Tuli Bistro

So, after much waiting and a bit of writing, Tuli Bistro is now open.  And yes, dear public, it was worth the wait.  How good is it, you may ask?  Is Tuli Bistro the best restaurant in Sacramento?  Of course not.  Nor would I presume to base such a statement after one meal (even if that meal was perhaps the world’s most perfect tuna melt).  No, Tuli may not be the best restaurant in Sacramento, but that’s probably in Tuli’s interest.  Being the “best restaurant” anywhere implies a certain distance between chef and diner, a certain cost over and above what one would normally shell out for good food, and even a certain reluctance to patronize such a location more than once in a blue moon.

Here’s the thing, I’m not interested in going back to Tuli once every blue moon.  I want to go there three or four times a week.  To me, it’s the perfect restaurant.

I love it.  It’s the perfect marriage of attitude, atmosphere, flavors, and presentation.  The tiny interior is dominated by the open kitchen.  Sitting at the counter, one can only marvel at the quick yet unhurried movements of the skilled chefs, their grill scarred hands putting together their hearty yet delicate fare.  One can sit, transfixed watching the simple yet perfect ingredients that go into every dish, or losing themselves in the dancing flames from the range, or the broiler, or the brick oven.  It’s magical, yet totally familiar.  Rather than going industrial, the kitchen seems to be intentionally homey, with a tile backsplash, white-washed cabinets, and colorful spices in glass jars.  The whole experience is like having a meal at a friend’s house (if that friend happens to be a professional chef that is). 

The servers are polite, friendly, and on the ball (especially whoever chose “The Best of Charlie Parker” as the restaurant’s soundtrack for the day of my visit).  The food is top notch.  The ahi tuna melt I devoured was ridiculously good.  A simple tuna salad of ahi, capers, magical mayonnaise, and herbs on a grilled baguette slice with a side salad filled me up and made me smile.  The other options on the menu looked equally appetizing, from sliders (small burgers with bleu cheese) to pizzas (I saw several diners making indecent noises while eating the thin crusted pies).  The care and skill going into each dish was obvious and worthwhile.

So, after the wait, Tuli Bistro is now open.  Was the wait worth it?  You better believe it was.  The owners have created a template on which all small restaurants should be based–small, homey, elegant, casual, delicious. 

Tuli Bistro- 21st and S, Sacramento

Food **** Ambience**** Service****

23 thoughts on “Tuli Bistro”

  1. Sounds wonderful! What would you say is the price range, say for an entree?

    And what do you know about their desserts?

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  2. Nice to hear such a positive review. I was going to check them out Tuesday but could not find a number on the website to at least call and see if our group needed reservations. Plus I didn’t see a wine list online either.

    After the review, I’m even more interested in giving it a spin.

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  3. I’ve only had lunch there but it looks “mid-priced,” meaning $8-10 for sandwiches at lunch, and I’m guessing $15-$25 for dinner entrees.

    The wine and beer list seemed varied if small.

    The place is very small indoors, so unless you want to sit outside, odds are a wait is in your future.

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  5. Tuli Bistro is the best little restaruant I have found in a long time. Atmosphere is wonderful, people are great and I hear the outside patio will be enclosed with in a month or so. I am going back there at least 2x a week. I plan on bringing all my friends. Excellent on my scale.

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  9. I have to disagree. My husband & I ate there Friday. The restaraunt only serves small plates, so fine. We ordered the Kobe beef small plate. It took over 40 minutes for our food to arrive, even though the restaraunt was not busy and everybody else in the place had been served. A waitress came by and asked us how everything was, only to be told it was difficult to tell, since we hadn’t been served. She told us she’s go check on it, and never returned. When our food was finally brought to us, we were told that the chef like the meat to rest prior to serving it, which is as it should be. However, for a piece of meat as small as we received, the resting time should have been about 5 minutes. The meat was cold. The fries were cold. The ketchup was from a bottle. This “meal” cost us $20. All in all, very, very disappointing. we won’t be back, there are better more proficient restaraunts in Sacramento. Don’t waste your money, or your time on Tuli.

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  10. Sorry Ms G. You may have had a bummer of a time, but my second visit was, if anything, better than the first. The “breakfast salad,” frisee with shoestring potatoes, bacon and poached egg, was unique and delicious. The tomato soup was perfect on a cold day. The service was friendly. The chefs were more than happy dish out recipe ideas with diners. And the music selection for the day was Charles Mingus’s “Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus,” one of my desert island discs, so I’m sticking with the fact that Tuli is fantastic.

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  12. Sorry sac-eats, I’m sticking with my original review. (BTW, “Tuli is fantastic” is an opinion, not a fact.) Once again,
    Food * Ambience * Service *. It makes me very sad, as I love to support local restaurants. 😦

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  13. Contrary to your assertion, I would claim that Tuli’s empiric fantasticness makes the proclamation of such fantasticness factual declaration and not, as is the case with some dining establishments, the utterance of opinion.

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  14. I have eaten here twice this week and can only say “awesome”, especially since it is the closest business to my house. Extra kudos to the sexy staff, woo!

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  15. It appears that Tuli’s is acquiring a clientele that consists mostly of repeaters who are biased towards restaurants close to their homes and that play “fantastic” music.

    But for potential first-time visitors, beware. My fiancée and I went there for the first and last time this weekend, unimpressed. There were the people who had been there before who were able to interact with the staff, and then there was us, along with other poor saps, sitting there as if we didn’t belong, but we couldn’t figure out why.

    That wasn’t the worst part, however. The main problem is that Tuli’s is way over-priced. The salads are priced as if they would be a full meal, but in actuality they are meager scraps of lettuce that don’t even make an appetizer. The pizza is good, but $10 good, not $15 good.

    Overall, an overpriced experience for food that isn’t that great and leaves you hungry.

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  16. You can exhibit your insecurities on this here website all you want, B. But don’t ever, ever, think that you can use ironic quote marks around the word FANTASTIC when referring to Charles Mingus and get away with it. If you bring that kind of garbage in here again, I may be forced to go Stanley Crouch* on your ass.

    *For more information on jazz critic Stanley Crouch and his ass-whooping tendencies, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Crouch

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  17. I’m gonna have to defend B on this one…not about Tuli, but about the quotes marks. They aren’t really ironic if they are actually quoting a previous post.

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  18. Thanks for pointing that out, Leo. If they are, indeed, referential quotes and not ironic quotes, then my hackles are summarily lowered.

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  19. i know the owners of tuli and i eat there all the time its a great please to eat the service is supper fast and there desserts are FANTASTIC!Another great thing is that the staff are very kind

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  20. I have to agree with Ms. G I’m afraid, and I’ve heard from several others with similar experiences. That is, that the service sucks and the food is good. So the question is, why are some of us having a bad service experience and others of us aren’t? Could it be uneven training of waiters? It’s plain weird. You can see my take at http://www.sacatomato.com/2008/04/tuli_bistro_a_confusing_time_w.html

    And just to follow up on the quoting of previous comments. The service is NOT “suppper” fast. Sheesh!

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  22. “i know the owners of tuli and i eat there all the time its a great please to eat”

    I don’t want to have to know the owners in order to have a good time, but that’s the feeling I got when I was there.

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  23. Ate at Tuli a few weeks ago with some friends and had a blast…food was great, service impeccable. The hostess (Amy Winehouse wannabe) drooled over this chintzy necklace I had gotten the same day at a garage sale…kept coming up to our table and asking where I got it, then finally just saying, “Hey, I could probably make that pretty easily!” I agreed and off she went….
    Last night I was there again, food again perfect (those pears on the mixed greens salad are like honey)…when I saw the hostess I asked her if she had gotten around to making that necklace..the one she was so agog at just a few weeks earlier. She looked at me like I was speaking Latin and suggested that it I was mistaken, maybe it was “the other hostess”…..
    But hey, nice way to leave your customers feeling good about themselves and their experience there. Tuli still gets an “A” from me. She coulda pulled it off a little better tho.

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