Author: sac-eats

Maritime– Valentine’s Day prompted the return of Mrs. Eats and me to Maritime. Chef Song is still putting out absolutely exquisite food. V-day brought a set menu including ahi tartar, roasted duck on puff pastry, sea bass over risotto (my favorite) and filet en croute (filet mignon cooked in a pastry shell).  Desserts (Song’s true speciality if truth be told) were divine, coffee creme brulee and strawberries macerated with wine and served with a creme anglaise.

The big news about Maritime is not that the food is still good, or even that they’re still open.  The news is that they’re changing their name, changing their service, and changing their vibe. The new name is Ambiance, the new vibe is a little slick and a little less top crust, and the service is $45 a person fix price menu only.  I hope very much that this rebranding works.  Chef Song is a treasure, and we’d do well to keep him in town.

Enotria– With new chef Tony Brenes overseeing the small, two-man kitchen — the second of the two men being Chef de Cuisine and 11-year Enotria vet Christian Sieck — things are very, very good at Enotria. The short rib ravioli, a surprisingly light dish all considered, with a wispy ravioli pasta, stuffed plump with flavor-infused short rib, topped with a single piece of pecorino and a dot of rich, syrupy balsamic, is absolutely out of this universe.  Ask new wine director, the intense yet lovable Chad Seaburg, what to pair it with, and you’ll have yourself quite a nice evening. Continue reading “A Roundup of Really Good Meals”

So I must be an enormous goliath of a man to say that I love Tre.

I’ll admit it, I was a bit of an asshole when poo-poo’ing the Haines Brothers’ latest endeavor, but I’ve been forced to eat my words as I try to eat everything that comes out of Tre’s kitchen.

I’m telling you, the food is simply awesome, and the menu is enormous — which to me usually spells doom like at those Chinese/Korean/Italian/Barbecue joints that have 256 menu items and prefer that you just order by number — but Tre isn’t like that. (Why do i feel like I’m trying to justify dating some crappy girlfriend that none of friends or family like?) Continue reading “Tre: It Takes a Big Man to Admit When He’s Wrong”

The River City Saloon, an old-West themed bar and restaurant, is hoping to open up in Old Sacramento in the spring of this year.  According to their website, the place will feature servers dressed in period clothing, twenty-five cent sasparilla, and a shooting range. 

This sounds suspiciously like a moderately horrific hybrid of Claim Jumper and Bobby McGee’s.

Or even worse, doesn’t this sound eeirly like the Dodge City bar that the Griswolds visit in National Lampoon’s Vacation?

Good talk Russ.  Good Talk

Opened only weeks ago in the new Citizen Hotel on J Street, Grange has bought in completely to the three buzzwords of modern dining: fresh, local, organic. But really, what choice did they have? If a modern chef these days doesn’t claim to cook with an eye toward the local, the sustainable, the organic; doesn’t claim to know all their local farmer/suppliers by name — or for that matter know each lamb, pig, and chicken they cook by name — doesn’t claim that the best meal they ever had was eaten while sitting in distant goat pasture under the shade of a hundred-year-old oak, cooked by a peasant that spoke no English and cold-pressed his own olive oil; if a chef doesn’t claim all that, then he might as well advertise that he regularly cooks with baby seal blubber as a thickener and uses dolphin tears as a base for his stock.   Mixing the farm-fresh ethos with the slick, upscale vibe, going for height-of-the-season freshness while trying to please the fickle public- it seems as if every restaurant opened in the last three years has been doing the exact same thing.

The challenge, I guess, then becomes to do it better than everyone else is currently doing it.  How is Grange Chef Michael Tuohy doing it? He’s doing things well, not spectacularly, not unbelievably, not orgasmically, but well. Some dishes, like his fried chicken soaked in buttermilk for two days, was exceptional, really incredibly swell. Almost ruining it though, were the soupy mashed potatoes served with it, so heavy with cream and butter that they could have been mashed milk crates. Also on the plate was a side of unpleasant greens still bitter enough to make the mouth pucker. Continue reading “Grange Restaurant & Bar”

I’m so far ahead of my time that I’m already thinking what I’m going to eat next year. 

Thankfully for me and you, some people still think they can make a go of it in the restaurant business.  My hats off to them (if I wore hats that is– but if I did, I’d probably not wear multiple hats at the same time).  I admire their gumption, their sticktuitiveness, their bluster, their steadfast disbelief in the economic doomsday machine crushing us all in its bloody jaws.  There are a few places on the horizon that have piqued my interest, and a few others that seem stuck in some wormhole feedback loop, never actually progressing towards any kind of state of readiness, yet producing waste product by the ton, trucked away in oversized trash receptacles once a month or so.  But I digress.  Here are a few spots that we should all keep and eye out for in 2009.

The Firestone Building– 16th and L- With a nightclub upstairs and two restaurants downstairs, the Firestone will add a little more to the16th street corridor of what the 16th street corridor already has, that being moderately upscale chains and clubby lounges.  Signs proudly announce that a California Pizza Kitchen will be arriving soon, as well as the slowly materializing Fleming’s Steakhouse (a Morton’s-like chain steakhouse), and finally “Mix,” an adult nightclub from the owner of Mason’s which is just one block away.  Now don’t get too excited, “adult nighclub” doesn’t mean leather masks and crotchless footie pajamas, but rather a club aimed at the over-30 set. Continue reading “Looking Forward to 2009: Grand Opening Edition”