Dozens of customers packed Trancas Country Market on Pacific Coast Highway on Thursday night to say goodbye to Kristy Apana, the owner of Kristy's Wood Oven & Wine Bar, before her restaurant closes for good next Wednesday, September 9, after 15 years serving the Malibu community. Some celebrities turned out for the send-off too, joining longtime regulars in thanking Apana for a run that outlasted wildfires, mudslides and a pandemic.
The going-away party was organized by longtime customer Tara Kohlberg, giving both everyday neighbors and celebrity regulars a chance to thank Apana in person, according to CBS News Los Angeles. Apana told the station that a combination of factors pushed her to close: her lease was expiring, and she had simply absorbed too many compounding disruptions over the years, from the 2018 Woolsey Fire to the COVID-19 pandemic to the recent Palisades Fire, which she described as a particularly hard final blow before lease renewal talks fell through.
From a Chili Cook-Off Trailer to a Malibu Institution
Apana's roots in Malibu's food scene go back further than the restaurant itself. As CBS News reported on the story, Apana first built her local following running a pizza trailer at the Malibu Chili Cook-Off before opening Kristy's Wood Oven & Wine Bar in early 2011. The restaurant originally sat on a bluff overlooking Zuma Beach within the Malibu Country Inn property, a coastal perch that made it a fixture for beachgoers long before it moved.
In 2017, the restaurant relocated to its current address at 30745 Pacific Coast Highway inside Trancas Country Market, taking over the former footprint of Le Village Cafe. That move put Kristy's in the heart of a shopping complex that has itself served as a community anchor during past disasters — in December 2018, Trancas Country Market businesses, including what was then Kristy's Village Cafe, hosted a “Locals Night” offering complimentary food, wine and donated goods to residents holding FEMA or insurance claims after losing homes in the Woolsey Fire, according to reporting from Patch at the time.
A Restaurant That Doubled as a Relief Station
That instinct to open her doors during a crisis wasn't new for Apana. During the 2018 Woolsey Fire, she paid out of pocket to feed displaced residents and first responders, and she later delivered meals to healthcare workers and staff during COVID-19 lockdowns, the same CBS Los Angeles report notes. That fire hit her especially hard: Apana had already lost another restaurant she operated in Malibu to the Woolsey Fire, which destroyed more than 1,600 structures across Los Angeles and Ventura counties, while Kristy's narrowly survived both the flames and the mudslides that followed, according to a January profile in Sports Illustrated.
Kristy's also built an unlikely bond with the Los Angeles Rams. Per that same Sports Illustrated account, general manager Les Snead became a regular after a Pacific Coast Highway shutdown once brought his family into the restaurant, and the relationship grew from there, with Apana supplying the team's staff with Hawaiian Spam musubi drawn from her Maui heritage alongside the restaurant's standard coastal cafe fare.
What's Next for Apana
Once the Trancas Country Market doors close for the last time, Apana does not plan to disappear from Malibu's food scene entirely. She intends to pivot to catering, per CBS Los Angeles, while keeping the door open to opening a new restaurant space down the line. For now, though, the send-off this week was less about what comes next and more about marking the end of a restaurant that, for 15 years, doubled as one of West Malibu's steadiest sources of comfort — through fire, flood, and a pandemic that tested every small business on the coast.
