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

From Southwestern fusion in Woodland to Slavic sausages in El Dorado County, the eatin’ was good around Sacramento-area restaurants in November.

All of these reviews were first published in The Sacramento Bee’s free weekly food and drink newsletter, along with opening and closing news, recommended articles by other publications and musings on the local dining scene. To sign up, visit http://sacbee.com/foodnewsletter.

Thai Basil

Nursing a bit of a cold and incapable of not over-dramatizing the slightest illness, I trudged down to Thai Basil in midtown Sacramento for some takeout chicken noodle soup earlier this week. It’s not like my grandma’s recipe, though.

Suleika Sun-Lindley’s Thai Basil at 2431 J St. (and her sister Wannipa Raff’s restaurant by the same name at 1613 Douglas Blvd. in Roseville) is one of the few places around Sacramento to serve a soup called gang jeard ($7.50 for a cup, $12 for a bowl). The salty mushroom-soy broth packed with ground chicken, glass noodles and chopped carrots, zucchini and kale soothed my scratchy throat and made me appreciate my sense of taste still being intact.

Sun-Lindley also owns plant-based Veg Cafe upstairs, and Thai Basil is similarly veggie-friendly. There’s a robust all-vegan menu, no curries on the main menu use animal products and Impossible meat or JUST Eggs are listed as protein options alongside tofu, shrimp, chicken, beef and pork. That makes it easy to go for items like the slippery lad nha ($16), flat wide rice noodles wok-fried with broccoli and served in a thick soy gravy.

A steak dish called nuah-yang ($23) spun in the opposite direction but relied again on a soy-based sauce, this an assertive one stocked with chilis, ginger and garlic. It was delicious, and needed to cover up regrettably tough strips of medium-rare sirloin served alongside zucchini, broccoli, onions and carrots.

CT European Cafe & Grill

There’s not much eastern European food around Sacramento, save for the Russian grocery aisles of Rancho Cordova; the January 2020 closure of Cafe Marika in midtown after 30 years left a chicken paprikash-shaped hole in my heart, as it did for many others. A meal on CT European Cafe & Grill’s lovely vine-surrounded patio while driving through Shingle Springs, then, was heartwarming, buoyed by scarcely-seen country cooking and a hostess who called everyone “babe” or “sweetie” or “my love.”

Where else is one going to find ćevapi ($14 for five sausages, $18 for 10)? The national dish of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it consisted of gamey lamb sausages stuffed in soft lepinja bread (sort of like a cross between a pita pocket and a sausage roll) with sour cream, chopped onions and a red pepper spread available as condiments. Accompanying fries were disappointing, though: crispy on the outside, but nearly empty husks covering more air than potato.

A stuffed cabbage dish called sarma ($18) was the lunch special when I went. Two hulking cabbage balls filled with rice and ground beef sat atop stringy spätzle, egg-based German noodles, with a tomato-based sauce below and dollop of sour cream to the side. A nice balance of acid and umami, with enough carbs to soak up all the flavors.

“CT” stands not for the cafe’s checkered tablecloths but for Crêpe Town, and I felt obligated to try one. The Burgundy crêpe ($17) was a great choice. Tender Angus beef braised in a wine sauce poured out from the crepe’s insides, where it happily married with pungent melted asiago and earthy mushrooms.

Alma and Edi Zildzo immigrated from what’s now Croatia (then Yugoslavia) in the mid-90s and opened their restaurant first in Cameron Park in 2011 before moving to a shopping center at 4064 Mother Lode Dr. two years later. The menu is a little Balkan, a little German, a little Hungarian, a little French and a lot scrumptious. In short, it’s well worth a stop on the way to or from South Lake Tahoe, and maybe even a special trip.

Doggeros

I first ate at Doggeros about a week before everything shut down in March 2020 for a story that never saw the light of day due to shifting priorities. After making it back to 437 First St. in Woodland last week, my first impression holds true: It’s an extremely fun, low-key Cali-Mex spot that embraces trends while holding onto a little nostalgia.

Doggeros’ menu has a whole “birria zone” section, including loaded fries and ramen, added as the stewed meat became popular over the last couple of years. But one has to start with the quesabirria ($3 each), a quesadilla/taco hybrid featuring shredded beef and melted mozzarella inside two semi-crispy corn tortillas, which fueled the 2019 birria craze in the Bay Area and Southern California that’s since spread to the rest of the country. No quesabirria experience is complete without a cup of dark, cloudy consommé ($1) made from leftover juices once the meat has been removed from the stew.

Borrowing its name from the Mexican slang term for hot dog vendors (the spelling is slightly anglicized from dogueros), Doggeros is one of the few places around here to offer Sonoran-style hot dogs ($7.55). Popular throughout Arizona, these high-quality beef dogs are wrapped with bacon and piled with grilled green peppers and onions, tomatoes and avocado sauce in a housemade brioche bun.

The Chori-Burger ($9.75) was super flavorful, from a thoroughly-spiced patty to its many accoutrements (beef chorizo, mozzarella, chipotle mayo, avocado sauce, grilled onions, lettuce and tomato, with grilled yellow jalapeño slices available upon request). Tajin-dusted fries were a nice surprise but came out slightly limp, the result of Doggeros using clamshell takeout containers for all orders, even those about to be consumed on the food stand’s garage-door-covered patio.

Word about Doggeros seems to have gotten out around Woodland, and service takes longer than expected for such casual fare — we waited an appropriately-quoted half hour for lunch Sunday. But for an affordable, new-school take in a town rich with Mexican food (co-owner Josue Peniche also owns Las Brasas Tacos & Salsas two blocks away), it’s worth the wait.

Peace Cuisine

It doesn’t look like much — a tight, casual Chinese restaurant in a West Sacramento strip mall. But give Peace a chance (editor’s note: always a pun, Benjy) and you’ll find a semi-hidden gem.

Peace Cuisine, located at 829 Jefferson Blvd. a mile from Sutter Health Park, delivers Cantonese comfort food for American stomachs. Portions are gargantuan — I went Monday and will still be working on leftovers come Friday. The restaurant advertises that no MSG is added to any dish, but recent studies have indicated that perceived allergy to this naturally occurring compound is more rooted in xenophobia than science.

A grilled chicken lunch special ($11, plus another $1 after 5 p.m.) piled succulent thighs in a soy marinade on top of the customer’s choice of chow mein or fried rice, with a cream cheese wonton and hot-and-sour or egg drop soup on the side. We opted for the chow mein and a full order of the yangzhou fried rice ($14, anglicized as yang chow on the menu), which came with shrimp, barbecued pork and scrambled egg.

Neither was particularly fancy, uncommon or hard to make. Both hit the damn spot eaten out of a takeout container, still steaming hot 20 minutes after pickup, on a drizzly night with an empty fridge. The noodles had an appropriate level of give, the proteins were frequent throughout the fried rice — it was simple food, yes, done extremely well.

So too was the shrimp egg foo young ($16), a Chinese omelet folded over in the takeout box and stuffed with bean sprouts, onions and 21 good-sized crustaceans (chicken, beef and veggie variations also exist for a few bucks less). An oyster sauce-based gravy provided all the umami flavor one could want. In a strange way, it reminded me of a slightly lighter Hangtown Fry, the Placerville-specific omelet containing shelled oysters and bacon.

There’s a lot of restraint here: Chef Eric Kuang came to Peace Cuisine from the more refined Lotus 8 in Folsom, and cooked in Hawaii under a Hong Kong native before that. It’s clear he could be making more exciting dishes at a better-known restaurant, an itch that’s partially scratched by his willingness to make off-menu dishes upon customers’ advance requests.

He’s evidently content at Peace, though. For West Sacramento, that means exceptional no-frills Cantonese food — lots and lots of it.

This story was originally published December 1, 2021 at 8:40 AM.