It only took thousands of protesters for the last standing Sambo’s in the country to change its name.
The Santa Barbara restaurant, which opened in 1957, was the first of the more than 1,000 Sambo’s restaurants that later opened up across the county at the height of America’s pancake house obsession.
Protests over the name, which is a slur toward black people, began in the 1970s and forced locations to close or rename through the ’80s. The Santa Barbara location kept the name to honor the founders, Sam Battistone Sr. and Newell Bohnett, who named the restaurant based on a combination of the first three letters of one name and two from the other.