Food reporter’s notebook: The best dishes I ate around Sacramento in September

You don’t need a Michelin guide to find good food in the Sacramento area — just a mode of transportation and a sense of adventure.

One week, it was a scrumptious Cambodian fish stew and beef larb. The next, it was grilled swordfish in a summery corn-okra relish and Jimmy Nardello pepper cream sauce out in Auburn. A Chinese holiday meant it was time for a pilgrimage to south Sacramento, where the region’s best moon cakes are made.

All these write-ups first appeared in The Sacramento Bee’s free weekly Food & Drink Newsletter. To sign up for future reviews plus new openings, reporter commentary on the local dining scene and recommended food writing from other outlets, visit https://t.news.sacbee.com/webApp/mccSignUp?newsletter=sacbee_food_drink_newsletter.

Taste of Angkor

Taste of Angkor is the only Cambodian restaurant in Sacramento city limits, though members of the Som extended family also run S.E.A. Hut and S.E.A. Bowl not far away in Elk Grove. Southeast Asian art, jewelry, dresses and more for sale have taken over the dining room at 4566 Mack Road in south Sacramento during the pandemic, relegating Taste of Angkor’s vibrant dishes to Styrofoam takeout containers for now.

Cambodian dishes often lean on kroeung, a Khmer spice paste that includes lemongrass, makrut lime leaves, galangal and turmeric in Taste of Angkor’s rendition. Nowhere is that clearer than in the nom banh jok samlor khmer ($13), a traditional yellow stew with rice noodles, coconut milk and minced catfish and chicken. Exercise caution with the red pepper tucked into the corner of the noodle box: A small bit is enough for all but the biggest spice fiends.

I really liked the kathiew goak ($12), noodles with sliced beef, shrimp, tripe, meatballs and fried garlic that get another umami punch from a side cup of oxtail broth. The laab sach koo ($11.50) was tasty, too, beef larb over sticky rice buoyed by an unmistakably Southeast Asian combination of mint, lime juice and fish sauce. Take your pick to wash it all down — bubble tea, Gunther’s Ice Cream or an avocado smoothie.

Restaurant Josephine

I had the pleasure of eating at Auburn’s Restaurant Josephine for a front-page story on the California Michelin Guide’s shortcomings, not the least of which is a reluctance to eat outside of downtown, midtown and east Sacramento. Named by yours truly as one of the area’s best restaurants to open during the pandemic, Restaurant Josephine is Carpe Vino alumni Eric Alexander and Courtney McDonald’s first place of their own, a homey concept worth a detour.

Backed by ancestral roots, fine dining skills and some produce from the owners’ farm, the restaurant at 1226 Lincoln Way merges classic French and American dishes with Eastern European specialties rarely seen around these parts. That means appetizers like roasted heirloom beets ($12) tossed in a Georgian sauce called tkemali made from the farm’s Elephant Heart plums. The mildly tart sauce offset the beets’ bitterness and played nicely with the feta, but could have used a little more flavor - if you’re going to do something different, why not commit?

Beet salad said winter, but the grilled Pacific swordfish ($29) screamed summer. Marinated as a steak in house-cultured kefir and topped with corn, sliced okra, cherry tomatoes and a creamy Jimmy Nardello pepper sauce, it was bright and cheery, the kind of traditional dish with fun, modern influences that defines Restaurant Josephine. It was so summery, though, that between my visit and writing this, it’s been replaced on the menu by a scallops dish.

Dessert was the tarte au citron ($7) made with Meyer lemons from the owners’ farm, an initial pucker giving way to a pleasant grassiness from the fennel pollen dusting. Next time, I’ll try a Georgian wine or a cocktail like the Picon Punch (Amario CioCaro, dry curaçao, Pierre Ferrand cognac float, housemade grenadine, soda and a twist of lemon).

Pegasus Bakery & Cafe

As Sept. 21’s Mid-Autumn Festival approached, I (and many others) headed down to the best local place to find moon cakes: Pegasus Bakery & Cafe, a Hong Kong-influenced pastry shop in a well-trafficked south Sacramento shopping center at 6825 Stockton Blvd., Suite 265.

For those who haven’t experienced the joy of moon cakes ($3 each), they’re small, dense circular sweets typically eaten during the annual festival honoring Chang’e, the Chinese moon goddess whose story can be read here. Each cake has a thin crust stamped with the Mandarin word for its paste filling.

I grabbed cakes with the four types of fillings Pegasus had out: red bean, green bean (not that kind), lotus seed and white lotus seed. Other fillings like winter melon or assorted nuts could be pre-ordered. Sweet but not saccharine, a little dry but not chalky, they all had a bit of a toasty, nutty flavor from the crust. Among fillings, I liked the deep, rich lotus seed the best.

It being lunchtime, I also picked up a couple of Pegasus’ savory options. The chicken sticky rice ($5.50) wrapped in a lotus leaf with shitake mushrooms, meatballs, sausage and a quail egg could have probably satiated me alone, but at that price, why not add a garlic ham bun ($2.50)?

Beast + Bounty

I’ve felt Beast + Bounty can be hit-or-miss since its 2018 opening in midtown, and my most recent visit didn’t fully dissuade that notion. But few meat-serving Sacramento restaurants make vegetables stars of the show like Beast + Bounty does, there are points for creativity and the pandemic-borne parklet outside 1701 R St. makes for some of the city’s best outdoor dining.

We thought about going to a thin-crust pizzeria instead, and ended up with the polar opposite of that in Beast + Bounty’s vegan pizza ($18). Currently topped with housemade pesto, plant-based mozzarella rounds and dispersed caponata (essentially a sweet-and-sour Sicilian ratatouille), I liked the flavors but could have done with less dough.

Coal-roasted maitake mushrooms ($16) with a red curry dipping sauce were complex and flavorful, if a bit rubbery. Grilled Nantes carrots ($14) with pickled cauliflower and capsaicin-loaded green chutney were a fun appetizer, even though the carrots didn’t hold up particularly well on the takeout voyage home.

Even the one meat dish we ordered, the duck bolognese ($20), got a unexpectedly pleasant kick from the arugula mixed in along gamey little meatballs. Maybe it should be called Bounty + Beast?