Until last December, if you wanted to eat at Home, you waited until dark. The restaurant on North Main Street opens for dinner and closes for lunch, and for nine years that was the deal: Soquel Village had one destination kitchen, and it ran on an evening clock. Antique shops closed at five. The tasting rooms poured until the light went flat. And then the village went quiet until reservations started at 5pm.

That clock changed the week chef Brad Briske opened Home Away around the corner.

One Kitchen, Two Addresses

Home Away sits at 4901 Soquel Drive, in the space that used to hold the wine bar VinoCruz. It shares a kitchen supply chain with its sibling restaurant a few blocks over, open on Main Street since 2016. The gardens and dry aging at Home in Soquel supply its new neighboring sister spot Home Away. Same chef, same sourcing philosophy, same hyper-local ethos that made the original a name in the county. But the two restaurants don't compete for the same hour of the day. Home Away is a casual daytime bar and market serving seasonal small plates, soups, salads and local beer, wine and cider. The soft opening led into a real schedule. The new spot expanded to a Wednesday-Sunday schedule starting Dec. 3 and added grab-and-go items in January.

Briske has been direct about why he built it that way. The Dec. 3 grand opening fell the day after his birthday, and he called it "kinda like I got myself a new restaurant for my birthday." The gift wasn't a second dining room. It was a second shift.

What's actually on the menu tells you the split is deliberate, not just a smaller version of the same restaurant. Instead of full-kitchen dinner plates, Home Away serves dishes like duck cassoulet and butter beans for $21 and tripe with tomato demi-glace for $10, prepared in Home's main kitchen and brought over daily. The opening menu included a raw bar with Marin Miyagi oysters at $3.50 each, a vegan trumpet mushroom ceviche for $10, charcuterie plates with house-cured meats, chicken liver pâté, and house-marinated warm olives for $10. The collaborations reach outside the building too. Beef cheek empanadas are made in partnership with Diego Felix of Collectivo Felix, a Santa Cruz kitchen on Ingalls Street. The bar pours Tanuki Dry Farmhouse ciders from Robby Honda, whose wife Hannah happens to be Home's general manager.

Here's the version you can actually plan a week around:

That last row is the one worth sitting with. Home has been a fixture since chef Brad Briske opened Home in 2016 with his wife, Linda Ritten, and became known for his focus on hyperlocal, organic and seasonal ingredients from the Central Coast. For most of that run, the village's best-known kitchen simply wasn't open when the rest of the neighborhood was out running errands. Now it is.

Why a Second Shift Changes More Than a Menu

Soquel Village is small enough that one anchor's hours set the rhythm for everyone around it. When the anchor only opened at 5, there was no reason to plan a weekday stop in the village unless you were already headed to dinner. Antiquing, wine tasting, and coffee happened on their own separate schedules, disconnected from each other, because nothing in the village was pulling foot traffic through the middle of the day.

Home Away closes that gap. A resident can now build an actual weekday loop instead of a single-purpose dinner trip, and the rest of the corridor was already built for exactly that kind of wandering.

A version of that loop, if you're doing it this week:

• Coffee at The Ugly Mug, an independent shop known for its coffee and a comfortable spot to sit with a laptop
• A slow pass through the antique row along Soquel Drive and Main Street, where the shops keep the kind of inventory that doesn't show up twice
• A newer stop at The Multi Shoppe on South Main Street, a vintage clothing and glassware shop that opened its brick and mortar in September 2022
• Lunch at Home Away, timed around whatever's come out of Home's kitchen that day
• A tasting at Soquel Vineyards, whose tasting room sits in the village itself rather than up a mountain road

None of that loop existed as a practical daytime plan a year ago, because the last stop on it, or the first, depending on your route, simply wasn't open.

The Antique Row Nobody Renamed

The antique shops deserve their own mention because they've been doing the quiet, unglamorous work of giving Soquel Drive a daytime identity long before Home Away showed up. Locals already know this, but it's worth saying plainly: this stretch has been an antiquing destination for longer than most of the county's newer food press has bothered to notice. The shops don't rotate through trend cycles. They just keep restocking, which is why regulars treat the row as a rotating inventory worth checking every few weeks rather than a one-time browse.

The Multi Shoppe is the newest entrant, and it reads differently from the older antique stores: less formal furniture and glassware, more vintage clothing and decor, the kind of curated secondhand mix that pulls a slightly younger crowd into a corridor that's historically skewed toward serious collectors. It's not competition for the antique row. It's a second reason to park on the same block.

The Park With the Rolling Balls

A few minutes off the main drag sits Anna Jean Cummings Park, which almost nobody in Soquel calls by that name. The nickname comes from a specific piece of public art. The park is locally known as "Blue Ball Park" due to an art installation of four giant 8-foot wide balls that appear to be rolling down the coastal prairie terrace. The park itself has been there since the turn of the century. The 95-acre park opened in the summer of 2001, with the upper field portion opening in February 2002, and it sits next to Soquel High School on Old San Jose Road.

It's the kind of park that works for a lot of different visits: a picnic table crowd on a weekend, a quiet lap for someone squeezing in a walk before work, a soccer ball on the upper field on a Tuesday evening. It doesn't get the same out-of-town attention as the beaches ten minutes away, which is exactly why it still feels like a neighborhood park rather than a stop on somebody's itinerary.

The Creek That Ties It to the Beach

The other thing that connects Soquel Village to the rest of the coast is easy to walk past without noticing. Soquel Creek runs through the heart of the village and drains out over the beach in Capitola. It's not a dramatic waterway. But it's the physical thread between the inland village, with its antique shops and wine tasting rooms, and the beach town everyone pictures when they hear "Capitola." The creek is the reason those two identities, quiet inland village and beach town, sit close enough to feel like the same afternoon rather than two separate trips.

The Weekend That Pulls the Whole Map Together

If you want to see everything above happen at once, in the same afternoon and on purpose, there's already a date on the calendar. A Taste of Soquel, a food and music benefit for Second Harvest Food Bank run as a project of the Congregational Church of Soquel, features Soquel restaurants, wineries, breweries, and live bands, and returns on September 26, 2026.

It's a fundraiser first, but it's also the one day a year when the village's normally scattered pieces, the restaurants, the wine, the antique row's foot traffic, all show up in the same block at the same hour. Everything else in this piece is a version of that same event stretched across an ordinary week: a village that used to run on one clock now running on two, and a community that benefits from the food bank's cut either way.

What Changed, in Plain Terms

None of this is a claim that Soquel Village transformed overnight. The antique shops were already there. The park's been there since 2001. The creek hasn't moved. What changed is narrower and more specific: one restaurant split its hours into two addresses, and that single decision gave the rest of the village's daytime economy, the coffee shop, the tasting room, the vintage store, a reason to be visited together instead of in isolation. That's the kind of shift that doesn't show up in a neighborhood description. It shows up in whether you can actually plan a Tuesday around it.

If you're weighing what a move to Soquel or a nearby stretch of the county might look like, beyond the food and the antiquing, Ryan Fontana works this part of Santa Cruz County day in and day out and can walk you through it neighborhood by neighborhood.