Sacramento Restaurants, Nightlife and Entertainment

[wburg]

Originally Posted by BrianSac

Thats the place! It figures you would know the name of the restaurant, bar, and owner. I wonder if this building will ever be "gentried"?

I hope not! We need places like the Capitol Park Cafe, and the hotel too. I used to rent a house owned by Ron Henry, and I went to the hotel's lobby to pay my rent.

[BrianSac]

Originally Posted by BrianSac

Good to know. I've wanted to go there for awhile, I always seem to forget about the place.

*******************************
On another note:

We strolled around midtown for second saturday last night and had some cocktails and mexican grub at Azul.

Very friendly staff. Fun décor, muy azul. Steak Burrito and Cheese Enchiladas were very good. Ceviche was average to good.

Don Julio Reposado Margaritas were excellent!

Ask for the Minnesota Daquri Ice Cream drink, only one bar tender knows how to make it. Loaded with rum, not my kind of drink, but for people who like sweet drinks its delicioso.


We went to Crush 29 in Roseville on Friday night:

The Salads were excellent. Pasta ok. Steak Sandwich was very good.
Desserts were horrible, bad coffee.

They served their white wine warm, and they poured it from those little carafes which I hate, and the waiter said its too much of a hassle to pour from the actual wine bottle....I hate that too.

They spent a fortune on stone and tile. The place is beautiful, great center bar. Very Tuscan décor.

*****************

Might I add I was more impressed and satisfied with the grub provided for Felipe's Birthday party at Faces last night, than either of the two places above. And it was FREE. :-)

Forgot to mention Tuli Bistro:

I liked this place a lot. We had the salumi pizza(salami, pepporoni, and spanish sausage). It was excellent. The salads were good too!

Tempanillo Red wine...from Argentina. We had a chardonnay and reisling as well. They have good a selection of wines.

It was good, friendly staff, hot chef, and intimate setting.

[SacTownAndy]

This makes me very happy. Yum! A little bit of home in my new home. I'm definitely going to eat there.


Mikuni to open Colorado restaurant
Sacramento Business Journal - by Mark Anderson Staff writer

Mikuni Restaurant Group signed a lease to open a Mikuni Japanese Restaurant & Sushi Bar in the Park Meadows lifestyle shopping center in Lone Tree, Colo., 20 miles from Denver.

Sacramento-based Mikuni has six restaurants in Northern California from Sacramento to the Village at Northstar-at-Tahoe Resort in Truckee. The company is also working on a restaurant in the Village at Queensridge in Summerlin, Nev., which is part of the Las Vegas metropolitan area.

The Park Meadows Mikuni could open August. The Summerlin Mikuni should open in the first quarter of 2009.

Started as a family restaurant in the suburbs of Sacramento, Mikuni has grown to employ 650 people.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2008/02/11/daily46.html?f=et76&ana=e_du

[What is a Rivercat?]

This is SO stupid. And now the story is on Fox's front page
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/714546.html - Kings dance team photos

[Majin]

Anybody got a link to the photos?

[sugit]

http://withleather.com/post.phtml?pk=4994

But the link isn't working right now....

[TowerDistrict]

Raley's heir plans bistro/market at former Andiamo in east Sacramento
By Bob Shallit - [email protected]
Published 12:00 am PST Saturday, March 8, 2008
Story appeared in BUSINESS section, Page D1

A group headed by Raley's heir Michael Teel has leased the former Andiamo restaurant site in east Sacramento and plans to open a bistro and gourmet foods market there by year's end.

Tentatively called "Good Eats," the gourmet bistro-market will be the first of several planned by Teel – a former Raley's CEO – and his business partner, Michael Ashker, a local technology entrepreneur and former hedge fund manager. "This is part of a large enterprise we are building. This is just one component," Ashker says.

The partners have been formulating their concept for a year and negotiating for the Andiamo site – at 32nd Street and Folsom Boulevard – for nearly that long. Competing for the lease was Whole Foods Market, says Barbara Mikacich, whose family continues to own the property. Whole Foods intended to level the building, acquire additional surrounding land and put up a multilevel store, Mikacich says.

The Teel group, called M2 Venture Partners, plans to keep the Andiamo building intact and preserve much of its interior, including its "outstanding" kitchen, Ashker says. "We want to use the character of the building and take advantage of its location," says Ashker, who stresses that the company's plans are still developing.

Ashker said he and Teel, who are partners at Prosper Media, want to bring in an "all-star" chef and offer a large selection of wines – by the glass at the bistro and by the bottle in the adjoining market. Gourmet foods offerings will be selective and limited. "You won't want to bring your whole grocery list here," Ashker says.

[wburg]

Local business, Raley's back in (or at least near) the central city, PLUS adaptive reuse of an awesome existing building?

Rock on.

[TowerDistrict]

i concur with your rocking sentiment.

Whole Foods project sounds grandiose. They'd have much better luck trying to
work into Crystal Ice, imo. And if they want the build to suit type of thing, then
there are numerous empty lots that i'd be happy to point out to them... for a
slight commission of course.

[sugit]

Funny you said the Crystal Ice project. I was thinking the same thing when I saw the the article.

[wburg]

Would Whole Foods work that close to Safeway? From what I saw of the potential tenant mix in the Crystal Ice project it seemed more focused on dry-goods retail--clothing, furniture, a couple of specialty foodstores but not a large market. The one retailer I'm looking forward to is that green-focused home improvement products store tentatively slated for the old Orchard Supply building. Midtown needs more hardware stores!

[jsf8278]

Speaking of Crystal Ice...I remember a while back someone posted the pdf of the plans for it. Did that include any type of timeline, or does anyone know if they have one? I assume it's pretty far off, but i was just wondering.

[TowerDistrict]

Originally Posted by wburg

Would Whole Foods work that close to Safeway? From what I saw of the potential tenant mix in the Crystal Ice project it seemed more focused on dry-goods retail--clothing, furniture, a couple of specialty foodstores but not a large market. The one retailer I'm looking forward to is that green-focused home improvement products store tentatively slated for the old Orchard Supply building. Midtown needs more hardware stores!

Whole Foods must think that they'd work nearby Safeway, considering that 32nd
& Folsom is only about a 3 block walk from the Safeway at Alhambra & J.

Regarding the Orchard Supply building...

I'm not so sure that's going to happen any time soon. This article popped up last
week. It's a bout a joint venture between three guys from GreenBuilt Consulting,
Green Sacramento, and LJ Urban.

Green Sacramento is the shop on Fulton that was rumored to be moving into the
Orchard Supply building. So I'm not sure what the future holds for them...

From the Sacramento News & Review

Little green shop on the corner - Green Living Center comes to Midtown

By Sena Christian, [email protected]

This article was published on 02.21.08.

It will be the first of its kind in Sacramento, so they wanted a name that really nailed it. They considered “Sustainability Complex,” but scratched that: too Freudian. “Green Central Station?” Nope: lacked pizazz. At one point the three friends joked they might just have to buckle down, head to a bar and drink their way to a consensus. Suggest a name, chug a beer. Last man standing had the final word.

But it didn’t come to that. Josh Daniels of Green Sacramento, Scott Blunk of GreenBuilt Consulting and Construction, and Micah Baginski of LJ Urban amicably—and soberly—settled on “Green Living Center” as the perfect moniker for their hub of three businesses committed to green building and sustainable lifestyles.

On Monday, March 3, GLC’s doors will open at 1931 H Street, the current home of real-estate developer LJ Urban, which is making space for the new roommates.

Midtown’s Green Living Center will offer Sacramentans convenient solutions to green-building issues. Thinking about a green remodel of your home? GLC is your place. Looking for wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council? They’ve got it. Interested in infill development or the LEED-certified Washington Neighborhood housing project in West Sacramento? Check and check.

“The center’s bringing together a gravity of likeminded people and it’s going to bring more attention to the green movement,” said Baginksi, construction manager for LJ Urban.

Until March, Daniels will be hauling carpet tiles, organic cotton bedding, cork flooring, recycled glass countertops, non-toxic paints and more from Green Sacramento, his green-building supply store in north Sac, to the new digs. The Midtown location’s smaller than Daniels’ current 2,000-square-feet showroom, so “it’s going to be a bit of a challenge,” he said. “But it’s worth it to be in the Midtown area.” His customer base is, after all, primarily urban.

“This has always been the spot where he belongs,” Baginski agreed.

The move won’t be quite as daunting for Blunk, of GreenBuilt, who up until four months ago, headed operations out of his West Sacramento home. His construction company grew from one employee to eight since its inception in 2004, so the Midtown move from their current temporary abode in Folsom is the next logical step. Once settled, the company will continue to focus on balancing health, comfort and safety with respect for the natural world.

“I love that green building is science-based building,” said Blunk, who has a mechanical-engineer background. “It’s an intellectual pursuit, as well as a values-based pursuit.”

Green building is also a necessary pursuit, as Daniels will attest. Several years back, while remodeling his house, he discovered that eco-friendly products were hard to come by. He started his store in March of 2005 to fill this void, opening his business on a shoestring budget and with a simple conviction: “Hey, somebody’s got to do it.”

And the general public has arrived as well. A decade ago, green building was considered fairly radical. Now, Senators Clinton and Obama, NBC and even Raley Field and Loftworks are in on the act. It’s an issue everyone can rally around.

“I’d say we’re just about on the verge of the masses getting it,” Daniels said of going green. “Instead of complaining about a problem, green building is a solution.”

The solution will soon be at our fingertips, right in the heart of Midtown.


Scott Blunk, Josh Daniels and Micah Baginski welcome you to the Green Living Center.

Related Web sites:
www.ljurban.com
www.greensacramento.com
www.greenbuiltconstruction.com

[wburg]

Sounds like a natural pairing, and hey, sooner is better than later and Orchard Supply would have been "later." The other plan I heard for that building was La Bou moving their bakery into it, but that was before the Green Sacramento thing came up.

Neither location seems to make sense for Whole Foods. On Alhambra makes even less sense, due to the proximity of the Co-Op.

[goldcntry]

Easy Answer:

Make Whole Foods the market that goes in the newly renovated DTPlaza...


... Then again, I'm not sure that would be good for my waistline to have all that good cheese and the olive bar so close to my office...


BUT I'M WILLING TO CHANCE IT!

[innov8]

I heard this was pretty funny last month... the price is right too.

[arod74]

Here is a link to a SBJ article this week doing a round up of the restuarant and entertainment scene in the central city. Not much new info but a good read none the less.

http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2008/03/24/focus1.html?b=1206331200^1608027

[wburg]

I found it interesting that they mentioned Capitol Garage opening (assumed from context) after The Park, when Capitol Garage had been where Ma Jong's is (and open late) back to the early nineties. And I couldn't help but think of those horrible microwave snacks when they kept talking about "hot pockets."

It ends on a very true point: the residential population downtown won't carry all those restaurants, and at some point there's going to be a shake-out of restaurants, at least until downtown gets a bit more repopulated.

[urban_encounter]

Originally Posted by wburg

I found it interesting that they mentioned Capitol Garage opening (assumed from context) after The Park, when Capitol Garage had been where Ma Jong's is (and open late) back to the early nineties. And I couldn't help but think of those horrible microwave snacks when they kept talking about "hot pockets."

I worked at the origional Capitol Garage when it first opened. It was owned by George Warren of News10 and his brother..


It was a blast and i can remember living in my Cada apartment and had so much fun working there and going to school. The pay was crap; though i liked the burritos or "Hot Pockets"

The one thing i didn't like about it was our coffee. We would roast the beans in the back between the CG and Beers Books and our designated (or hired) roaster didn't know the first thing about roasting beans, so consequently he always seemed to burn them.

[otnemarcaS]

Talking of midtown restaurants, I stopped at the new "i dragoni pizzeria" which just opened about one week ago on the bloc. They sell pizzas, sandwiches, salads and coffee. It replaced "it's a grind" coffee shop which was located between Centros and Gianni's. We stopped in after leaving Harlows at about 1:40am last Friday. The place is open till 3am on Fri and Sat nights. I Dragoni sells pizzas by the slice for $3.50. The mushroom slice and aquitania (meatballs, garlic, peso, cheese) slice we had were some of the best slices of pizza I've had in Sac. Made me forget that deep dish crap I had before at Chicago Fire on J.

Of course, this place is owned by Peter Torza family so they use Gianni's for additional seating as an open door separates the two places. The pizza, apparently, is the same one made at Gianni's although I had never tried pizza at Gianni's. Also, I think Gianni's only sells whole pizzas. But if you go to Gianni's menu at theblocsacramento.com, you can see the pizzas available.

Just amazing to see what Paragary and Torza have done to that whole area now called 'the bloc'. Anyone know when G.V. Hurley's officially opens? Seems like they recently did a soft opening.