Here is what the night before Thanksgiving looked like at Strange Beast in Ventura, from behind the camera.
We were out in California over Thanksgiving to see family, which is the kind of trip where the good meals get planned first and everything else falls in around them. This one started in Santa Barbara and ended in downtown Ventura, and both stops belong to the same people.
It started at The Good Lion in Santa Barbara
We walked into The Good Lion on State Street with no plan, tucked into the ground floor of the historic Granada Theatre building, and we were not ready for it. The room is small and warm and completely sure of itself. The menu rotates every week around whatever is actually in season on the Central Coast, with produce coming in from regional organic farms like Mud Creek Ranch, Earthtrine Farms and Glen Annie Organics, and the bar builds its own syrups rather than reaching for anything off a shelf.
That sounds like a talking point until you taste it. Nothing arrives sweet in the way bar drinks usually arrive sweet. It is a bar built by people who care about the part of the craft the guest never sees, and it shows up in the glass.
I spend a lot of my working life photographing hospitality, so I have sat at a lot of bars with a camera. This one earned the attention. We got talking, and that conversation is why the rest of this post exists: Good Lion invited us down the coast to Ventura for a media dine at Strange Beast, with the holiday build-out up. Everything below is that night.
The people behind it
Good Lion Hospitality is Brandon Ristaino and Misty Orman, a married couple who moved up from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara specifically to open the first bar. Brandon had close to two decades in restaurants behind him when they opened The Good Lion in December 2014. Misty designs the spaces, and her fingerprints are the reason each room feels considered rather than decorated. She also curates the sake program at Strange Beast.
The sustainability side is not a marketing layer either. The Good Lion was the first craft cocktail bar on California's Central Coast to earn California Green Business Program certification, and the group took home a Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award in 2017 for its green initiatives. Brandon has said publicly that he hires for kindness and integrity because the skills can be taught. You can feel that policy from a barstool, and you can feel it in an invitation extended to two people who walked in off the street.
Ten years on from that first room, the group has grown to nine spots across Santa Barbara, Montecito, Ventura and San Luis Obispo.
Strange Beast, downtown Ventura
Strange Beast sits at 394 East Main Street in downtown Ventura, in the 1924 Bank of Italy building, right next door to its sister bar Bank of Italy Cocktail Trust. It opened in February 2023 as the group's fifth concept, built in partnership with the team behind Sama Sama Kitchen, and it is best described the way Brandon describes it: a cocktail experience disguised as an izakaya.
We came up Main Street in the late afternoon to a facade wrapped in red garland, and inside the room had been handed over to the season. String lights strung across the ceiling. Tinsel along the rail. A row of skeletons standing watch along the glowing bottle shelves. Underneath all of it the room is dark and moody, all black and deep wood, with an enormous eye watching the booths from the back wall and woven pendant lamps hanging over the bar. It is Japanese pop culture and folklore filtered through a serious cocktail bar, and it is a genuinely good room to photograph because the light is low and warm and every surface has something to say.
What we drank and ate
The drinks lean on yuzu, plum, shiso and green tea, and the sake list is the one Misty built, so it rewards asking for a recommendation instead of guessing. There is natural wine and beer as well if the table is split. The seasonal menu is built fresh each year rather than licensed from somebody else's Christmas bar concept, which is the part I find genuinely impressive: every venue in the group gets its own theme and its own original cocktails, and the pop-ups run through New Year's Day.
The food comes out of the Sama Sama kitchen, which carries a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and it is built to share. Crisp chicken karaage with lemon, rice bowls under a soft egg, hand rolls, the wings. Order a spread and let it land as it comes.
The weekly programming is worth planning around too. There is karaoke on Wednesdays, hand rolls and highballs on Tuesdays, dim sum on Thursdays, and a rotating ramen on Sundays that regularly sells out. Late night happy hour starts at nine.
Worth knowing
- Check the hours before you go. The venue site and the group site list them slightly differently, so confirm on the day.
- Sit at the bar if you can. The best light in the room is there, and so is the conversation.
- Go on a programmed night. Wednesday karaoke and Sunday ramen both change the character of the room in a good way.
- Make it two stops. Bank of Italy Cocktail Trust is literally next door in the same building, so you can do an Italian aperitivo and a Japanese izakaya in one evening without moving your car.
- Go for the holidays if you can. The build-out was already up the night before Thanksgiving and runs through New Year's Day.
- Pair it with Santa Barbara. Strange Beast is about forty minutes from The Good Lion, and doing both across a weekend is the best way to understand what this group is actually doing.
Follow along
- Strange Beast: @strangebeastbar on Instagram, and strangebeastbar.com
- The Good Lion: @thegoodlionbar on Instagram, Facebook, and goodlioncocktails.com
- Good Lion Hospitality: @goodlionhospitality on Instagram, TikTok, and goodlionhospitality.com
We will be back for more of their rooms, and there are plenty left on the list. If you are looking for the best cocktail bar in Ventura and you want something with more personality than the average downtown room, Strange Beast is the one we send people to.
I shoot restaurant, hospitality and bar photography on location, in Florida and wherever the work takes us. Get in touch to talk about a project.
Photography by Blake Wisz at Strange Beast, Ventura, 26 November 2025. We were hosted by Good Lion Hospitality for a media dine. See more travel photography.