is reserved for 90 minutes, please begin evacuating at minute 83,” and more like eating is allowed to be part of life.

We talk about protein grams, seed oils, vitamin D, glucose spikes, toxins, supplements, sleep trackers, zone two cardio, cold plunges, saunas, and whatever powder the Internet has decided must be placed in coffee this month. I am interested in plenty of those things. But sometimes I wonder whether we are obsessing over optimizing every molecule while forgetting that humans are social animals.

Family matters. Friendship matters. Sitting around a table matters. Knowing the people in your neighborhood matters. Having places where you feel welcome matters. Eating slowly enough that you actually taste your food probably matters too, although this remains challenging when you have children asking for a snack while actively eating dinner.

Mike Santos has created a place that feels less like a restaurant designed by a hospitality group after a sixteen-page branding exercise and more like somewhere people genuinely want to hang out. There is warmth to it. The staff seems happy to see you. Families are there. Friends are there. People linger. Nobody seems to be performing “community.” It just happens.

Of course, none of this would matter very much if the food were terrible. “Come for the human connection, stay because we burned the fish” is not an especially durable business model. Fortunately, the food is fantastic. There are vegetables. There is seafood. There are things to share. There are dishes I would prefer my kids not discover because then I have to share them.

And they use quality ingredients, which matters to me. I spend a ridiculous portion of my professional life talking about what we feed children, and while I am not expecting every restaurant meal to resemble a wellness retreat in Ojai, I appreciate places where the food feels thoughtfully made from actual food. The bar is surprisingly low in 2026. If I can identify the ingredients without a chemistry degree, we are already making progress.

What is also impressive is that Barra Santos recently expanded into a much larger space, and somehow it still feels like Barra Santos. That is harder than it sounds. Plenty of restaurants start as charming little neighborhood places, become successful, expand, and suddenly you are eating beneath a neon sign that says GOOD VIBES ONLY while scanning a QR code to order a $19 side of carrots. Growth can remove the exact thing that made a place special. So far, this feels like the opposite. They have more room, but the personality is still there.

And that is really why I wanted to write this.

I have eaten at a lot of restaurants. Great ones. Expensive ones. Michelin-starred ones. Down home, cheap ones. Restaurants where someone has explained the emotional journey of a beet to me before allowing me to eat it. There are restaurants with technically better service, more elaborate food, more expensive wine lists, or napkins folded into increasingly ambitious geometric shapes. But getting everything right at once—food, price, atmosphere, warmth, consistency, family-friendliness, and that impossible-to-quantify feeling that makes you want to return—is incredibly difficult.

Barra Santos somehow does it.

I think we need more places like this, and I think we need to support them when we find them. Not just restaurants. The local coffee shop. The farmers market stand. The little store where someone knows your kid’s name. The park where the same families gather every Saturday. The places that slowly become part of the architecture of your life.

We spend so much time asking how to make our families healthier. Sometimes the answer might be kale. Sometimes it is sleep. Sometimes it is getting your child outside and confiscating the iPad before YouTube raises them.

And sometimes, maybe, it is finding places where you can sit with people you love, eat really good food, have a glass of wine at five in the afternoon, and watch someone bring your kid an extra frisée salad because they remembered.

Disclaimer: As I mentioned above, this is not a paid promotion. Mike Santos and Barra Santos did not pay me, ask me, or encourage me to write this, and I have no idea whether they will even see it. Most of you also live nowhere near this restaurant, so as a marketing strategy, this would be a pretty questionable one. That said, if you are in the Los Angeles area, I would absolutely recommend checking it out. I wanted to share this because I love supporting places that I think deserve to be supported, but even more than that, I think the bigger point is the message. This is really about community, connection, family, hospitality, and the kinds of places that make us feel a little more human. Barra Santos just happens to stand out to me as a great example of that.

Dr. Gator

Disclaimer: As I mentioned above, this is not a paid promotion. Mike Santos and Barra Santos did not pay me, ask me, or encourage me to write this, and I have no idea whether they will even see it. Most of you also live nowhere near this restaurant, so as a promotional strategy, this would be a pretty questionable one. If you are in the Los Angeles area, though, I would absolutely recommend checking it out. I wanted to share this because I love supporting places that deserve to be supported, but even more than that, I think the bigger point is the message: community, connection, family, hospitality, and creating places where people actually want to gather. Barra Santos just happens to stand out to me as a great example of all of that. And, as always, if Mike happens to see this and wants to send over a free appetizer the next time I’m there, I probably won’t say no haha. I do have journalistic standards, but apparently they have a price, and that price may be Portuguese appetizers.