If you want conviviality in Santa Barbara, it’s hard to beat Joe’s Café. The city’s oldest restaurant opened in 1928 in what had previously been a laundry, a blacksmith and a slew of restaurants. Now it’s a Santa Barbara institution. Locals and visitors stream in beneath the classic neon marquee, then gather at the bar for famously generous cocktails or hunker down in booths for some good, old American saloon food. In the morning, that could be an omelet or huevos rancheros. For lunch and dinner, French dip and tri-tip sandwiches, steaks, chops, pastas, seafood and salads are the draw. Joe’s Café has been the real deal for more than eighty years.