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JOURNAL
LOCAL INTELLIGENCE
The blocks around Paso Robles City Park hold the most ambitious restaurants on this part of the Central Coast. That surprises people who assumed the food would follow the coastline. It follows the wine instead, and Paso has had money and attention flowing into it for two decades.
The park is the organizing device. Tasting rooms, restaurants, olive oil shops and wine bars sit around it and just off it, close enough together that you can spend an evening downtown without getting back in the car. That matters more here than usual, given what people are drinking.
Bakery culture starts early. Paso is up before the coast is, and a morning here is a legitimate reason to make the drive on its own. Breakfast downtown, tasting rooms out on 46 in the afternoon, dinner back around the park is the shape of a good day.
Reservations are worth making for weekends year-round and are close to mandatory during harvest in early fall, when the town fills with people who planned further ahead than you did. The dining rooms here are not large and the good ones book out.
Weather is the other thing to plan around. Paso is inland and it runs hot in summer, often thirty degrees above whatever Morro Bay is doing on the same afternoon. Patios are pleasant in the evening and punishing at two. Winter nights are cold in a way the coast is not, and the town is quiet and easy then.
From the coast it is roughly half an hour over Highway 46, a grade that is slow behind traffic and dark on the way home. Decide who is driving before dinner rather than after. Your local manager can tell you what has opened recently, since this is the one town in the county where that list changes fast enough to matter.