Santa Barbara's Essential Guide

Talk about a family with taste. For fifteen years, Frank Goss and Patricia Sullivan Goss have operated the Arts and Letters Café as a delicious addition to their successful Sullivan-Goss Art Gallery. It’s the kind of secret sanctuary that locals love and visitors love to find.

 

A few tables on a street-side balcony tease pedestrians and visitors walking along Anapamu Street, just down from the famous Santa Barbara Courthouse. Those who venture inside find a warm, spacious dining room where the walls are lined with beautiful paintings, as well as a secluded courtyard that’s the perfect retreat for a civilized lunch or supper.

 

“It’s quiet here,” says longtime manager Lisa Neustadt. “I think that’s why a lot of city officials, attorneys and business people come here for lunch meetings.”

 

Neustadt, whom Frank Goss describes as “family by longevity,” has recently been joined by a pair of “Goss-lings” to run the restaurant.

 

Tyler Goss, for whom the Bay Area’s exuberant food-and-wine scene provided both work and pleasure during and after her studies as an art history major at San Francisco State University, runs the front of the house in the evenings and the wine program. She is currently expanding the wine list three-fold to include, as she says, “more French and Italian, more Napa classics and more local treasures.”

 

Her brother, Cosmo, mans the stoves. His journey from the Johnson & Wales University culinary program in Denver to cooking stints at New York’s Gramercy Tavern and the Hungry Cat in Santa Barbara have left him with a two-word foundation to his cooking philosophy: fresh and local.

 

He buys all his seafood from local fishermen, preferably from boats that don’t make multi-day trips and therefore have the freshest fish. The beef, pork and chicken are humanely raised and hormone and antibiotic-free, and, says Cosmo, “Ninety-nine percent of the produce comes from the Santa Barbara farmer’s market. It’s some of the best, most diverse produce in the nation.”

 

Starting with such ingredients, he brings a less-is-more focus to his cooking. “You don’t have to manipulate the ingredients,” he says. “You start with the best product and let it shine.” American home-style cooking, classics with a modern twist, refined takes on old favorites, beautiful steaks, exquisite seafood and salads, vegetable dishes that are not sides but stars, desserts both indulgent and refined—these are the hallmarks of Arts and Letters Café.

 

“Tyler and Cosmo have been working here in some capacity since we opened,” says Frank. “Having done so much good culling of ideas from San Francisco and New York, they’re now bringing new blood to the restaurant.” Five-course winemaker dinners that began in February are among them.

 

“I’ve always understood that if we buy a good painting, it will probably sell in within five years; that’s when we get the reward,” says Frank. “But if we make a good meal, we know in five minutes. To have people I love be part of that is the richest of rewards.”

 

And that is the true art of the family restaurant.