The John Steinbeck House is the Victorian home at 132 Central Avenue where the author was born in 1902 and spent his childhood. The house has been carefully preserved and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Tours are available and take you through the rooms where Steinbeck grew up, with period furnishings and photographs that give a sense of the comfortable, middle-class Salinas household he came from.
The ground floor operates as a lunch restaurant on weekday lunch hours — "The Best Cellar" — serving California cuisine in the dining rooms. Proceeds support the preservation of the house. Even if you skip the restaurant, the exterior is worth seeing: a well-maintained Queen Anne Victorian on a quiet street, exactly the kind of prosperous California small-town home that Steinbeck later wrote about with affection and ambivalence.