Category: Food

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”

We’ve spent so much time reading this year about restaurants closing, shutting down, and otherwise disappearing from the face of the Earth, that we’ve forgotten some of the more positive stories of the year.  So, in a spirit of happy-fun-time, let’s reminisce about all the brave souls who actually opened a business this year and are still in business at year’s end.  Here’s to the entrepreneurs!

Capitol Dawg– 20th and Capitol-happy hour pricing and one of the only places in town that you can get a deep-fried dog.

Cosmo Cafe– 10th and K- a sleek eatery attached to the charming Cosmopolitan Cabaret.  It’s still getting its sealegs, but the Paragary name is popular enough to mean that you need a reservation on most nights.

Tre– Howe and Hurley- The Haines brothers continue the expansion of their restaurant empire, this time with a mega-lounge.  Strangely enough, the food at Tre is probably the best food coming out of any of the Haines’ kitchens.  Will people go to a night club to eat though?  With food this good, they just might.

Table 260– 9th and J- upscale soulfood downtown.

Grange at the Citizen Hotel- 9th & J- as far as hotel restaurants go, this one is similar in that it’s also in a hotel. Continue reading “Ac-cen-tu-ate the Positive 2008: Restaurant Openings!”