You Gotta Try This: Easy on i’s stuffed pasilla pepper oozes cheese and value in Sacramento

This is “You Gotta Try This,” The Bee’s series featuring one particular must-have dish at a local restaurant. Each featured dish is nominated by a reader and chronicled at sacbee.com. Got a menu item you want to shine some light on? Email reporter Benjy Egel at begel@sacbee.com.

Easy on i isn’t fussy, fancy or particularly farm-to-fork. It’s just bar food that’s better than it needs to be.

That’s clear with the stuffed pasilla pepper, which packs melted cheese into a crispy exterior with a smack of Southwestern spice. At $4 during happy hour 3 to 6 p.m. every day or $5.95 at regular price ($11 for two), it’s among the cheapest and best-selling items on Easy on i’s menu.

Midtown Sacramento residents Mark and Carol Hoyt go through more than 40 pasilla pepper dishes per week at their neighborhood restaurant and bar, Carol said.

“It’s salty a little bit, it’s got the ... batter, it’s got cheese. It goes well whether you’re drinking soda pop or a beer or cocktail,” Carol Hoyt said. “You can come in, have this and a couple of drinks and it’s very affordable and very satisfying.”

An Easy on i cook fire-roasts a tray of pasillas each morning until the outside is blackened, then peels them and removes the seeds. They’re then stuffed with a cheese mixture, folded, wrapped in cellophane and refrigerated.

The pepper itself actually has next to no heat; at about 2,000 Scoville Heat Units, pasillas are roughly as spicy as poblanos. Heat instead comes from the diced jalapeno folded into shredded cheddar and jack cheese, eggs and housemade bread crumbs formed from day-old Sacramento Baking Co. loaves.

Upon order, peppers are coated in a flour and Pabst Blue Ribbon batter, then deep-fried for four to five minutes until golden-brown. It’s drizzled with a housemade tomato aioli (mayonnaise, tomato paste, lemon juice, white pepper and garlic) and garnished with diced scallions once plated.

A Southwest chicken salad and chorizo-stuffed breakfast burrito join the pepper as Tex-Mex items along a slate of more typical bar food on Easy on i’s menu. The pepper is also served on top of a jalapeno corn cake with eggs, then topped with chipotle sour cream and housemade pico de gallo as part of a brunch plate.

“Both Mark and I like spicy food. Not everyone does, but we like (food with) a little kick to it,” Carol Hoyt said.

A stuffed pepper has been on Easy on i’s menu in some form since the bar replaced Michelangelo’s Italian Art Restaurant in 2013. Previous iterations used other peppers or plated on top of a lettuce leaf, which proved to be a slippery base when customers cut through the pasilla, Carol said.

The Hoyts try to separate their bar from the rest of the pack by keeping ingredients fresh, Carol said. She and Mark shop for Easy on i every day at Restaurant Depot, Safeway and Smart Foodservice.

Mark spent his entire career in the hospitality industry and at one point co-owned seven bars between Southern California and Hawaii. He and Carol, a fellow Sacramento native, dated for two years in the late 1970s before parting ways, only to reconnect about a decade ago.

EASY ON I BAR & GRILL

1725 I St., Sacramento, (916) 469-9574

Info: www.easyoni.com/

Hours: 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. Thursday and Friday, 9 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. Saturday, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday.

Pro Tip: The Hoyts have written out recipes for their menu items and are willing to share pretty much any of them.

This story was originally published March 9, 2020 at 4:00 AM.