It’s back! Sacramento’s legendary Biba restaurant to get new life at key East Sacramento spot

Biba Caggiano is gone. Her dishes — and her people — are coming back.

Longtime Sacramento diners will recognize Biba classics like the buttery ravioletti and eight-layer lasagna when June Chang opens his new restaurant Mattone Ristorante in early April. Diners might recognize the mask-obscured faces cooking for and serving them. Most of them will probably even know the place.

Chang signed Mattone Ristorante’s lease Friday for 5723 Folsom Blvd., which served as Español Italian Restaurant’s home for 55 years until it closed in August. He plans to mirror Biba at Mattone Ristorante by bringing in executive chef Karel Mulac, pasta/pastry chef Penny Sheridan and as many other Biba alumni as can be hired back, he said.

Mulac and Sheriden’s quarterly rotating menu will run through Biba’s best-known dishes, using the same ingredients and recipes they relied on at 2801 Capitol Ave. Mattone, which translates to “brick,” refers to the visible building blocks on the restaurant’s exterior.

“A lot of (people) think Biba went away in May of last year, but it’s going to be continued under a different name,” said Chang, a Biba bartender for eight years until closure. “The pandemic has been terrible, maybe the worst thing in my life, so we’re going to try to bring a little good news to Sacramento.”

A new bar menu and happy hour specials will mark departures from the Biba of old, and an outdoor patio facing Folsom Boulevard is in the cards as well, pending city approval. Chang is also planning cosmetic renovations to nearly every inch of Español’s 4,000 square feet, from the walls to the kitchen to the windows, to modernize its interior.

Mattone’s main dining room will seat about 70 at full capacity plus another 30 in a banquet hall. An office will be torn out, allowing Chang to extend the bar and bring a piano into the lounge like Biba used to have. Valet service will be available.

A native of Bologna, Italy, Caggiano was still mastering English when she moved from New York to Sacramento in 1978 with her husband Vincent. Pasta-making classes in her home kitchen were popular, and soon she was writing cookbooks, hosting national cooking shows and opening arguably Sacramento’s most influential restaurant of the late 20th century.

In an industry full of prickly bosses and job-hopping, Caggiano inspired a rare sense of loyalty. Several employees stuck with her for multiple decades, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a culinary leader with an ill word to say about the Sacramento dining scene’s unofficial nonna.

Chang worked for more than a dozen restaurateurs by the time he got to Biba in 2012. She was the only one to genially refer to him as “my son.”

“She’d offer me meals and I’d say, ‘Biba I’m OK, I’m working right now.’ She’d say, ‘No no, you’re my son, I want to take care of you,’” Chang said. “That woman, she was amazing.”

Biba’s employees kept the Northern Italian restaurant humming as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases gripped Caggiano, and for a few months after her death at 82 years old in August 2019. But in May 2020, the Caggianos’ daughters permanently closed Biba.

There were a few reasons; the coronavirus pandemic eliminated indoor dining indefinitely, the daughters had their own careers, the kitchen needed updating. Demand, though, hadn’t waned prior to the pandemic.

More than 100 customers who had been coming to Biba since its inception in 1986 told Chang they loved the idea of Mattone, he said. The final stamp of approval came from Caggiano loyalist, Sacramento grocer and world-recognized gourmand Darrell Corti, Chang said. His store, Corti Brothers, is across the street from Mattone Ristorante.

Español faced some of the same obstacles as Biba prior to closing. The 97-year-old former sheepherders’ hall had been using the same building on Folsom Boulevard since 1965, and owner Perry Luigi acknowledged Español’s hearty communal meals weren’t designed for social distancing.

This story was originally published February 10, 2021 at 6:17 AM with the headline "It’s back! Sacramento’s legendary Biba restaurant to get new life at key East Sacramento spot."