A feast in Santa Barbara
T’S quite unnerving watching your dinner scuttle across the plate – particularly when you’ve just been informed that it’s very much deceased.
Its ochre-yellow insides have been scooped out, replaced with a nutty biryani, then laid back over the top – a golden, gossamer-light coverlet of crustacean flesh.
Sitting in modern Indian restaurant Bibi Ji on Santa Barbara’s main drag State Street, not everyone is keen to interrupt the thin, clacking spines of the sea urchins we’ve just been served.
They’re so fresh their nerve endings are still playing at life.
Dip a teaspoon in though, and the subtle, silken urchin is incredibly soft, almost sweet.
The size of a curled hedgehog and just as lethal looking, these inky, indigo seabed dwellers are a Santa Barbara speciality, and if you’re going to eat one, preferably it’ll have been caught by
Stephanie Mutz, California’s only – and much-beloved – woman sea urchin diver. Her name is dropped proudly wherever we go.
A two-hour drive north of sprawling Los Angeles, along the curving edge of the North Pacific, Santa Barbara keeps a watchful eye on both passing dolphins and the Channel Islands, the native Chumash people’s territory.
While most visitors are attracted by the town’s laid-back vibe, year-round sunshine and nearness to Hollywood – Ellen DeGeneres has a house just up the road in Montecito, and regularly orders the marinara at Neapolitan pizza joint Bettina – I’m in the palm treefringed resort mainly for the eating possibilities.
The seafood options for a start are borderline excessive. Peeking into the kitchen of the wood-fronted, ramshackle Santa Barbara Shellfish Company on Stearns Wharf – its many struts reach into the water below, providing homes for huge Calippo-orange sea stars – there’s a transparent, dustbin-sized bucket bobbing with hundreds of scallops, shorn from their shells.
“Julia Child was a regular here,” says Karna Hughes, of Visit Santa
Barbara, as we quickly knock back a platter of briny, creamy oysters and a bowl of pale pink prawn ceviche. A gaggle of honking seagulls and courtly brown pelicans sit nearby, much too interested in our lunch.
The American doyenne of French cuisine spent her final years in the Spanish-infused beach town before her death in 2004, eating tacos and setting up the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.
Her view from Stearns Wharf wouldn’t be much different to ours, although the best vantage is undoubtedly from a kayak.
Dodging the harbour’s shiny, multi-million-dollar boats, we paddle out into the sea-haze with the Santa Barbara Adventure Company. Cormorants dry their stretched-out wings in the sunshine while the velvety bulks of seals split the water’s surface, and yet more prehistoric-looking pelicans commandeer a dredger.
Our main quarry – and reward for the tricep-punishing sculling – is a distant buoy. A bell clangs from the top of the rusted red and white structure, and on the platform below, a honking mass of chocolatey sea lions sunbathe, and clamber in and out of the ocean, flopping heavily on top of one another.
Aubrie Fowler, our guide, calls their squashed together bodies a “cuddle puddle”, which is suitably adorable.
Not all of Santa Barbara is so snuggly, though. Historic tensions and cultural collisions between indigenous Chumash, Spanish, Mexican and American influences can be felt everywhere, from the Old Mission’s twin bell towers, to the moreish huevos rancheros served on the terrace at our hotel, the
Belmond El Encanto, up in the hills.
And like the region’s native spiny lobster (so small and gnarly we only manage to wolf down a smidgeon of it atop a soft wedge of pain au lait at Spanish restaurant Loquita), swathes of the town have risen up in response to converging forces, born out of necessity or deprivation, and the spikiness of the landscape.
It’s partly why the Funk Zone exists, and why Santa Barbara is such a haven for wine aficionados. A 4x4 block that runs from State Street to Garden Street, the Funk Zone was an area that fell into disrepair when the train line, which still slices through the town’s belly, ceased being used to transport goods.
It hosted Santa Barbara’s fish market too (hence “funk”, a nod to the stench), before being overrun with artists carving out space for their work. The streets today are still daubed in murals, and you’re