John Hornick — Chef’s Apprentice
Santa Barbara, California, knick-named the “American Riviera,” is a picturesque Pacific coast town where the Santa Ynez Mountains meet the Pacific Ocean. Famous for its red-tiled Spanish Colonial architecture, Mediterranean climate, upscale dining, and wine tasting, both at in-town tasting rooms and wineries only a short drive away, it’s one of the best towns in America for a weekend trip. Here’s a collection of Tastes and Toasts from our recent Travels to beautiful Santa Barbara to reunite with old friends.
Getting to Santa Barbara
We flew directly into the Santa Barbara airport. To book your trip to Santa Barbara, or anywhere, and to get good prices, use this Expedia box:
We used United points for this trip. If you have slightly fewer points than you need, you can buy enough to get you a free trip from United. If you want to stay in Marriott hotels and don’t have enough points, you can also buy more here.
We travel with only one bag and a backpack each. I have been using this Pathfinder bag for many years. It has a large compartment with top or bottom access, and a nylon panel can be unzipped to combine the soft upper compartment and the rigid lower. The whole bag is heavy duty, including the retractable handle and wheels, as proven by the fact that I have been using it for well over five years. It still looks new despite having been in many, many overhead luggage compartments, and Sarah just bought one because mine has served me so well for so long. What I like most about it is the pockets. I love pockets and it has many pockets both inside and out.
Where to Stay: Moxy Hotel Santa Barbara
This Moxy had an appropriate amount of funk, as all Moxys do, but it was especially important and appropriate for this Funk Zone location.
The lobby has a small bar at the check-in counter, various funky comfy chairs and art, snacks for sale, various games, like Jenga, checkers, and Connect 4, coffee, and several communal or private work spaces, where several guests were almost always doing exactly that.
There’s also a kitchen guests can use, which is apparently a holdover from the building’s hostel days, including a new stovetop and communal fridge. It also has a cool water machine that can fill your bottle with ambient, cold, or hot water, or even sparkling, at the push of a button.
The hotel also has a pool, which is small but hey, it’s a pool in the Funk Zone. Obligatory cornhole games flanked the pool’s glass safety fence, as did a ping pong table. Alas, no air hockey.
Bordering on State Street, the hotel is walking distance to everything, of which we took full advantage. We stayed in two different rooms, both of which have some designer’s idea of a bathroom/shower combo, which we didn’t like but it’s not a deal-breaker and it does use space efficiently. The same designer favors wall pegs over a closet and clothes bar, which is okay but foiled our ability to steal nice wooden hangers for home use.
Our first room had a king bed. The second had two queens and was larger than the first. Why did we have two different rooms? The first room was on ground level, with only top-down blinds. This meant that we could have either light in the room of privacy, but not both.
We opted for privacy, which meant that we could not be awakened by the sun, which we like. So we moved up to the second floor for the remaining nights.
The second floor had the same blinds but we opted for light and oblique sight lines over privacy.
We liked this Moxy, especially the location, and will probably stay here whenever we are Santa Barbara.
Shalhoob’s Funk Zone Patio
This was a great first stop on our visit to Santa Barbara. It has a big umbrellaed patio, tables and picnic tables, wine barrels as hightops, and stools to sit along the railing, watching the world go by.
We seemed to have started a trend because the great dog-friendly patio was pretty empty when we arrived but was almost full when we left, partially with guests’ canine friends.
This may have been because passersby (and maybe their dogs) saw the beautiful order of Chipotle Peach Rib Tips delivered to our barrel. It started at the next barrel. The guy was ordering at the counter when his girlfriend spotted our plate. She said “I want that!” Then he came back and she said so. He said “I just ordered and paid.” But she didn’t give up. So she went to the counter and arranged to change their order to rib tips.
The dish itself was a generous portion of perfectly grilled morsels of pork rib end tips glazed in a delicious Peach Chipotle barbecue sauce. As a plus, the rib tips sat on a bed of fries, thinly cut as all fries should be. Normally I only like mayo with fries (the Belgian way), but they were great with the glaze drizzled over the rib tips.
We also ordered the Little Gem Salad, which was a perfect fresh foil for the richness of the ribs.
Live music from the wine tasting room a couple of doors down (our next stop) enhanced our lunch experience. My only suggestion is to offer a local red wine (instead of French) and to serve the wine in glass, if possible on the patio. Great job!
La Lieff Winery
This female-owned Funk Zone winery tasting room with a dog friendly patio (alas, we had no dogs with us, to take advantage of the canine hospitality) was our first of many wine stops during our visit to Santa Barbara.
We shared two glasses of the excellent Reserve Grenache and the Valkyrie Grenache/Syrah while rocking in wooden rocking chairs and listening to live music on a beautiful September afternoon.
If you don’t want to limit yourself to only one wine, try one of the tasting flights.
Loquita
I call this fine dining tapas, with a polished cool modern open-kitchen vibe inside and lush Bougainvillea garden seating outside. Check our my tapas recipes on my Chef’s Apprentice YouTube channel in my Spain on a Small Plate series.
The bar is also exactly the kind of bar where we love to hang out, drink fine wine, and dine. It was a tough choice but we chose al fresco.
I had a fireplace view and Sarah had a firepit view, from a very private corner table. I usually mention the service later in my reviews but I’ll make an exception because our server was truly outstanding, one of the best anywhere, which was partly training and largely personality.
The wine selections were mostly Spanish, as you would expect, which is fine because we love Spanish wines, but we chose a local cab sauv. When in Rome.
The menu offers paellas (check out my Paella lesson on my Chef’s Apprentice YouTube channel or my How to Make Authentic Spanish Paella Like a Pro blog post) and large plates but we opted for small so we could try more dishes: tapas (small) and bocaditos (smaller). The first three, the first of which is a molecularly gastronomical homage to Adria’s late great El Bulli, was as interesting as it was tasty.
But we really loved the Croqueta de Seta, but what’s not to love: a deep fried pankoed béchamelish ball of porcini and truffle with a saffron aoli and a crispy nest of micro potato sticks. We wouldn’t let them take the plate until the last traces of potato nest were gone.
We also loved the Pan Con Tomate topped with boquerones, which improves on virtually every pintxos I ever saw in Spain because the bread base was thin, as it should be, which leaves more room for more pintxos.
The lamb chops with romesco were also excellent (check out my Lamb Chops Master Recipe).
We ended with the generous order of churros with three sauces. If you love Spanish food, go there.
Helena Avenue Bakery
One of the many great things about the Helena Avenue Bakery is that it can keep you happy all day long. Start your day here with breakfast, sitting on the umbrellaed patio under a beautiful old tree.
Stay long enough or come back a little later and it becomes the Santa Barbara Wine Collective, where you can sip wines to your heart’s delight in the same garden or inside on one of the comfy chairs or at the tasting bar.
We shared a tasty ham and cheese breakfast croissant, which perfectly separated into flaky layers, as an excellent croissant should (which probably means ample butter).
We also shared an Elvis, which blew us both away. Banana bread smeared with peanut butter, topped with sliced bananas, crowned with several slices of thick-cut dark, crispy bacon, and — wait for it — drizzled with honey. OMG! It registered 11 out of 10 on the taste, decadence, and I’d-start-every-day-with-this-if-I-could scales.
Start your day here, end your day here, or both.
Carr Winery
We decided to do a Carr tasting because our friends have been members for years, the winery offers Cab Francs, which we love and believe are under-appreciated, the tasting room looked cool in photos, and it was within walking distance of our hotel.
The tasting room and tasting bar were even cooler in person and we enjoyed tasting the wines on the shaded patio, led by our excellent tasting guide, who was well-schooled in the wines on offer.
We especially liked the Cab Franc and joined their Cab Franc Club. Of course this was no surprise to us because we’ve had their wines before, at our friends’ house.
When we were planning our Santa Barbara trip I said “no more wine clubs,” but we made an exception for Carr.
Toma Restaurant & Bar
We had a delightful dinner reunion with longtime friends in the small but stylish dining room decorated with interesting art that reminded each of the five people at our table of something different.
There’s a small, L-shaped bar where we would have dined if it had been just the two of us, but we were lucky to have a round table for our group, which was best for conversation and laughter.
This restaurant was a recommendation of two in our group, who had been here before and loved it, one of whom ordered the roast chicken because she loved it so much the first time she was there.
Another friend ordered the wedge salad and mussels, which she gave rave reviews.
We shared the Crispy Skin Salmon and the Tuna Cones (an appetizer). The former was a melange of flavors and elements, from the perfectly cooked salmon itself and its crispy skin (at home the skin goes to our huskies but I was happy to have it for myself this time) to the pork morsels (yes, it works), lemon aioli, cannellini beans, and smoky tomato remoulade (check out my Sriracha Remoulade). It was as delicious as it was interesting and different. It also had a little kale, but I’ll forgive them for that because the dish was so good (when I run the world there will be no kale).
The tuna cones get top marks for presentation, taste, and discussion. The tasty cones of tuna tartare were coated in tuxedo sesame seeds and slightly sweet, leading everyone to discuss how they were made. No consensus was reached. Check out my Tuna Tartare with Mango & Shrimp in Martini Glass Icebowl.
We also encountered a white wine varietal that our collective wine knowledge had never heard of: arneis, which we loved.
We finished with the molten chocolate cake for the table, which capped off a perfect meal with perfect service. Next time we’ll try one of the pasta dishes, which all sounded great.
Check out my pasta dishes in the Italian Faves series on my YouTube Channel.
Vega Vineyard & Farm
Not sure what we liked more, the wine offerings, the shaded pastoral outdoor tasting area, the organic garden, or the animals, especially the snort of baby pigs (that’s my collective noun for pigs).
Before we spent a relaxing hour or so tasting this winery’s mostly Italian red varietals (they have whites too), which we thoroughly enjoyed, our guide gave us a tour of the grounds, where we tasted grapes from the vine, saw the old adobe house, and wandered among the pens of goats, llamas, rabbits, pigs, chickens, and other animals.
The baby pigs were for sale and I was worried that Sarah would want to take one home. It’s a good thing we saw them before we started drinking, or we may have gone home with a new pet under the seat in front of us.
But we did leave with a parting gift to enjoy when we got home: the owner and winemaker gave us a few beautiful heirloom tomatoes just picked from the vine.
Roblar Winery & Vineyards
At Roblar we combined a tasting of red varietals and blends, which we thoroughly enjoyed, with a delicious lunch under the vine-covered arbors shading the spacious patio bordered by tall wildflowers in bloom.
How can you go wrong with several delicious reds (our friends enjoyed the whites), a BLT made with candied bacon and heirloom tomatoes, and a panzanella salad with more heirloom tomatoes? Check out my BLT Shooter and my Softshell Crab BLT lessons.
Our excellent meal ended with freshly baked chocolate chip and peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, which paired perfectly with the beautiful Cab Franc reserve.
It was almost unfortunate that the weather was perfect because we were unable to enjoy the spectacular indoor tasting room or indoor and outdoor fireplaces.
Our friends, who were driving back to Long Beach, also stocked up on a few vegetables from the winery’s honor farmstand across from the horse parking area.
Brick Barn Wine Estate
This former horse farm offers a surprisingly broad selection of red and white varietals and blends, which paired perfectly with the pretzel sticks we bought inside.
We enjoyed everything we tried in our leisurely tasting on the umbrellaed grassy side of the outdoor tasting area. We especially liked the Cab Francs and bought one of each as gifts for a side-by-side tasting by a friend who was hosting us for dinner in Montecito that night.
The weather was perfect but if it had been cooler I’m sure we would have enjoyed tasting in one of the many stylish indoor tasting areas, as several other people were doing.
Lokum Turkish Delight Shop
On our last day we strolled State Street and window shopped. I spotted Lokum before Sarah, but I knew that we would be stocking up on Turkish Delight as soon as she saw it. Walking into the shop itself was like being transported to Istanbul, where we first delighted in Turkish Delight.
Many multi-shaped perforated tin lamps hang at various heights from the high ceiling and the bookcase-style wall is neatly lined with Turkish products, including coffee and appropriate little espresso-type cups to sip if from.
But there are two stars of this show, one of which is a selection of Turkish Delight with more colors than the 100 Crayola crayon box, and almost as many flavors.
The other star of the show is baklava, which is the only type of dessert that I will ever choose over chocolate. The baklava selection was the broadest and most beautiful and interesting that I have seen anywhere, including in Istanbul.
We left with a supply of Turkish Delight that would probably last normal people about a year, but may have us planning a flight back to Santa Barbara much sooner. The baklava was history by the time we got back to the hotel.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the restaurants, wineries, and attractions in and around this dynamic town. This is the kind of place that keeps people coming back for more, so I’ll cover more Tastes and Toasts after our next trip. We can’t wait.
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