Sacramento restaurateurs remember Randy Paragary’s legacy: ‘He changed my life’
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Remembering Randy Paragary
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Sacramento restaurateurs remember Randy Paragary’s legacy: ‘He changed my life’
‘One of the greatest Sacramentans of all time’: How the city remembers Randy Paragary
See photos from Sacramento restaurant giant Randy Paragary’s decade-spanning career
Randy Paragary, an icon of Sacramento’s restaurant scene, dies at 74
Patrick Mulvaney hadn’t worked at Paragary’s for eight years by the time he opened his own midtown Sacramento restaurant, Mulvaney’s B&L.
Yet the former sous chef called on Randy Paragary frequently, picking his old boss’ brain on how to deal with issues, small and large, in the months leading up to that 2006 opening.
“Calls came back in 20 minutes,” Mulvaney said. “Sometimes it was ‘Here’s the answer’ on the phone, sometimes it was ‘Come in and have a drink,’ sometimes it was ‘We’re going to Esquire (Grill), I’m picking the wine and you’re getting the bill.’ But it was always responsive.”
Paragary, 74, died Friday night after a short battle with cancer. He left behind a legacy as arguably Sacramento’s most influential restaurateur in his 52 years in the industry, a font of innovation who recognized the value of locally-sourced ingredients well before the farm-to-fork tagline. And he spawned a family tree of talented tastemakers.
“He had a huge impact on the Sacramento dining scene and the development of Sacramento generally,” said Alex Origoni, a former Paragary Restaurant Group manager who now co-owns The Shady Lady Saloon and B-Side.
His flagship restaurant, Paragary’s, was at one point Sacramento’s answer to Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Scott Ostrander said. Ostrander worked as a sous and head chef at Paragary’s as well as Paragary Restaurant Group properties Esquire Grill and Cafe Bernardo between 2001 and 2016 before opening Origami Asian Grill with former co-worker Paul DiPierro.
Paragary was also Ostrander’s landlord when the young cook lived above Cafe Bernardo at 28th Street and Capitol Avenue. Yet Ostrander could only recall one argument over their 20-year relationship, a 20-minute spat about cardboard during the stress of Paragary’s reopening after a million-dollar remodel in 2015.
“I can’t say enough good things about the guy,” Ostrander said. “He gave me every opportunity to develop in my career as a chef. I think he fed off people’s energy and ideas and creativity and good business and hospitality, and he exuded all that himself, so it was easy to get along with him.”
Paragary was never a chef — his background was in law, in fact — but one could hardly call him an absentee owner. He ate at a different PRG restaurant almost every night, often with his wife and co-owner Stacy, and kept his office upstairs from Paragary’s.
He owned most of the buildings his restaurants were in, and wasn’t afraid to shut down a concept that was losing money. If the idea was right, though, he was an active investor.
All five remaining PRG restaurants — Centro Cocina Mexicana, Paragary’s and three Cafe Bernardo locations — underwent significant renovations between 2015 and 2020, to say nothing of the seven-story Fort Sutter midtown hotel with a ground-level Cafe Bernardo he opened in January.
That taste for the cutting-edge was clear in 1984, when Rick Mahan was promoted to Paragary’s chef a year after the midtown restaurant opened. In the relatively early days of computers, Paragary demanded Mahan conduct a digital weekly inventory and take printed, not handwritten, tickets from servers.
Slow food was a foreign concept in Sacramento the mid-80s, said Mahan, who now owns The Waterboy and OneSpeed. Yet Yolo County farmers delivered fresh arugula, beets and potatoes to Paragary’s door. All PRG bread came from a proprietary bakery across N Street, a tradition that continues today.
There were monthly lunches at the home of the late Biba Caggiano, a longtime friend of Paragary’s and fellow Sacramento food icon. The Italian immigrant advised Paragary’s cooks how to perfect their fresh-made pasta. Paragary and then-partner Jim Mills once gave Mahan $100 and sent him to a San Francisco produce market for leafy greens and golden tomatoes, a memory that sticks out 35 years later.
“It was literally one of the greatest days of my life up to that point, and we were definitely onto something there,” Mahan said. “He definitely saw the value in that (style of cooking).”
South owner N’Gina Guyton was an 18-year-old Cafe Bernardo busser saving up to continue her UC Davis aeronautical space sciences and meteorology education in 1996. Then one autumn afternoon, things changed. The smell of wood-fired pizzas, the soft jazz playing over speaker system, the people laughing, the golden leaves falling outside Bernardo’s large windows — this was her new career path.
Guyton told Randy and Stacy she wanted a career in restaurants. In response, they set goals for her every three to six months until she became the cafe’s manager.
Guyton stayed at Cafe Bernardo for five-and-a-half years, then went to work in corporate restaurant management. Yet once a year, she’d spend an hour in Paragary’s office vetting her plans for South, scribbling down his financial advice prior to the southern restaurant’s 2014 opening.
“Who the f--- does that now? Who runs a million-dollar company and has all of these restaurants, and allows a former employee to come back and pick their brain for an hour about trying to be your own entrepreneur?” Guyton said. “Literally, South would not be here today if it were not for him, me working for him and the culture he created at that (Cafe Bernardo). He changed my life.”
The pandemic has underscored restaurants’ roles as community hubs, Mulvaney said. In PRG’s restaurants, there’s an air of sophistication but a lack pretension. They feel rooted in Sacramento, yet willing to adapt to changing winds.
That’s who Randy Paragary was.
“A restaurant’s spirit is created by its leader, and the spirit that Randy brought to his restaurants is something that Sacramento should treasure,” Mulvaney said.
This story was originally published August 14, 2021 at 2:36 PM.