Santa Barbara Restaurants

Santa Barbara dining is a large part of the city's highlights. Restaurants in Santa Barbara offer informal to formal menu that includes Italian, French, Mexican and American cuisine, sandwiches, and soups.

Dining in Santa Barbara is enhanced by excellent service, outdoor courtyards, elegant ambience, view of the mountainside, overlooking the city and the sea. Other cuisines that can be enjoyed in the downtown area are Japanese, Thai, Morrocan, Hawaiian, Korean, Chinese and many more.

Coastal Dining in Santa Barbara Restaurants

On Santa Barbara's wharf was the former Moby Dick restaurant that was destroyed by a fire in 1998. The wharf was established in 1872 and is the oldest operating wharf on the West Coast. The wharf is a preferred location for strolling and dining for locals and tourists alike.

Like most of the restaurants in California located along the coastline, the dining in Santa Barbara restaurants provide fresh seafood coupled with enchanting view of the ocean and mountains. Diners can enjoy eating at seaside grill houses and informal and affordable seafood eateries that serve good food and offer local ambience. Coastal Santa Barbara restaurants also include grills and steakhouses.

Santa Barbara Dining: Enjoying the Scenery and Activities

Santa Barbara is a known tourist and resort destination with its vigorous and rich economy nurturing almost all sectors like education, service, health care, technology, manufacturing, and finance. The education sector in the city is particularly well-represented based on the number of prominent schools, universities and educational institutions in the city.

Architecture features a mix of Spanish, Mediterranean and North African touches. A walking tour along some red tiles is a path towards a place destroyed by an earthquake in 1924 that shaped the current face of the city. The walking tour passes through old theaters, old movie palaces that now houses live drama and music performances, an art museum, a Spanish and Moorish courthouse, a Spanish fort, beautiful gardens and grounds, an array of shops and eateries and more than a handful of historic structures.

A known landmark is the Moreton Bay Fig Tree, a huge Australian native plant rooted at the south of downtown Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara's top attractions are located in a scenic drive that can be done in an hour's time. The city also has two beautiful private parks, a preserved national forest, a botanical garden built in 1926, and good campsites along the beaches.

About Santa Barbara, California

Santa Barbara City is in Santa Barbara County, California. It nests on an east-west trending part of the coast in the middle of the Santa Ynez Mountains and the sea and has a Mediterranean climate. Santa Barbara's location is also called South Coast or American Riviera. Santa Barbara is a flourishing community with a semi-tropical and moderate climate, long beach lines on one side and the mountains on the other.

The Chumash Native Americans are the first settlers of the city. In 1542, Juan Cabrillo sailed through the Santa Barbara Channel and baptized the place as Santa Barbara in honor of the saint and to give thanks for saving him from a violent storm.

Diners at Santa Barbara enjoy being caught in the middle of a thriving and industrialized city and its attractive tourist and resort spots.