Santa Barbara foodies prepare for Restaurant Week
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Santa Barbara foodies, February 21st to March 6th is your chance to try some of the best the Central Coast has to offer. Those two weeks are Santa Barbara Restaurant Week.
Local restaurants, bistros, hotels and wine bars are preparing to serve an extra bonus SBRW menu. The restaurants will offer a three-course meal at either $25, $35 or $45 per meal.
The FisHouse server Mason Johnson is excited to see an increase of customers. He said, “We’ve got two weeks, just poke your head in. You know just find a nice sunny day. We’ve got plenty of spots as you can see. It’s starting to pick up, so we just hope to see everybody.”
About 50 restaurants along the Central Coast are chopping up and creating special set 3-course menus. And pairing them with a refreshing wine or cocktail.
“Get new people in here, you know, people that we haven’t had before who’ve maybe been in Santa Barbara for a long time, give them a little bit of everything say apps, entrees, we’re doing a little bit of a tasting menu this year,” said Johnson.
And it’s not just the restaurant serving up the best Santa Barbara has to offer.
Leslee Garafalo is the chairwoman of Santa Barbara Restaurant Week. She said, “The hotels got involved the wine tasting rooms, they offer great values, the tasting rooms and the hotels. So you can make a weekend out of it, a week out of it.”
Garafalo said her committee chose the end of February to make up for the lull in Santa Barbara’s hospitality world. And a restaurant like Tre Lune Ristorante, who puts tiny chairs on the wall for their returning customer, they hope restaurant week will bring them new regular customers to add to their wall.
Gene Montesano is the owner of Tre Lune Ristorante. He said, “When you’ve been here a bunch of times, you’re nice we give you a chair. So that’s the way we sort of do it. So hopefully there will be other people that will come back and in time get a chair.”
Johnson added, “We’re really happy to get people back in here, you know the slow season in Santa Barbara, you get the winter time everybody wants to stay in so it’s nice to reintroduce people to spring and summer.”
Restaurant week will also help aspiring chefs. A portion of each ticket will go to help ProStart, which helps teach high school students how to become chefs. And you can expect some tourists coming for the specials to with Restaurant Week being advertised up and down the coast.
You can find the restaurants cooking up delicious menus on the SB Restaurant Week website.
