The Butler’s Pantry

The hostess gift is one of the small problems of summer entertaining that polite people never quite solve. In Santa Barbara, where the most casual dinner sits down the road from a working vineyard, the default offering — a good bottle of wine — is rarely the right one. Your host has better. They have a cellar of it. What follows is the note we send to our private clients each year when summer travel begins: a working pâtissier's guide to arriving at someone's home with something they will actually remember by Tuesday. With three notes on etiquette, a few thoughts on shipping ahead, and the box we send most.

Mother's Day is the gentlest holiday on the Santa Barbara calendar. It arrives quietly, asks little, and passes by Sunday evening. Memorial Day weekend is something else entirely — the moment the summer hosting season unlocks, the al fresco tables finally go out on the lawn, and the city's quietest hostesses begin a ten-week run of Saturday dinners. What follows is the guide we send our private clients each year in mid-May: a pâtissier's notes on the first long dinner of summer, in three movements — the Saturday dinner, the Sunday lunch by the pool, and the small ribboned box pressed into a houseguest's hand on Monday morning.