Four Favorite places in Santa Barbara

There is a German saying, “Happy as God in France.” In California we don’t think He would prefer France, but as a writer once put it, “God would live in Santa Barbara, if he could afford it.” When the town was devastated by a major earthquake in 1925 the city fathers decreed that in rebuilding they would do it in a Spanish Colonial Revival style and so we have the city we know today, a west coast Williamsburg where even McDonalds and KFC’s look like 18th century Mexican bodegas and the courthouse looks like a Viceregal Palace. Hundreds of Mexican revival villas and haciendas dot the landscape. Montecito is home to millionaires and Oprah Winfrey with oak trees, stables, formal gardens and the musty smell of old money or barely dry ink aroma of crisp new money.

Far beyond what you might expect in a city its size, Santa Barbara is a center for innovative and traditional restaurants, food stores and bakeries. This is not a review, just quick a summary of places my family likes a lot. There are at least a dozen more I could and should mention. They will get their turn later.

The Summerland Beach Cafe is a small Victorian house with terraces around it. Only open for breakfast and lunch, it does very well thought out California dishes and serves them cheerfully in a welcoming ambiance. Organic, pretty much. Vegetarians are welcome, but they also make a near perfect club sandwich on whole grain bread and make a huge selection of sandwiches, hamburgers, salads, omelets and egg dishes. Even the side dishes like their potato salad, onion rings, cole slaw and garnishes show imagination and nice but not fussy flair. Breakfast or lunch here is our customary first stop on a long weekend or mini vacation in Santa Barbara where sitting in the sun looking over the 101 freeway at the Pacific begins our decompression.

Another favorite is Anderson’s on State Street, a Danish bakery and restaurant that serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. The bakery is exceptional and has wonderful breads and then pastries that show what very gifted mortals can do with butter, marzipan and skill. They make their own off the chart good orange preserves and raspberry preserve too. They even offer a real Danish breakfast -- no eggs, just a platter with two kinds of rye bread, a huge slice of homemade liver pate, a pile of sweet and salty Danish ham, slices of dill Havarti cheese and some garnishes and samples of their breakfast pastries. Phenomenal. This is usually our last stop where we buy bread, pastries or tubs of fresh fruit preserves to take home.

Not far away is Ca Dario, a small Italian restaurant with a Venetian accent. Lunch there can be a celebration of life. A soup of local shellfish in a briny broth, a platter of homemade zesty Italian sausage & peppers with fried polenta. At night, they serve a striped bass that is magnificent.

Above, the striped bass, below the artichoke salad. Photos by Mara Kelly

Take your time, it is small and often jammed. It is not a red check table cloth ItaloAmerican cafe, but very very much like a cafe in the Veneto, the most cultivated and orderly region of Italy. You would do best to eat a bit later than usual to avoid the meal time tides. Ask the servers about the menu and the day's specials, Ca'Dario is full of unexpected and authentic surprises like their cold artichoke appetizer which is unique and the best salad that doesn’t look like one since the Spanish invented gazpacho.

Finally, there is Cafe Buenos Aries (It originally occupied the small place where Ca Dario is now). My late wife loved this romantic place, especially at night when latin music and tangos were playing and candles and tiny lights lit the courtyard. This is a large restaurant you enter through a courtyard with arcades on two sides and outside fireplaces. The dinning room is tile floored and feels like it has been there a hundred years. They mix all the great national cocktails of the Americas (mojitos, caipirinhas, pisco sours, margaritas and more). They then serve steaks that are either flown up from the Pampas or cut locally in the Argentine manner. These are served with perfect fried potatoes and chimichurri, the herbal tangy national condiment. Romantic is the only adjective.

Andersen's Danish Bakery & Restaurant

1106 State St

Santa Barbara, CA 93101

(805) 962-5085

www.andersenssantabarbara.com

Ca' Dario

37 E Victoria Street

Santa Barbara, CA 93101

(805) 884-9419

www.cadario.net

Cafe Buenos Aires

1316 State Street

Santa Barbara, CA 93101

(805) 963-0242

Summerland Beach Cafe

2294 Lillie Ave

Summerland, CA 93067

(805) 969-1019

Breakfast in LA: Huevos Rancheros

Something odd about what is no doubt the most popular single breakfast in Los Angeles is that the more you pay for it, the lousier it gets. This is counter intuitive but I am afraid all too true. What I’m talking about is my favorite start to the day, a platter of Huevos Rancheros. The further up the food chain, the worse this hearty soul satisfying meal becomes.

In case you are new to the West Coast, Huevos Ranchero is the traditional breakfast in northern Mexico. In English it would be Ranch Style Eggs. I first experienced this wonderful meal on Spring Break in the sixties. After driving through the night on our way to Mazatlan in the middle of the Sonora Desert we stopped at a rustic Pemex gas station that was also a tienda y cantina to fill up and eat. The place was all by itself in the wildest wilderness, a long building with walls of rust colored stone and a corrugated metal roof and a shady verandah across the front. Inside the far end was a bar and dinning room with simple homemade tables and a mix of chairs and benches painted in bright colors.

Our unofficial guide and classmate, a Mexican Irishman from Mexico City told us to have the huevos rancheros. We went along and fifteen minutes later the daughter of the cook served us each a platter of refritos with two perfectly fried sunny side up eggs on a crispy corn tortilla under a ladle of warm ranchero sauce, neither mild nor hot. We also got a pile of hot home made corn tortillas. Wow, it was a great breakfast, a huge load of protein that we ate with cups of smooth rich cafe olla, literally “rotten coffee” which is strong Mexican grown coffee sweetened with raw brown sugar and cinnamon. Great stuff. For some reason Mexican coffee while aromatic has less bitterness than our coffee. We didn’t talk much and made short work of the food. We were hungry and every platter was wiped clean with the hot tortillas.

Back here in LA, something that drives crazy is that this classic dish suffers terribly as the level of the joint selling it moves up the market. You can pay fifteen bucks for huevos rancheros at a hotel dinning room and get parody of the traditional meal. For starters, the refried pinto bears are replaced with underdone black beans. Then the tortilla is factory made from white wheat flour and as appealing as a cold buttermilk pancake. Two poached eggs rest on this limp pasty starch and they are covered with a warm overly tomato and far too spicy sauce. Ugh! Apparently our foodies are in love with black beans, even though they are as rare in northern Mexico as corn bread and grits are in Minnesota.

In diners and coffee shops the management often tampers with this dish on the mistaken assumption that their customers don’t want it to be too Mexican. Here you pay eight to ten bucks for a toned down huevos de gavachos. Awful stuff. (Gavacho is what Mexicans call us, gringo is what we think they call us.)

As I said, the cheaper the place the better the huevos rancheros. Right now my favorite place for this world class breakfast is a hamburger joint in Glendale. For five bucks they give me what I want and expect, a very close replica of variorum meal I ate in the middle of the Sonora Desert almost fifty years ago. When they call my number, they present me with a platter covered with an inch of real pinto bean refritos with shreds of queso ranchero melted into them, at one end on a corn tortilla are three sunny side up eggs covered in a warm medium salsa ranchero. Tightly rapped in aluminum foil are four small warm corn tortillas. This is it, the real thing. When you finish the last tortilla and wipe up the last smear of egg york and ranchero sauce, you feel ready and willing to take on the world, ready to mount your horse and head for the north end of the rancho.

The lesson here is that with huevos ranchero, do it right or not at all. The dish is simplicity itself and that is what makes it great. It’s like going into a little place in Japan and getting a perfect bowl of steamed rice topped with a grilled fresh mackerel lightly sauced with teriyaki sauce. A perfect combination of clean pure flavors.

The place I mention is Burger Central on Central Avenue in Glendale half way between the Galleria and the 134 Freeway. They also make a very good flame broiled quarter pound hamburger and serve it with regular or steak fries. It is almost as good as the one at Oinkster. Another place that make real huevos rancheros is Doña Rosa at Arroyo Seco & California in Pasadena. I can also add that almost any little place in the Barrio makes real huevos rancheros for a fair price, and they might even serve it with home made corn tortillas too.

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