I was reading this story on sacbee.com about the pending closure of California Pizza Kitchen’s downtown Sacramento location (bummer, the CPK site still says “NOW OPEN”) when I came across this interesting quote.
“I think what we learned is that the downtown-midtown Sacramento crowd is not into the corporate chains (like CPK),” he says. “They’re more into locally owned businesses that are more aware of the city.”
The restaurant will be replaced by a sports bar called Firestone Public House which will feature pizza, “fun” appetizers and 30 to 40 different kinds of beer. So, are the appetizers not fun? At any rate, do you think this is true about the downtown-midtown Sacramento crowd? Could they just not like gourmet pizza?
The Sac Rag 
I’m not wild about chains either, but I hope the new business will be as vegan friendly as CPK was.
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I don’t have a knee jerk reaction about chain businesses, but I think that this comment is probably accurate about downtown/midtowners. Personally I think being knee jerk anti-corporate is not a winning point of view. The employees and management are local people drawing a salary, and in addition it is employing people who live somewhere else up the supply chain or people who work at the corp. office. Isn’t that better? Could a city of this size employ everyone who needs a job only with businesses that are owned locally? Probably not.
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CPK is one of the better chains out there. Our family likes their pizza, and the Firestone spot was a great location with the big glass windows looking out onto the street.
But even with everything seemingly going for it in my book, in practice it was still hard to drive past Masullo, Hot Italian, Zelda’s (or even my local cheapo takeout favorite… Famous Pizza on Freeport) to go to chain pizza shop.
CPK has a good product, but has also oversaturated and diminished their brand identity worse then their chain competitors by selling their pies in the supermarket freezer aisle and also at airports (unlike Chipotle or In&Out for instance). If Stouffer’s tv dinners opened a restuarant, would you eat there?
It doesn’t help that CPK has also expanded their franchise to national & international business locales. It is a mainstay of my diet in Manila for instance when I get sick of Filipino food. So eating at CPK “for fun” is kinda like having a planning a romantic weekend with the wife at a Holiday Inn Express.
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It can’t be a good sign that after working and living in mid/downtown for years this is the first I’ve heard of there being a CPK there.
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