Welcome to Joe’s Cafe on State Street in Santa Barbara, home of the self-proclaimed stiffest drinks in town and the mystery of the missing money.  

Joe’s Cafe turns 95 this year, and as general manager Joey Somerville describes it, it hasn’t changed much from the day in 1928 when Joe Ferrario and his wife, Adelina, bought a place called the Channel Bar and renamed it Joe’s Cafe.

Back then, Santa Barbara was a port town as well as the epicenter of the bygone silent film era. But it was also a place where locals sought out a decent meal on a budget, and tourists, pockets more flush, came on the weekends and holidays to enjoy white sand beaches and temperate climates.

“We benefit from the tourists. We always have,” Somerville told SFGATE during a stop there in late May. “But we’re lucky enough to be steady without that business. We’ve always been built on that regular clientele. We even have so many generations of families who come in.  

“And they all have their stories.”

The one story that wasn’t instantly recalled by Somerville and the various staff and patrons I spoke with is the best chronicled. It goes like this: On June 12, 1985, an ad appeared in the lost and found section of the Los Angeles Times classifieds between a wayward golden retriever and a “huge Macaw, mostly red taken 1 month ago.” The ad was headlined in big bold letters: “LIFE SAVINGS LOST.”

The words beneath it were direct if not a little disheartening: “Let me appeal to the conscience of whomever found Crocker Nat’l Bank bag w/ $8700, June 5, Joe’s Cafe Santa Barbara. It is all we had in the world. We’re recently unemployed. We desperately need it. Reward of $1000 for info leading to recovery. NO QUESTIONS ASKED. Tom.”

UPI picked up the story a few weeks later and really let Tom have it for his fumbling of the literal bag. “A poet once said it is not the death of a wife, or a flood or famine that sends a man to the madhouse, it is the snap of a shoestring when he is late,” reporter Ellis E. Conklin wrote. “Shortly before 9 p.m. June 5, Tom Thompson broke one of life’s shoestrings, committing the kind of stupid mistake that makes a person want to scream and clench his fist while the blood rushes fast and hot to the face.

“Thompson left all the money he had saved for more than a year at a crowded roadside Santa Barbara cafe. One forgetful moment, and poof — gone.”

According to the UPI story, Thompson traveled from his Texas home to meet up with a friend named Greg with a plan to buy a used Toyota for sale in Van Nuys. Thompson drained his savings and took a flight out to LA, but the car deal never materialized. So the men took the opportunity to vacation a few extra days before going home, Thompson said, noting the pair mostly slept on the beach.  

The pair enjoyed their meal at Joe’s, and may have also enjoyed one of the town’s stiffest drinks (though the article neither confirms nor denies this), and were out the door before Thompson realized he’d forgotten the bag. “When we were on the road, I said, ‘Greg. Oh my God. Go back. I left the money,’” Thompson, 37, at the time, told the UPI from his apartment in Arlington, Texas.

“The only thing I can figure is that it was fatigue,” he told the reporter. “We had been sleeping outside and didn’t get much sleep. You know, I’m not the scatterbrain type, and I don’t drink much and never take drugs.”

The pair made a U-turn and ran back into Joe’s Cafe, asking servers and patrons if they’d seen the bag, but came up empty-handed. “No clues, other than a waitress’ recollection of a couple men talking the same seat Thompson and his friend occupied, and then leaving without ordering,” the story reported.  

Whoops.

“I’m hoping any minute, I’ll wake up,” Thompson told UPI. “Mostly, I’m embarrassed. … I guess if I was a doctor or something pulling down $600,000 a year, I could write this off, but I’m a six or seven dollar [an hour] kind of man.”

Realizing the money was gone for good, he had to place a fateful call home to his girlfriend, Candice. “She went into a shock and then she cried a little,” he said.  

The ad in the Times came and went with no leads. Thompson said he didn’t receive any follow-up calls from the police or from Joe’s. “It just makes me so sick,” he said. “… I’m just a little desperate right now.”

It was an inauspicious, or notorious, beginning to the restaurant’s relocation. A few months earlier, Joe’s Cafe moved about a block farther up from the beach to a space formerly known as Maggie McFly’s.

“Nobody goes away hungry … or thirsty,” LA Times food writer Sharon Dirlam wrote of the new location in February 1985. “The hard part is getting a table. At 6:30 on a recent Saturday evening there was already an hour’s wait. But the bar — still long and wooden, though decidedly less weathered — was doing a booming business, and you couldn’t hear yourself think for the revelry decibels.”

Indeed, the place still bustles, the bar is still packed, and the menu, by design, still features crowd-pleasing standards that are now almost a century old, Somerville said.  

On his recommendation, I tried the French dip sandwich, a regional favorite whose roots can be traced to a pair of restaurants in Los Angeles that both claim they were the first to serve the specialty. Joe’s offering is the best I’ve had in recent memory: thinly sliced house tri-tip served over a grilled brioche bun with a side of au jus (the sandwich also has a turkey option). I ordered it medium, and it came out pleasantly on the rare side. The portion, sliced into thirds, was generous, and I could only get two-thirds of the way through before tapping out.

The patrons in the booth next to me ordered the same thing. Visiting from San Diego, the Owens family, with two children under the age of four, decided they needed a place that was already a little noisy with some “wiggle room” for their little ones. Joe’s was the place. “This is our first time here,” Erick Owens said. “I feel like we struck gold.” 

I told Owens about some of Joe’s Cafe stories, including the missing money. He laughed. “Man, a toughie,” he said. “We’ll be on the lookout.” 

Forty-year regular Chris Scott, sitting at the bar, said he didn’t remember the missing money tale but said that he’s seen and heard things at Joe’s throughout the years that “run the whole spectrum.” 

“I think when you have a place like this, it’s important to Santa Barbara,” he said. “Locals feel good about coming here. Tourists feel welcome. Things are going to happen, for sure.” 

On my way out, I couldn’t help but wonder whether some of the regulars knew something I didn’t. These historic spots all have their secrets. This particular mystery, though, feels lost to time. 

When I returned home, I started looking up Tom Thompsons from the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area just to see if I might stumble upon the sad sack who’d lost a fortune over a cheeseburger. Nobody caught my eye until I ran across the obituary of Tommy Joe Thompson, who died on April 6 at age 79 — but would’ve been slightly older than the Texan who left a mighty nice — albeit unintentional — tip at Joe’s four decades ago.  

Whether that’s the same Tom Thompson who lost his new car money over lunch and went back to Texas with some explaining to do, we may never know. As for the location of the money today, that too remains a mystery — or at least a well-guarded secret: “I’m sure it’s OK if you look around,” Joe’s Cafe regular Scott told me. “Let me know what you find.”