Category: Food

There’s something sad when an obviously talented pitmaster is undercut by his overwhelming slant towards cheapness. That’s all I could see looking around at the new J.R.’s Texas BBQ restaurant on Jibboom. Cheap bread, cheap condiments, cheap plates, cheap silverware, err plasticware. This is J.R.’s third or fourth location in and around town. They’re all in questionable locations, minimally furnished, and lacking in the homey diveyness of many of my favorite cheap restaurants.

The hotlinks had that distinct flavor of slightly old meat about them like when you take a risk and cook hamburger that’s been sitting in your refrigerator for 10 days. You can smell it from a mile away and can’t get the taste out of your mouth after a week. Likewise, I oversaw someone eating a cheeseburger that looked as if it had come out of a little league field snack bar. We’re not talking about quality here. We’re talking about the lowest common crap you can pick up at the cash and carry. This doesn’t feel like food made with love. And what is barbecue other than lovingly, slow-smoked love? dense cornbread love? overly sweet baked beans love?

This was none of those things.  The potato salad was nice however.

Having eaten the day before at the big Joe’s BBQ the contrast couldn’t have been clearer. Big Joe strives for quality in preparation and content. JR seems to be a cheapskate who likes smoking meat.

The Village People’s Action Man ringtone on the StickiePhone means that Sacramento has several impending collisions with great craft beer. Fasten your goggles.

Extreme Pizza continues to prove that they are one of Sacramento’s leading proponents of extreme beer. Propietor Fred Munday frequently pours collections of the hoppiest and/or booziest beers from throughout NorCal. This Friday, Fred hosts Speakeasy Brewery, featuring Prohibition, Big Daddy IPA, Double Daddy Double IPA, and Vendetta (you guessed it, an IPA). Extreme Pizza will also have kegs of two locally made Triple IPAs: Auburn Alehouse ZZ Hop and Knee Deep Simtra. Next Friday, July 6th, he will feature several hop monsters from High Water Brewing Company as well as a few seasonal treats. Beer flows for both events at 4:30pm.

Also this Friday, Whole Foods in Folsom hosts Firestone Walker for a Total Tap Takeover, with tasting and pint specials from one of America’s most award winning breweries.

But wait, there’s more!
Continue reading “Summertime beer events”

Last fall, I was gaga over the prospective opening of Doughbot, a funky, irreverent doughnut dispensary way too close to my home. When it finally opened, I was less than whelmed. I found the doughnuts chewy and unappealing, the toppings one-dimensional, and the frequent sell-outs and equipment related shut downs amateurish.

However, less than a year after opening, this doughbot is running on all doughy cylinders. I hadn’t visited in over six months and stopped in on a whim needing coffee more than a treat. Not one to pass up a doughnut (for the sake of research) I sampled one, the blueberry/cornmeal, and knew right away that things had changed at the d-bot.

This doughnut was mind-blowing: dense, sugary, fruity, and ever so slightly crunchy. I had to try another. I tried the maple bacon. Hard to screw that up, yes? However, d-bot’s initial offering last year was, to put it hyperbolically, a doughbortion. There’s nothing sadder than a disgusting soggy bacon doughball. This current incarnation however, was a thing of culinary beauty. It was pillowy, bacony, syrupy without being cloying. I was in heaven. Doughbot had become that thing that I had hoped for, the best doughnut shop in town.

I’m a convert. I’m sold. I’m investing in Ukrainian diet pills for the duration.

Doughbot- 2226 10th St (at W). 444-5157, www.doughbotdonuts.com

This is all I know. The space formerly occupied by Lounge on 20 is slated to become a German eatery and bar. Now, I’m sure, with only about 10 seconds of thinking, you could come up with a funny and mostly crude name invoking sausages that would play up the new restaurant’s Lavender Heights location.

To look at it from the street, you’d think it was a front for the Russian Mafia, or a grade D chain out of Minneapolis that some optimistic Korean family bought into for a small fortune that they try to repay while still saving enough to send their kids to Stanford, or maybe just a run-down storefront that switches from owner to owner with promiscuous regularity, never quite finding that sweet spot of pizza satisfaction. Trust me though, it’s an ugly duckling with a swan-like beauty within.

You’ve probably seen it before, on J Street, right across from the old Shakey’s, right next to that culinary asylum known as Opa Opa, with a simple sign that says “PIZZA.” If you’re a savvy consumer, you’ve probably never stepped foot in the place. Man, are you missing out.

In no particular order here are the highlights: Continue reading “Hot City Pizza- Delightfully Shabby”

Two newish places have popped up on the eastern side of Broadway and I thought both deserved a little notice. The first is Original Poboys at the flat-ironish corner of Broadway and Alhambra. The place is so well-branded that I at first took it for a chain, but upon my questioning of the owner I found it to be an independent establishment. Specifically, the conversation went like this:

ME: Is this place part of a chain?

OWNER: Not yet.

So, apparently the owner is a go-getter type with Carl Karcher-esque vision, which could work as he has some pretty good ideas. First, Poboys is a small, clean establishment, offering the expected bayou fare, from poboy sandwiches to jambalaya ,bignets to fried oysters. The departure from the expected is the breakfast menu which features an all-you-can-eat cereal bar (not clear if milk is all-you-can-drink as well). I can just picture teenagers on their way to school devouring a pound and a half of fruit loops without batting an eye. I’m thinking that might be a tough sell to franchisees. Continue reading “Oak Park Eats- Grubbin’”

It is fish cooking season. Whether you are pulling trout out of a lake, stripers out of the American, or chartering a boat to chase big catches like Chinook salmon, a lot of you out there have fish to fry. Or griddle. Or…. poach.

In the past day, two of my favorite angling writers posted killer fish recipes, which I have included after the jump. One is simple: How to sear a fish, as told by Sacramento’s own Hank Shaw. The other is an East Coast recipe for Striped Bass Cakes, which Captain Mickey Melchiondo says are five times as good as crab cakes. Continue reading “Stickie’s latest musings on fish”

This Saturday, the 2nd annual Amador Barbera Festival kicks off at Cooper Ranch. Unfortunatley, for the second year in a row, the event has sold out. So, if you didn’t get tickets and still want to sample the finest nectar to drizzle from the fruity bosom of Amador county check out this post from 2009 about where to get some of the best Barbera this side of Italy:

If we were to be honest with ourselves for just a moment, we’d readily admit that we live in the deep, enveloping cleavage of the bosom of great wine. Just barely peeking out over the plunging neckline of our beautiful valley, we can see some of the best vineyards in America staring back at us. And while Zinfandel, Cab, and Chardonnay get all the attention and all the praise, it is the simple Barbera that I seek out every time. Continue reading “Barbera on the Brain”

Sacramento’s booze fans have been rallying behind local moustachioed mixmaster Andrew Calisterio in Hangar One’s California Tour cocktail contest. He currently has twice as many votes as all other cometetors, but I encourage you to click on his page and vote TODAY (the last day of the contest).

Why? Because Sacramento was snubbed in the contest. Andrew is lumped in with the San Francisco cocktail shakers because Hangar One decided that SACRAMENTO WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH to warrant its own category.

We all know that our local cocktail scene kicks major ass. Let’s get behind Andrew for one final push of votes and show them that we deserve to be considered alongside those inferior cities.

Click through to see his (soon to be) winning recipe, the West Bengal Cocktail.
Continue reading “Mixologist muddling the competition”