Walk from Home to Home Away and you will not need directions. Chef Brad Briske's fine-dining restaurant sits at 3101 N. Main St. His new counter-service spot, opened in the same block, occupies the old VinoCruz storefront on Soquel Drive. The distance between them is short enough that Briske splits his own day between the two, cooking dinner service at Home while overseeing lunch and early evening at Home Away, then walking the food over himself when the smaller kitchen can't keep up.

That short walk is the story. Not because a chef opened a second restaurant, plenty of chefs do that, but because of where he put it. Soquel Village is compact enough that its biggest restaurant news, its only real pedestrian infrastructure project, and most of what residents actually do on a Saturday all happen inside the same couple of blocks. If you already live here, that compression is worth understanding, because it explains why the Village feels different from Capitola or the 41st Avenue corridor even though they're a few minutes apart by car.

The Restaurant That Split in Two

Briske and his wife, Linda Ritten, opened Home in 2016 in a building that had previously housed Theo's and Main Street Garden & Café. Over the past decade it became known for whole-animal butchery, house-cured salami and prosciutto, and ingredients sourced almost entirely from Central Coast farms. It is not a place that needed a second location to prove itself.

What it needed, according to Briske, was a format that didn't fit the fine-dining room. He and Ritten had been kicking around ideas for years: a counter where regulars could grab something fast, a place to sell the charcuterie and fresh pasta they used to sell at farmers markets during the pandemic, a spot with a lower price point and a shorter time commitment than a full dinner at Home. The plan was originally to open by early summer 2025 in the former VinoCruz space. It didn't happen until late November 2025, and the full Wednesday-through-Sunday schedule didn't start until December 3, 2025. Good Times, the local alt-weekly, credited the delay to permitting rather than construction, noting the proprietors of Home had to clear a long list of county requirements before they could open the doors.

Once it opened, Home Away turned out to be less a wine bar and more a food counter with beer, wine, and cider attached. Briske put it plainly:

"I didn't want it to be a bar like a wine bar, more like a food bar."

The menu draws on the same sourcing as Home but at a different register: whipped lardo made from Stemple Creek pork fat, a raw bar with Marin Miyagi oysters, a kimchi Caesar with sea lettuce vinaigrette, and duck cassoulet finished in the main kitchen and carried over daily because the smaller space has no full kitchen of its own. Briske's brother-in-law, chef Diego Felix of Collectivo Felix in Santa Cruz, contributed beef cheek empanadas to the opening menu, a nod to the kind of informal collaboration that's easier to pull off when your second restaurant is a five-minute walk from your first.

The Corner That Wouldn't Sit Empty

The space Home Away moved into has changed hands more than once in the past few years. It was VinoCruz until owners Muriel D'Agostino and Nicolas Lossky, who ran Adorable French Bakery out of area farmers markets, bought it and renamed it Adorable French Bakery at VinoCruz. That arrangement didn't last either. D'Agostino and Lossky eventually moved their bakery into a standalone location in Scotts Valley, in the former Malone's Grille space, which is what freed up the storefront for Briske and Ritten.

Three concepts through one address in a handful of years isn't a sign of a struggling corner. It's a sign of how little commercial space Soquel Village actually has to work with. There's no strip of vacant storefronts absorbing new restaurant concepts here. When a well-known operator wants to expand, they're negotiating for whatever becomes available on the same two or three streets, because that's the entire footprint of the Village core.

The Trail That Ends at the Same Corner

The other piece of recent Soquel infrastructure runs through the identical stretch of ground. Santa Cruz County Parks finished building a creekside multi-use trail connecting Heart of Soquel Plaza to the pedestrian bridge behind Soquel Elementary School and on to Main Street in 2021. The project cost roughly three million dollars, paid for through a mix of Prop 68 park funding, the county's Measure G sales tax, and development impact fees, and it was built with an eye toward giving kids a safer walking and biking route to school along Soquel Creek.

Before the trail existed, Anita Gabriel, a Soquel Village business owner who organizes the annual Sip and Stroll Wine Walk, was candid about what it would and wouldn't accomplish. She told a local reporter covering the project that the trail would be great for kids but doubted it would bring new shoppers into the Village, pointing to parking fees as a bigger obstacle for foot traffic than a lack of creek access.

She wasn't wrong that a walking path alone doesn't create commerce. But the trail's endpoint on Main Street sits inside the same tight radius where Home Away opened four years later. The Village didn't get bigger. It got a bit easier to move through on foot, right at the spot where its most talked-about business decision would eventually land.

What's a Short Walk, What's a Short Drive

Once you're oriented around that core, it's worth knowing what's actually within it and what only sounds like it is.

Inside the walkable Village core:

• Home and Home Away, a block apart on Main Street and Soquel Drive
• Anna Jean Cummings Park, with picnic tables, a playground, and open grass a short walk from the plaza
• Heart of Soquel Plaza and its creekside trail

A short drive or ride from the core:

• Discretion Brewing, on 41st Avenue, hosting regular live music
• Moe's Alley, a longtime concert venue booking national touring acts
• Bargetto Winery, which runs its own music series alongside tastings
• Soquel Vineyards and Poetic Cellars, both tucked into the hills along narrow roads that reward the drive with quieter tasting rooms
• Soquel Demonstration State Forest's Flow Trail, a multi-section mountain bike route through redwood and Douglas fir that's become one of the more popular rides in the Santa Cruz Mountains

The pattern holds. Everything that requires a car sits in the hills or along the avenue. Everything that doesn't sits inside the same two blocks that now hold two restaurants under one ownership and the county's only real investment in pedestrian access.

The One-Block Village

None of this means Soquel Village is small in a limiting sense. It means the Village operates less like a commercial district that grows by adding storefronts and more like a handful of addresses that keep getting reused by the same operators and the same infrastructure projects. A chef who wanted to expand didn't leave the neighborhood, he moved half a block. A county project meant to improve creek access happened to terminate at the same corner. That's not a coincidence so much as a description of how little ground there is to cover here.

If you've lived in Soquel for a while, you already knew the Village was small. What's worth knowing now is that it's staying small on purpose, in the sense that the people investing in it, whether that's a restaurant owner or a county parks department, keep choosing to build inward rather than out.

EF Homes keeps an eye on changes like this because we work in these neighborhoods every day, not just when someone's ready to buy or sell. If there's a corner of Soquel or the surrounding county you're curious about, reach out and we'll tell you what we know.