Since some of our readers’ weekend plans might very well involve a stop in Santa Barbara this Memorial Day, it seemed the right time to explore what’s new in the plush Spanish-styled city. Petros, Manhattan Beach’s sterling Greek restaurant, recently replaced Cafe Buenos Aires on State Street with its third location and is currently serving its own menus of mezze and moussaka for the Santa Barbarian palate. Nearby, a new Mexican restaurant named Cielito has replaced Acapulco in the city’s Downtown, The menu, with fish anticucho and pulpo a la plancha, already appears to be a vast improvement on Acapulco (but what wouldn’t be?).
Over in Monte(conce)ito, long-standing burger and beer joint Peabody’s, which recently earned Yelptard praise for hooking a brother up with some strange, is closing, with the interesting report in The Montecito Journal that the property has been purchased by cellular technology gazillionaire Craig McCaw, also the ex-husband of Wendy McCaw, Santa Barbara’s controversial newspaper maven.
Word is McCaw plans to completely renovate the space to turn it into a market-driven, made-from-scratch restaurant under the watch of chef and GM Kurt Steeber, a veteran of Big Sur’s Ventana Inn and Malibu’s The Ranch at Live Oak. The venue may maintain the same Peabody’s name, if not the same ability to score dudes a date.
