Exclusive: Tower Cafe, closed since March 2020, will reopen in summer. Here are the details
One of Sacramento’s most cautious and beloved restaurants is coming back after more than a year of dormancy, a welcome indication of the COVID-19 pandemic’s slow end locally.
Tower Cafe will finally reopen at 1518 Broadway shortly after the July 4 weekend, owner Jim Seyman confirmed Monday. Seyman said he’s eyeing the first or second week of the month for a full indoor and outdoor reopening, though Tower Cafe’s Yelp page pegs July 20 as the scheduled date.
Tower Cafe has remained closed throughout the entire pandemic despite being home to one of Sacramento’s best patios, a lush canopy as diverse as the globally-inspired menu. Pre-COVID brunch lines regularly extended down Broadway as people waited an hour or more for their turn to order Tower’s heralded custard French toast.
COVID-19’s health risks dissuaded Seyman from reopening earlier, he said. He paid Tower’s kitchen staff and management through an $808,470 federal Paycheck Protection Program loan and out of his own pocket, he said, but furloughed the rest of the restaurant’s 100 or so employees.
“I just didn’t feel safe. I didn’t want my staff or any of my customers threatened or possibly coming down with COVID,” Seyman said. “It wasn’t worth (doing takeout or reopening sooner). For me, it wasn’t practical.”
With widespread vaccine availability, low positivity rates and the looming eradication of dining restrictions June 15, Seyman decided July was the right time to open again. He’s waiting until after Independence Day to avoid the holiday rush.
Tower Cafe has sat on the dividing line between Land Park and the grid since April 22, 1990, when Seyman opened his eclectic restaurant on Earth Day. It replaced Tower Drugs, the drugstore where Russ Solomon first began selling music under the Tower Records brand in 1960.
The restaurant’s ever-changing menu dances in and out of regions with a fair bit of intercontinental fusion, placing Texasia Thai skirt steak next to Baja crab melts below Brazilian chicken salad. Yet Tower’s staff reflects its menu: employees hail from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, China, the Middle East, South America, southeast Asia and Australia, and many have worked there for 20 or more years, Seyman said.
“We’re hopefully a reflection of the different communities that exist within this area of Northern California,” Seyman said. “It’s what the public really likes about place, the wide selection. Tower Records was a company that really reflected the myriad different genres that existed in music, and I’ve tried to do the same somewhat in how we set up the menu and the foods we work with.”
Rumors swirled about Tower Cafe’s permanent closure or Seyman selling the restaurant. A sign has hung on Tower Cafe’s front door and website homepage since March 2020 announcing the temporary closure.
Closing Tower Cafe for 14 months allowed Seyman to have the walls painted and complete some electrical maintenance work, he said. A 100-recipe Tower Cafe cookbook featuring specials from years past, long a brainchild in the back of Seyman’s mind, has been another pandemic project and is expected to be released around December.
“I think it’s part of our legacy to Sacramento and the public, to try to preserve our many hundreds if not thousands of recipes and the things we’ve done over the years. I’m looking forward to that,” Seyman said.
The leadership team of co-chefs Sukanya Tourville and Joseph Pounds, pastry chef Yolanda Neal and managers Ruben Reveles and Luis Gonzalez remains intact. Tower will have to compete with hundreds of other worker-starved restaurants across the Sacramento region for the rest of its employees, another reason Seyman’s not sure about an exact opening date yet.
Opening hours have yet to be set, but Seyman hopes to serve breakfast, brunch, lunch and dinner as Tower did in the past, to say nothing of its eye-catching dessert case.
This story was originally published May 10, 2021 at 2:37 PM.