2020 has done a number on downtown Sacramento restaurants. What does the future hold?
COVID-19 risk and social distancing protocols have crippled restaurants across the region, and no neighborhood has been hit harder than downtown Sacramento.
Owners and staff watched as the udders of the neighborhood’s three cash cows — Golden 1 Center, the Capitol and the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center — dried up, the first two within a week’s time.
As Sacramento’s restaurants go, so goes the city. The last decade’s interest in and marketing of locally-sourced, high-quality food cast restaurants into an all-encompassing role as cultural beacons, economic drivers and wellness aides.
Many of those businesses are struggling or shuttered. Yet vacant storefronts and dirt lots hold glimpses of downtown’s future, one that’s hard to visualize now but may manifest in a few years.
“We’ve taken some body blows for sure, but I don’t think we’re feeling in any way that the future for downtown is going to be anything but really exciting when we get through this,” Downtown Sacramento Partnership CEO Michael Ault said.
THE MANY FORCES PLAGUING DOWNTOWN
It’s hard to believe, but just four years ago, Golden 1 Center hadn’t hosted a game or concert. The surrounding area was still more Westfield Galleria than Downtown Commons. A block over, The Hardin and its row of restaurants and bars were more than 18 months away from revamping 7th and K streets.
Downtown restaurant competition grew stiff and rents skyrocketed in the years after Golden 1 Center’s ribbon-cutting, with many owners paying more than $4 per square foot by late 2019; some market correction was probably inevitable. The pandemic’s gone beyond that.
Longstanding lunch favorites Ma Jong’s Asian Diner, Ambrosia Cafe, Specialty’s Cafe & Bakery and Bud’s Buffet have all shut down, as have relative newcomers El Santo Cantina & Ultralounge, Backbone Cafe and Jim’s Good Food. Three of the five Calling All Dreamers winners in business when the pandemic started — Oblivion Comics & Coffee, Milk House Shakes and Andy’s Candy Apothecary — have closed. Andy’s Candy Apothecary says it plans to reopen next year.
Those spots by and large stuck to classic dishes done well, offering a sense of comfort amenable to the wide range of palates of people working around them during normal times.
But many state workers still live in Sacramento suburbs and won’t drive 20-40 minutes each way into the city center for a meal, outside of a special occasion. They might seek out Camden Spit & Larder’s expanded outdoor patio for an anniversary dinner; they didn’t make the trip for a midday pastrami sandwich from Bud’s.
The same is true for office workers who once walked to Old Sacramento from One Capitol Mall or West Sacramento, Steamers owner Janie Desmond Ison said, as well as for the tourists and business travelers that once stayed in the Embassy Suites Riverfront hotel.
“All the people that come to visit downtown Sacramento come to Old Sac. So that just dried up and went away overnight,” Desmond Ison said.
Protests based in downtown Sacramento have hurt, too, even for restaurants untouched by the late-night vandalism largely done by people not associated with the daytime Black Lives Matter marchers. Frank Fat’s closed during the George Floyd protests because staff were concerned for their safety downtown, Fat Family Restaurant Group CEO Kevin Fat said.
Mass releases from the Sacramento County Main Jail and Rio Consumnes Correctional Center increased downtown’s homeless population. Restaurants on The Kay can’t move tables into the street because of the Sac RT line, and those near freeway entrances face a similar obstacle, Fat said. Even those able to do “al fresco” dining closed for up to three weeks in August and September due to wildfire smoke.
Forced innovation has produced some results that could be good ideas even post-pandemic, such as DoCo’s new system where customers scan six different restaurants and bars’ menus through a single QR code at a patio table. Each restaurant’s staff cooks and delivers the dish independently before one cumulative bill comes.
“All of our businesses are just trying to find creative ways to stay connected with their customers, this being one of them,“ Kings president of business operations John Rinehart said. “Sacramento’s a very resilient city. The innovation in this city is tremendous.”
Despite those efforts, COVID-19’s economic impact on downtown has been far worse than the Great Recession, Ault said. Times were tight back then, but Furlough Fridays only kept state workers out of the office for up to three days per month. Now it’s unclear how many will ever come back.
Frank Fat’s revenue is down about 60-70% from before the pandemic, Kevin Fat said. After 81 years of lunch meetings and private room deals, it’s now only open for dinner to-go and is outpaced by Fat’s Asia Bistro locations in Roseville and Folsom.
“A lot of my friends who live in suburbs have said they don’t want to go downtown right now,” said Fat, 52. “Downtown is just not looking like it was pre-pandemic. And it’s sad, because all the work that everybody did to make downtown what it was before that is gone now.”
NEW PROJECTS WILL PAVE THE WAY
If the state decides not to bring employees back downtown, there’ll be no shortage of businesses ready to move in, Ault said. Several private companies have expressed interest in renting downtown office space, including the slightly older Class B office spaces that had a 13.6% vacancy rate last year.
“Downtowns and urban centers go through changes and morph during cycles. If one population is not down here (like) state employees, it opens up the opportunity for others to take over that space,” Ault said.
That’s a lot of space to fill, though.
Most of the 71,000 state employees who work in Sacramento County worked downtown before the pandemic. And private companies — particularly those in tech that can afford premium real estate — are likely to shift toward remote work as well.
The convention center has been closed since a $240 million remodeling began in January 2019, and while Visit Sacramento spokeswoman Kari Miskit said several conferences are already booked for 2021 and beyond, the pandemic threatens to affect those as well.
Downtown Sacramento needs people to thrive. If 2020 has proven anything, there’s really only one way to get them there consistently: housing.
A substantial increase in people living downtown would feed area businesses in the cyclical down times such as the Kings’ offseason and legislative recess.
All development is considered essential in Sacramento County, and nearly 2,000 residential units are currently planned or under construction from F to P streets west of 16th Street, including 930 units and another 769 hotel rooms from I Street to Capitol Mall.
Those projects will take time, and they don’t do much for businesses struggling downtown right now. More beloved restaurants and shops will undoubtedly close by the time the virus is contained.
Whenever that time comes, though, their replacements will open with far more potential customers within walking distance. The new restaurants and those that survive the pandemic will reap the catalyst projects’ benefits without relying on them quite so heavily, which caused accordion-like rushes and dead periods over the last few years.
New restaurants move downtown
Yet the charm of any city’s restaurant scene is inherently tied to local ownership, and as mom-and-pops suffer, deep-pocketed chains such as Dunkin’, Domino’s and Chipotle are already planning to “swallow up” premium real estate, according to Business Insider.
Desmond Ison likened the coming years’ worst-case scenario to colony collapse disorder. Honeybees fuel life and generate plant diversity throughout their ecosystems. If all the worker bees disappear — or enough small-scale owners decide running a restaurant is too much work — they leave behind a habitat bound for monoculture, she said.
“The honeybees, if they become extinct it’s because people haven’t been paying attention to how critical the colony collapse is,” Desmond Ison said. “One day people will just wake up to find the honeybees are gone ... that is exactly what I’m predicting (with restaurants). We’re going to look just like everywhere else and all the little places like (Steamers) will be gone in 10 years.”
Given eaters’ love of all things farm-to-fork, though, it’s hard to imagine savvy landlords leasing exclusively to chains. New locally-owned restaurants such as Nash & Proper, Emma’s Tamales and Union Lounge have already opened downtown in the last few months.
Whatever restaurants move into the increasing number of vacancies, they’ll have the benefits (and likely, the associated rent costs) of more projects driving people downtown. A $47 million waterfront renovation will bring an elevated observation deck and walkway, an outdoor performance space for up to 5,000 people, a food hall and more to Old Sacramento.
Construction is underway to turn the Sacramento River-adjacent Powerhouse Science Center into the 50,000-square foot SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity, or MOSAC, campus with amenities to draw school groups and a 120-seat planetarium.
Most notably, the 21,000-seat stadium destined to house Sacramento’s MLS and NWSL soccer franchises is supposed to connect downtown and the Railyards. Surrounding developments will eventually add 10,000 residential units and 6.5 million square feet of commercial space roughly a 10-minute walk from DoCo.
That’s all assuming the city and developers are financially able to continue major projects as scheduled. So far, though, no major stoppages have occurred beyond the Republic’s MLS start date being pushed back a year to 2023.
‘We’re still hoping’
At 17, Danny Maya took his first restaurant job washing dishes at the now-closed Monterey Bay Canners Restaurant & Oyster Bar near the Sacramento and American rivers’ confluence. The seafood restaurant sat across Bercut Drive from a then-empty, 8,500-square-foot building.
When Maya returned home from teaching in Spain in 2016, he and his family — who also own Taqueria Maya — began looking for a new restaurant location. The area around DoCo was already filling up with planned eateries, Maya said, so they bet on Republic FC’s MLS dreams eventually coming true and signed a 25-year lease at that empty building on Bercut Drive.
Maya Traditional Mexican Food opened in July 2018, serving traditional dishes like tlacoyos, chiles divorciado and pozole in a sleek, modern dining room.
Surrounding development hasn’t yet picked up like Maya thought it would and customers aren’t coming over from the neighboring Hawthorn Suites during the pandemic. The Sacramento Housing Authority asked for state money last month to turn that River District hotel into a living facility for formerly homeless people.
This year has not gone the way Maya thought it would, and he’s not blind to his surroundings. Yet he’s invested in Sacramento for the long haul, and is trying to be optimistic about the future. It’s a position relatable to many in the city.
“I felt like (this area) was going to kind of bloom again, and we’re still hoping that happens in the future,” Maya said. “It’s just a risk you have to take sometimes, and there’s nothing we can do now because our lease is locked in. We just have to keep pushing and not give up.”
Twenty years from now, people may well look back at this downtown Sacramento’s phoenix moment. The new downtown will hopefully be a larger, more livable district with bells and whistles aplenty.
It just might not be quite like the old, quirky downtown many grew to love.
This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 8:34 AM.