For high class French/Californian food, the best choice is Bouchon, which serves what they have named “wine country cuisine.” The Bouchon website explains that:

“Only the freshest, high quality local ingredients find their way into the Bouchon Santa Barbara kitchen. Working closely with local produce growers, fishermen and game ranchers we have created a menu we believe captures the unique spirit of California’s Central Coast.”

Bouchon’s speciality is duck breast, and they also serve rack of lamb, venison, and seafood, with an unequaled selection of Santa Barbara County wines.

Another restaurant of deservedly good repute is Louie’s California Bistro. It is located on the first floor of the the historic Upham Hotel, which is housed in an old Victorian built in 1871. At Louie’s, you can savor epicurean California cuisine–paired with Santa Barbara County, Napa, or Sonoma Valley wines–on its attractive porch or in the cozy wood-floored dining room, served up with friendly elegance.

The Seagrass Restaurant is owned by Mitchell Sjerven, who is also the proprietor of Bouchon. Seagrass serves fresh seafood and the evening specials all conveniently have suggested wine pairings of, for the most part, local wines. Here is a description from the website:

“The ambience at Seagrass was designed to be incredibly easy on the eyes and ears. Beautiful Seagrass wall covering, plantation shutters and whitened wainscoting are enjoyed in luxurious chairs, while high vaulted ceilings and carpet underneath keep the noise level to a comfortable hum.”

The moderately priced Italian restaurant Ca Dario was chosen by locals as the best restaurant overall in Santa Barbara in 2010. It has toothsome Italian food and a slap-up wine list offering both Californian and Italian wines.

For atmosphere at family-friendly price, it’s hard to beat The Breakwater Restaurant. Located in the harbor, their food is good (I recommend ordering the Catch of the Day) and the view of the marina from their terrace is stunning . This is a popular breakfast spot, but it’s also a good place to go for lunch or dinner. After a satisfying meal, you can enjoy a walk  along the breakwater and take in views of the marina and the Pacific Ocean.

If Mexican food is your thing , La Playa Azul Cafe is a moderately priced restaurant with sun-bathed patio and an unresistable menu of Mexican standards and more unusual fare such as “callo de acha con cebolla y jalapenos,” which is scallops sauteed with onions, tomatoes, tomatillos, and jalapenos. They also make great margaritas.

Another place popular with locals is a funky little taco stand known as La Super Rica Taqueria. It is renowned for being a haunt of Julia Child’s. She even extolled its virtues it in a piece she wrote about Santa Barbara for National Geographic’s Traveler, in which she named La Super Rica, “one of the most authentic Mexican home-cooking restaurants around.”

If you visit Santa Barbara, one place you should not overlook is Stearns Wharf. The best place to eat on the wharf is the Santa Barbara Shellfish Company, a crab and shellfish shop were you can get steamed crab or lobster with a pint of draft beer to enjoy on a picnic table at the end of the wharf. If you just want to grab a burger, the best place to go is Char West, also located on Stearns Wharf. They have tasty grilled burgers and a much better ocean view than a burger joint has a right to.

The best place to go for a good cup of coffee is The French Press, conveniently located on State Street, Santa Barbara’s main drag. The French Press simply makes the best cup of coffee in town.

One local treat you must try is a McConnell’s ice cream cone. If you’re in the mood for something cold, sweet and delicious, McConnell’s in the place: they make the best ice cream I have ever tasted anywhere.

As far as nightspots go, I suggest Joe’s Cafe. Joe’s has been a Santa Barbara institution since 1928. It is a massive place with great tasting, down to earth food, a raucous atmosphere, and the stiffest drinks in town.

Well, I think that is at least a good outline of a very important subject for visitors to Santa Barbara, or any other town for that matter: whare the best places to eat are. If you’d like more free information about this idyllic city located just 90 miles north of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara California, just click on the link.

http://www.squidoo.com/Beautiful-Santa-Barbara

Often said to be the most lovely small city on the California Coast, and to have the “most beautiful downtown in the world” Santa Barbara is a stunning example of successful planned development. During the city’s development , deliberate choices were made to stick to a certain architectural style and a policy of deliberately limiting growth in order to protect for the purpose of protecting the city’s livability and saleability as a tourist destination. In 1922, an association of community activists calling themselves the “Civic Arts Association” began promoting an architectural style called “Spanish Colonial Revival”–a Mediterranean style incorporating Andalusian, Moroccan and Italian elements–through their “Plans and Planting Committee.” They announced that:

“Our committee aims to preserve the city’s early nineteenth-century Hispanic buildings, remodel or replace the non-Hispanic buildings with Spanish Colonial ones, use this imagery for all new buildings, encourage landscaping compatible with this image, and use planning tools to maintain the scale and size of the community.”

Of course, Santa Barbara’s attractiveness is not solely due to its architecture. located as it is between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the “American Riviera” is also blessed with scenic beauty and a mild climate often called “Mediterranean.” However, it was a natural catastrophe –a devastating earthquake that devastated the downtown commercial district –that played a major role in the city’s eventually becoming the beautiful locale it is in the present day .

The quake struck at 6:44 in the morning of June 28, 1925. Most residential buildings survived the temblor more of less intact, but the downtown commercial district experienced extensive damage. fortuitously , owing to the fact that most residents were still at home when the tremor struck , there were only thirteen fatalities .

The timing of the quake was fortuitous in another sense for the Civic Arts Association. The architectural style they had been championing was not only well adapted to the local weather and a good match for the Mission and Santa Barbara’s old Spanish adobes, more significantly to their fellow Santa Barbarans, the Spanish Colonial structures that were already standing had held up well in the earthquake. This fact increased support for the idea of creating a city modeled on the Spanish Colonial Revival architectural style.

Even before the earthquake, a “Community Drafting Room,” which offered design assistance to builders , had been set up by the Plans and Planting Committee, and an “Architectural Advisory Committee” had been instituted by the city government. straight off after the temblor , the first formal Architectural Board of Review in the United States was established by Santa Barbara .

As part of the rebuilding effort, the Community Drafting Room provided free plans for all types of shops and buildings, mostly in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. inside a year, over 2,000 projects had been approved by the Architectural Board of Review and, with the new structures white stucco walls and red tile roofs, Santa Barbara had been metamorphosed into a Spanish city located , not altogether incongruously, in Southern California.

The crowning achievement of the rebuilding and beautification drive was the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, completed in 1929. The courthouse, which has been called “the most beautiful public building in the United States,” is an elegant example of the Spanish Colonial Revival style and affords stunning views of Santa Barbara’s red-tiled rooftops, the Santa Ynez Mountains, the ocean, and the Channel Islands from its eighty-five-foot-high clock tower.

The main reason that the views from the clock tower are so impressive is that building height limitations first set in the late thirties have been maintained up to the present . The highest building in the city is the eight-story Granada Theater, built in 1924, before the height limitations had been put into place . Today, commercial buildings cannot exceed four stories or sixty feet, and multifamily residential buildings can be no taller than three stories or forty-five feet.

Another measure that has helped to keep Santa Barbara livable is its zoning code, established in 1930. Rather than having single-use zoning districts, as is typical in most cities, Santa Barbara has a pyramid scheme that allows residences in the same area as other-use buildings. Corner grocery stores can still be found in residential neighborhoods, and you can see single-family homes and apartment buildings standing next to each other .

The City has also been successful in keeping its downtown area alive as a popular option for shoppers and diners who have not all been siphoned off by sprawling suburban malls, as they have in so many other towns and cities. Six blocks of Santa Barbara’s main shopping street, State Street, have wide, landscaped sidewalks, wooden benches and mid-block pedestrian crossings, while the street has been narrowed to only one lane each way. The purpose of these changes was to create a “Hispanic Drive-Through-Plaza” all the way down to the waterfront. It is not a problem to park your car and get around to all the downtown shops, restaurants and movie theaters on foot.

In 1973, a newly elected anti-development city council put in place a population limit of 85,000 residents within the city limits, and limited growth in the surrounding area by being sting in their granting of water meters to developers. In 1989, a measure limiting non-residential development to 3,000,000 square feet was adopted. The anti-growth measures of course have a downside–Santa Barbara is not a cheap place to buy property. But it also has been a successful economic strategy when you consider that one of Santa Barbara’s chief assets, and certainly its main tourist draw, is its scenic and architectural beauty .

Santa Barbara is an example of a city that has managed to make itself livable for residents and attractive to visitors by consciously choosing an architectural style that, while not exactly indigenous, is well suited to its climate and scenery. This has been a successful experiment which demonstrates that opting for ambiance over utility and pure market forces can be a smart economic choice that adds value to a city.

For more free information about this idyllic city located just 90 miles north of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara California, just click on the link.