You Don't Have to Leave Soquel for a Proper Night Out Anymore

For years, if you wanted a real dinner in Soquel, meaning something beyond a taco truck or a pizza box, the unspoken rule was to point your car toward Capitola or keep driving into downtown Santa Cruz. Soquel Village was where you went for antiques and a glass of something poured creekside, not where you built an evening around a meal. That rule quietly stopped being true, and most people who live here haven't caught up to it.

The reason is a chef named Brad Briske, and the fact that he now runs two restaurants within walking distance of each other on the same short stretch of the village.

The Second Kitchen

Briske opened Home in a converted bungalow on North Main Street back when the space had already cycled through two prior restaurants, Theo's and Main Street Garden Cafe. It became one of the better tables in the county almost immediately, the kind of place where the wine list runs through Birichino, Windy Oaks, Storrs, Bargetto, Beauregard, and Sones, all Santa Cruz Mountains labels, and where a boar's head still hangs over the fireplace from the room's earlier life.

What changed this year is that Briske didn't stop at one restaurant. He opened Home Away as a fast-casual sibling, close enough to share the same gardens and the same dry-aging program. Where Home leans into pasta and slow-cooked plates, Home Away does hyper-local dishes at a quicker pace, oysters, and beef cheek empanadas made in collaboration with his brother-in-law Diego Felix, who runs Collectivo Felix in Santa Cruz. The two spots aren't a chain expansion into a new neighborhood. They're one chef doubling down on the same two blocks.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A restaurant opening in a new part of town tells you the town is spreading out. A second restaurant from the same kitchen, a few doors from the first, tells you the existing core has enough foot traffic and enough repeat diners to support two concepts instead of one. Soquel Village didn't get bigger this year. It got thicker.

What's Actually Walking Distance

It helps to see the corridor laid out plainly, because "Soquel Village" gets used loosely to describe anything with a Soquel address, including spots that are genuinely a drive away.

Bargetto is the anchor that predates all of it. It's the longest continuously operating winery in Santa Cruz County, still run by the third generation of the Bargetto family, with a tasting loft that looks out over Soquel Creek and a courtyard that allows dogs. It was pouring wine on North Main Street decades before anyone imagined a second Briske restaurant would sit a few blocks away.

Discretion Brewing, by contrast, sits on 41st Avenue, closer to the Capitola line than to the antique shops. It's a fine destination in its own right, solar-powered, dog-friendly, with a Monday Keg of Honor pour and Tuesday trivia at 6:30, but it's not part of the same walkable stretch. If you're planning a night that starts at Home and ends with a nightcap, Discretion is a drive, not a stroll.

The Fundraiser That Keeps Pulling the Corridor Together

The one event that consistently ties the walkable village core to the farther-flung 41st Avenue spots is A Taste of Soquel, the annual food and music benefit that the Congregational Church of Soquel and the Capitola/Soquel Chamber of Commerce co-host for Second Harvest Food Bank. This year's event lands on September 26, 2026, at the church on Soquel Drive.

In past years, the pour list has read like a map of every winery and brewery within a short drive of the village, Discretion Brewing, Soquel Vineyards, Wargin Wines, Bargetto Winery, VinoCruz, and Poetic Cellars among them, alongside cider from Everett Family Farm. Restaurant tables have historically included Home itself, plus Café Cruz, Sawasdee Thai Cuisine, and other neighborhood kitchens. It's the one afternoon a year when the antique-row wine crowd and the 41st Avenue beer crowd end up in the same folding chairs.

That's worth knowing if you've filed Taste of Soquel under "the church fundraiser" and stopped paying attention. It's still the clearest single snapshot of who's actually pouring and cooking in this town in any given year, updated annually, and free to attend without a ticket if you just want to walk through.

Where the Walkable Part Ends

Soquel's other fixed point sits uphill from all of it. Anna Jean Cummings Park, a 95-acre county park next to Soquel High School on Old San Jose Road, is better known locally as Blue Ball Park, thanks to Skyballs, an art installation of four concrete spheres, each 8 to 9 feet across, that artists Steve Gillman and Katherine Keefer built in 2001 to look like they're rolling down the hill. The land itself carries an older story too. It was once part of the Rancho Soquel land grant held by Martina Castro in 1833, before it became O'Neill Ranch and eventually county parkland in 1989.

Behind the park and the high school, the Anna Jean Loop Trail runs 1.8 miles with about 285 feet of elevation gain, an easy climb that opens up to ocean views at the top and stays dog-friendly the whole way. It's the kind of trail you can do before work or after dinner, and it has nothing to do with the restaurant corridor two miles away. That's the honest shape of Soquel right now: a compact, walkable food and wine core clustered around North Main Street, and a separate hillside park and trail system that you drive to, not stroll to.

A September Worth Planning Around

If you're trying to make sense of what's actually new here versus what's simply always been good, September gives you a clean test case:

• Try Home Away first if you haven't, since it's the newest addition and the fastest way to taste what Briske is doing without committing to a full dinner service
• Walk North Main Street on a weekend afternoon and treat Bargetto's tasting room and the antique dealers as one outing, since they sit within the same few blocks
• Show up to A Taste of Soquel on September 26 if only to see which wineries and restaurants are pouring this year, since the lineup shifts slightly each cycle
• Save Discretion Brewing for a separate trip rather than trying to fold it into a North Main Street evening, since the drive makes it its own destination
• Take the Anna Jean Loop Trail in the morning before the day heats up, since the climb is short but exposed

None of this requires leaving town. That's the part worth sitting with. Soquel spent years being described as the quiet inland cousin to Capitola's beach scene, a place you passed through for antiques on your way somewhere else. A chef with two restaurants on the same street, a winery that's outlasted a century, and a park nickname that's stuck for two decades suggest otherwise.

If you're weighing a move within Santa Cruz County, or you already call Soquel home and are curious what a property here is actually worth given how the neighborhood is filling in, Megan Lyng has spent two decades reading exactly these kinds of shifts across the county. Let's Connect.