Frank and Natalie Ostini bought the Casmalia Hitching Post in 1952 near what today is Vandenberg Air Force Base (then Camp Cooke). Frank Ostini was a carpenter by trade looking for a new career. He spent three months with the former owner learning how to cook over an open flame, and that was that. The Ostini family ran the original Hitching Post with their children for several decades before opening Hitching Post II in Buellton in 1986. A few years later, in 1993, the brothers dissolved their partnership. Son Frank Ostini kept the Buellton restaurant. “I wanted to be closer to wine country and offer a slightly more varied, contemporary menu,” Ostini told me.
