Arnoldi’s Café Down but Not Out

Reports of the demise of Arnoldi’s Café, perhaps the most quintessentially quintessential of all Santa Barbara restaurants, appear to have been premature. According to a message posted Friday morning by Jeanette Arnoldi, granddaughter of the restaurant’s original founders, the family is in talks with a prospective new operator, and the Eastside café and bar — which first opened for business in 1940 — will soon be humming again. It was premature, she said, to name any names. 

Word broke that the restaurant had shut down last weekend as news leaked out that its principal owner, Dave Peri, had died earlier in the week. Peri — a major-but-quiet behind-the-scenes force in Santa Barbara’s progressive-environmental circles for more than 50 years — and his wife, Kitti, took over operations of the restaurant 22 years ago, along with his sister and brother-in-law, when the eating establishment appeared to be teetering on its last legs. He and Kitti were not just owners but restaurant regulars, appearing to savor Arnoldi’s distinctive ambience as if it were their own living room. 

Like a lot of restaurants, the food was good enough, and the bar was a beacon. But above anything else, Arnoldi’s was always about its sense of time and place. Its back-lot patio — hard-packed dirt — hosted bocce tournaments long before the sport was “discovered” by nuevo hipsters. Indoors was classic old-school, sporting critters with big antler racks on the wall and Arnoldi’s signature booths, walled off so snugly they could pass for confessional booths.

Peri himself was a second-generation Italian immigrant, a child of the Goleta lemon fields and no stranger to the Italian stonemasons who built most of Santa Barbara and for whom Arnoldi’s itself stands a lasting testimonial. A CPA by profession, Peri — and his firms — would emerge as the accountant of choice for liberal Democratic political candidates and residents with like-minded values. 

Peri was tight politically, personally, and professionally with a coterie of get-shit-done, practical-minded activists such as Selma Rubin, who would help transform Santa Barbara from the sleepy Republican backwater it was in the 1960s into the Democratic stronghold it is today. To the extent anyone was stirring the pot to make things happen — the creation of Casa Esperanza, Santa Barbara’s first major homeless shelter — Peri’s fingerprints could always be found on the ladle.