Dennis Franz

* The four-time Emmy winner is the star of “NYPD Blue,” which begins its eighth season Tuesday at 10 p.m. on ABC.

Paradise Found: We have a second home in the Santa Barbara area and we leave work in L.A. to come up here. What we look forward to the most--my wife has a very stressful job--is a weekend where we’re sleeping late and then getting up to walk around the yard. We’ll check the garden out, do a little digging and pick fruit off the trees.

Oceanside Entrees: One of our favorite breakfast spots is a place in Summerland called the Summerland Beach Cafe. It’s in an old Victorian house that’s been converted to a restaurant. It’s got a wonderful breakfast menu. They have great waffles with fresh berries, whatever’s in season. Then we’ll walk down to a beach near the Miramar Hotel, which is being renovated, and spend a couple of hours. We might go to another of our favorite spots for lunch, the Wine Bistro on Coast Village Road in Montecito. That’s a simple little cafe that has tables outside where you can sit in the sun under a canopy. They have wonderful salads. We also frequent Mollie’s Trattoria, also in Montecito, a romantic place and wonderful Italian restaurant. Mollie always greets you at the door. It’s a romantic place, a little pricey, but great food, particularly the fish soup.

Films and Felines: We have a favorite little theater, the Riviera Theater in the Santa Barbara Riviera area. It’s part of the old UC Santa Barbara campus when it was a teacher’s school way back when. But the movie theater, being part of the old school, is very tiny. It’s not a major theater and they show offbeat movies. There’s just one person sitting in a little ticket booth. But the charming part is that they have some arrangement about cats in the neighborhood. The leave the doors open, so you’re watching a movie and you’ll feel something brush past your leg, and it’s a cat.

Tradin’ Time: We go to swap meets. A lot. We’re been know to stay in L.A. just to go to the Rose Bowl flea market on the second Sunday of the month. We collect all kinds of unusable things. It was Depression glass for a while, but when we got married we got inundated with that as gifts. Now we get jadeite, a milky green glass. You see it on Martha Stewart.

But Can It Catch a Frisbee?: We also like to drive to the Santa Ynez Valley and go to this miniature horse ranch. They’re like little dwarf horses. They’re big dogs, but horses. We have a couple of acres and keep fighting with ourselves about whether to get one.