Plant-based fast food restaurant Burger Patch to open in downtown Davis on Monday

Vegan fast food restaurant Burger Patch will open in downtown Davis on Monday, co-owner Phil Horn confirmed in an email to The Sacramento Bee on Friday.

The restaurant at 500 1st St., Suite 9, in the Davis Commons shopping center will have essentially the same menu as its midtown Sacramento counterpart, including agave milkshakes, faux pulled pork and burgers composed of Beyond Meat and Daiya cheeze. Nicole Michaels, a Day 1 employee at Burger Patch’s midtown location, will helm the Davis store under general manager Stephen Leopold.

The expansion comes just over a year after Phil and his wife Danea Horn launched Burger Patch’s original location at 2301 K St. in Sacramento. Danea Horn is an agricultural and resource economics Ph.D candidate at UC Davis, making the college town a logical second destination.

The owners tour prospective new Northern California locations about once a week and hope to announce their next store by the end of the year, Phil said.

At 1,500-square feet, Davis’ Burger Patch is twice as large as the Sacramento location and will accommodate dine-in seating with precautions aimed at limiting the coronavirus’ spread, such as sanitizing hard surfaces every 30 minutes and requiring all staff to wear masks. It’ll also eventually sell beer and wine, unlike the midtown store.

Proceeds from every sale will go to different local charities every month under Burger Patch’s “Patch Match” program. Burger Patch is paying to round up the change on all June purchases to the nearest dollar, and plans to donate the sum of $3,000-$5,000 to nonprofits that mostly assist African Americans through Sacramento Building Healthy Communities at the end of the month.

“As we get going, the idea with each of the locations is they will contribute to specific nonprofits around them, so Davis would serve Davis,” Phil Horn said. “But as we kick this (store) off, we’re going to roll this over to benefit those organizations that are largely in the south Sac area.”

Burger Patch also called on local restaurants to employ women in at least half their management and back-of-house positions through an initiative called “Gril Power” last December.

Burger Patch will be open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week in Davis.