Santa Barbara has become home to a milestone location for a popular sandwich and salad chain.

Mendocino Farms has officially opened its doors at La Cumbre Plaza, marking the company’s 100th location.

Located at 3851 State Street, the restaurant is Mendocino Farms’ first location in Santa Barbara.

Announcing its new store in a social media post, Mendocino Farms said the restaurant offers chef-curated sandwiches and fresh salads using seasonal ingredients.

“Whether you’re fueling your next adventure or settling in for a sunny lunch with friends, we can’t wait to be part of your community. Here’s to our next chapter, together!” the business wrote on Instagram.

The restaurant features a custom mural by local artist DJ Javier, as shared by Mendocino Farms in an Instagram post.

The store opened on June 30 and marked its first day with a host of activities to celebrate its launch.

The opening day featured a live DJ, activities such as ‘Rodeo Riviera’, a hat bar, live sandwich-making sessions with the chefs, and a postcard station.

The location is open daily between 10:30 a.m. and 9 p.m., according to its website.

Diners can enjoy a special summer menu along with the regular options of sandwiches and salads that Mendocino Farms is known for.

In addition to its menu options, the restaurant also offers catering services with deliveries available from 10 a.m. onwards.

The space occupied by Mendocino Farms earlier housed Panera Bread, which closed in 2025, per the Restaurant Guy.

About Mendocino Farms

The Los Angeles-based fast-casual chain is known for its selection of freshly made sandwiches, salads, wraps, and soups.

Founded in 2005, Mendocino Farms offers classic as well as limited signature items.

The company opened its first location below the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and has since expanded into a regional brand, according to the Restaurant Guy.

In addition to California, Mendocino Farms has locations in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Washington, the company’s website shows.

The restaurants feature a rotating menu of items, along with a range of kids’ menu items that are served with a beverage and a choice of side.

Additionally, the chain offers a variety of dessert options, packaged chips, and packaged beverages.

The company is known for sourcing all its ingredients from ethical local farms and small producers.

All meat and poultry items served are antibiotic-free and humanely raised, while eggs are sourced from cage-free farms, according to its website. Fruits and vegetables are hand-picked, and bread is locally and freshly sourced.

The menu includes a range of items to accommodate all types of diets, such as flexitarian, vegan, and gluten-free.

A fitness club is being sued after an employee at one of its childcare facilities in Southern California threw a 23-month-old child in the air and failed to catch him, resulting in a traumatic brain injury, according to the complaint.

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Matthew and Elena Kittle filed the lawsuit July 2 against The Bay Club, an upscale club with multiple locations, including one in El Segundo, just south of Los Angeles.

They allege that while their son, identified by the initials C.K., was at the daycare center at The Bay Club El Segundo on March 17, 2025, an employee tossed him into the air — 6 feet above the ground — but failed to catch him, the lawsuit says. C.K. fell to the ground and hit his head on the hardwood floor, and the employee fell backward and landed on top of him, the suit says.

It says The Bay Club downplayed the severity of the fall to the boy’s parents. C.K. sustained a concussion and still experiences side effects from the fall, the suit says.

The complaint, filed against The Bay Clubs Co. LLC and Bay Club South Bay LLC, alleges negligence; negligence per se; negligent hiring, retention and supervision; negligent infliction of emotional distress; fraud — intentional concealment; intentional infliction of emotional distress; and battery.

The Bay Club said it is unable to comment on ongoing litigation.

“At the Bay Club, the safety of our members, team members, and the families we serve is our highest priority,” it said in a statement.

The Bay Club LLC owns and operates private fitness and country clubs across the West Coast, including locations in Oregon, Washington and California.

Its El Segundo location has the El Segundo Clubhouse, which the club’s website describes as a 14,000-square-foot childcare center, where kids participate in activities under supervision.

The day of the incident, C.K.’s father dropped him off at the El Segundo Clubhouse. He told staff members he would be at the Bay Club Manhattan Country Club, a mile away, for the next three hours, according to the complaint.

C.K. was injured at 9:20 a.m., the suit says.

Security video, which was included in the lawsuit, shows a female employee holding a child by his hands and swinging him between her legs. She then throws the boy over her head, letting go of the child’s hands, and fails to catch him. The child falls to the floor behind her, and the employee falls backward and appears to land on top of him, the video shows. The employee then appears to hold the child while they are on the floor.

Other staff members react with shock and concern after the fall, the video shows.

The club called C.K.’s parents separately afterward. Matthew Kittle picked up the call at 9:30 a.m. and was told that C.K. had “fallen” and had since “calmed down,” the lawsuit says. He called back and said he would pick up his son at the end of his session.

At 9:45 a.m., the club called him again, suggested C.K. needed to be picked up and said that “they had not been able to settle C.K. down,” the filing says.

When Matthew Kittle picked up C.K. at 10:10 a.m., he found his son’s face was “badly bruised,” with his right eye swollen shut and his mouth swollen, the suit says. Once he was at home, C.K. was “extremely drowsy, lethargic, and irritable,” and his parents became concerned, the suit says.

Elena Kittle spoke with an employee, who described herself as the aquatics director, at 10:44 a.m., according to the filing.

The aquatics director said that C.K. “was being held by an employee who fell over while she was in a squatting position” and that “C.K. was only about ‘1.5 feet above the ground’ when the fall occurred,” the suit says. She also said that C.K. wanted to “go to sleep immediately after the fall” and that employees “had trouble keeping him awake,” the suit says.

An hour later, C.K. was checked into the emergency room at a medical center in Torrance. There, the medical staff also questioned the accuracy of The Bay Club’s description of the incident, “because the injuries weren’t consistent with a fall from 1.5 feet,” the suit claims.

C.K. underwent a CT scan and a neurological exam and was diagnosed with a concussion, blunt head trauma and facial abrasion, the complaint says.

At 2:22 p.m. that day, Elena Kittle spoke with The Bay Club’s general manager, who said she reviewed video of the incident and also claimed C.K. fell from 1.5 feet, according to the filing.

The parents asked for the video, which they received March 21, 2025 — which left them “shocked” by the “severity of the fall” and by “the fact that the Bay Club tried to cover up the true nature of the incident,” the suit says. The complaint says the video showed the child was at least 6 feet in the air — not 1.5 feet, as the club had said.

Weeks after the incident, C.K. had symptoms including sensitivity to light and sound, irritability, irregular sleep, lethargy and attachment issues, the suit says. A neurology specialist who examined him in April 2025 said C.K. was still experiencing concussion symptoms, the filing says.

“It was assessed that C.K. suffered a ‘definite concussion with a discrete enough force and clinical signs that indicate he’s in pain and behavioral changes,’” the complaint says. The filing says C.K. continues to experience symptoms, including loss of hearing.

The suit also alleges that the daycare center was not operating legally.

Under California law, childcare centers require licenses from the state Department of Social Services. Some child daycare programs can be exempt from licensing if parents and guardians are on the same premises and if they are not operated on certain sites, including malls or ski facilities.

The suit alleges The Bay Club does not fall under that exception because parents are not necessarily always on the premises. Children can be left at the Bay Club El Segundo Clubhouse while parents go to The Bay Club’s Manhattan Country Club a mile away, the suit says.

The club’s website says a parent or guardian has to be on-site during a reservation.

The parents, represented by the law firm Rosen Saba, demand a jury trial, exemplary and punitive damages and civil and statutory penalties.

It’s midafternoon outside KIPP Academy of Opportunity, a charter school serving children in fifth through eighth grade on South Figueroa Street in residential Los Angeles. As children inside prepare for their futures, a young female struts by in high heels, wearing nothing but a bikini and a jacket. 

“We’ll see some police officers roll by and some young women out here just prostituting. They’re walking right by, and the police drive right by them,” the school’s gun-toting security guard said. “It’s normal.”

This is Figueroa Corridor, one of California’s most notorious sex markets. Here, prostitutes gather, night after night, selling sex acts that, according to one former cop, cost as little as $25. Last year, members and associates of a gang were indicted after allegedly trafficking adults and minors—including foster children—along the corridor and branding them with tattoos.

This was all the predictable result of public policy. In 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law decriminalizing loitering with intent to commit prostitution. When he signed the bill, Newsom suggested it would help would reduce the harassment of women.

We went to Figueroa to see the results for ourselves. As we walked the corridor, saw the sex market, and rode along with a former LAPD vice cop, one thing became clear: on Figueroa, human flesh is big business—something state leaders appear to have no desire to change.

The scene stretches across almost four miles of hot, dusty cement. Nearly nude women cluster at the start of side streets just off the main road. Lines of cars slowly cruise along, apparently hoping to buy. Pimps either oversee the prostitutes themselves, on a nearby phone, or through hired low-level watchers. Sirens blare constantly, but officers often just roll on by. When asked about activity on the corridor, one prostitute said, “money and p*ssy,” before twerking and walking away.

Stephany Powell, a former sergeant in an LAPD Vice unit and former executive director at Journey Out, a Los Angeles–based nonprofit serving human trafficking victims, rode with us along the corridor.

“Statistically, the average age of entry for human sex trafficking is between the ages of 12 and 14 years old,” she said. “We’d see 14-, 15-year-olds that were out on the prostitution tracks. We also would see 25-to-30-year-olds . . . some of them had been out on the streets on the prostitution tracks since age 13. And in those cases, nine times out of ten, they had a trafficker.”

Figueroa has been a sex-trafficking den for decades. But recent policy changes have made the corridor harder to police. In California, it had been a crime to loiter with the intent of committing prostitution since at least 1995. Patrol officers could use this law to curtail the street market—and stop, identify, and rescue trafficked minors.

That began to change in 2016. That year, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed S.B. 1322, prohibiting minors from being charged with solicitation of and loitering with intent to commit prostitution. The law was arguably well-intentioned, reflecting a belief that trafficked children shouldn’t be treated as criminals.

But that wasn’t enough for the state’s progressives. In 2021, State Senator Scott Wiener authored S.B. 357, a bill that would fully decriminalize loitering with intent to commit prostitution. A trio of the state’s most powerful progressive institutions—the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU’s California chapter, and Equality California—rallied behind the bill, which passed in 2022.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill in July of that year, suggesting that it would reduce the “harassment of women.” He also referenced “transgender adults,” seemingly endorsing LGBT activists’ view that the loitering statute had criminalized “walking while trans.”

“Black adults accounted for 56.1% of the loitering charges in Los Angeles between 2017-2019, despite making up less than 10% of the city’s population,” Newsom wrote. “To be clear, this bill does not legalize prostitution. It simply revokes provisions of the law that have led to disproportionate harassment of women and transgender adults.”

Since the law’s passage, however, Figueroa has more prostitutes than it did before. Before S.B. 357, Powell says she delivered around 30 makeup kits along the entire corridor each night that she engaged in outreach efforts. When we drove past a particularly active handful of blocks, Powell said that after “S.B. 357 passed, we counted about 60 girls just from this track [alone].”

More minors are apparently being trafficked, too. The Times reported that LAPD Sergeant Al Navarro’s officers, who work at the nearby 77th Street station, rescued 123 children in 2024—a nearly eightfold increase from 2022, the year before S.B. 357 took effect.

The law itself is driving these trends. Before S.B. 357, police officers could use a woman’s attire and behavior to determine that she was loitering to commit prostitution. Once that behavior was decriminalized, prostitutes began wearing hardly any clothes—and law enforcement found itself helpless to control the sex trade.

“A lot of the girls hardly have anything on, they’re practically naked. In many cases you can see right through whatever they’re wearing,” Powell said. “Before S.B. 357 . . . what would happen if we were working vice and we’d see somebody out there like that, we could arrest them for solicitation of prostitution. Now, in order for you to arrest them for solicitation of prostitution, there has to be an act involved.”

S.B. 357 has also enabled traffickers. In the past, a patrol officer could arrest a loitering prostitute to get her off the streets and encourage her to testify against a trafficker. Today, law enforcement has to use resource-strapped undercover units to target traffickers one-by-one.

“SB 357 removed a key enforcement tool that kept communities free from red light blight,” former Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva told us. “This ill-advised bill condemned the marginalized to be sex trafficked, and human trafficking has exploded.”

The situation is so dire that the federal government intervened. In August 2025, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli spearheaded the region’s first-ever RICO human trafficking case against the vicious Hoover Criminal Gang. Essayli’s office charged six members and associates of the Hoovers with various crimes, including sex trafficking of minors, money laundering, and sexual exploitation of a child.

The indictment spells out the depraved allegations. The Hoovers and their associates allegedly targeted adults and children as young as 14; branded their victims with tattoos; and, in some cases, required their victims to secure $1,000 per night. In one instance, a Hoover associate and two unindicted co-conspirators allegedly tried to kidnap prostitutes from San Bernardino, a plot that failed only when the two targets broke free and escaped.

On July 1, 2026, a federal follow-up operation took down another ten suspects, including the operator of a seedy motel, who was charged with “financially benefiting from the Hoover gang’s sex trafficking operation.”

City Journal’s four-day visit to the corridor took place just before the second operation against the Hoovers and revealed the challenges faced by the ongoing federal efforts. Figueroa still pulsed with activity, with the entire apparatus of apparent prostitutes, pimps, watchers, and Johns out in the open for all to see. Police drove on by. Women walk the corridor, risking disease, beatings, and death with each step.

When he signed S.B. 357, Gavin Newsom suggested that the new law would help reduce harassment against women. What it enabled instead is a wave of crime, suffering, and abuse.