11 things to love about Sacramento’s food scene in 2021: From banh mi to Binchoyaki

Want more food news? Sign up for the Food & Drink newsletter at sacbee.com/foodnews to get your weekly fill.

Well, 2021 was better than 2020.

Restaurant and bars reopened as vaccines became widely available and infection rates slowed. Downtown Sacramento still feels like a ghost town sometimes, but other parts of the city such as midtown and east Sacramento (not to mention suburban downtowns) were back to near-bustling by summer.

Amid surges, variants and safety questions — should we fly now? When can we return to the office? — we interacted more, experienced more the best of our region. Of course, that includes dining and drinking. Here are 11 things to love about Sacramento’s food and beverage scene.

1. A White Linen cocktail on a 100-degree summer day. Created by The Shady Lady Saloon and Ella Dining Room & Bar bartender Rene Dominguez in the mid-2000s, a White Linen combines gin, elderflower liqueur, simple syrup and lemon juice, garnished with cucumber slices. Incredibly refreshing in the heat and unmistakably Sacramentan, it’s the city’s principal contribution to modern cocktail culture.
   
   
2. Seeing a co-worker walk in with a pink Freeport Bakery box. It’s a jolt of excitement — oh, they got the good stuff — that almost makes me not want to work from home. Almost.
   
   
3. Starting a day trip with to-go sandwiches from Corti Brothers or Nugget Markets. Two excellent local grocery stores with deli counters that turn out some of the region’s best sandwiches? I’ll take a number for that.
4. The Hangtown Fry. Legend has it some starving prospector struck gold, walked into a Placerville hotel and ordered the most expensive meal the kitchen could throw together, which turned out to be an omelet with bacon and oysters. Some say disgusting, I say worth stopping at Buttercup Pantry for a taste every five or 10 years.

5. Banh mi from Giò Chả Đức Hương Sandwiches or Hướng Lan Sandwiches. You feel a sense of nostalgia even if you didn’t grow up eating them, simple ingredients bouncing off each other in acidic/spicy/savory harmony. At around $5 for a large, the price is unbeatable, too.

6. The rise of high-end, low-pretension fine dining over the last 10 years. It’s great to see restaurants such as Canon attract outside attention; it’s even better to see them present seriously good cooking in a not-so-serious light with dishes such as a grilled broccoli/Sichuan sausage plate topped with burnt Cheez-Its or 60-ingredient mole over tater tots.
   
   
7. Driving the California Delta’s winding waterside roads, few other cars in sight, en route to a Clarksburg winery. Bonus points if the leaves are turning.
8. Answering out-of-town visitors asking “so, what can’t you eat in your city?” Sacramento’s diversity (and, admittedly, an intimate knowledge of local restaurants) means I can usually help friends and family scratch that itch for a specific kind of food done well, be it Cambodian, Moroccan, Russian or many other underrepresented cuisines.
9. Burning an evening at Binchoyaki. Here, the sake flows as small plates slowly trickle out from the kitchen. Nibbling onigiri, slurping ramen and listening to “chicken ass” crackle over 1,000-degree binchotan charcoal always makes for a great evening at the Southside Park izakaya.
10. The region’s leap into craft brewing over the last decade. That yielded neighborhood breweries everywhere one looks and reshaped the millennial bar scene. Is the market now saturated? Yeah, pretty much, but the craft distillery movement is just getting started.
    
    
11. Ending a night out with Winko Ljizz. The one-man band’s purple trailer used to set up by my apartment but can now be found at 200 J St. Thursday through Saturday. Ask for a song or give him a word from which to freestyle, and sit back as he plays five to 10 of his 40 instruments at once.

What I’m eating

Jonathan Kerksieck and Katie Kinner-Kerksieck’s charming Greenhaven ristorante, Cacio, has drawn a devoted following to Riverlake Village Shopping Center since opening in 2018. Reservations are pretty much necessary for the snug interior and petite patio, where heat lamps and complimentary blankets make mid-40s dining comfortable, and it earned a crowd vote spot on The Sacramento Bee’s 50 Best Restaurants list earlier this year.

Cacio’s seasonal baby chiogga beet salad ($12) felt very winter-appropriate, with the roasted Italian beets countered by tart mandarins, creamy whipped burrata, arugula and pickled onions. Each part was surprisingly bright, a welcome bounce in contrast to heavier cold-weather foods.

The restaurant’s name comes from cacio e pepe ($18), a simple cheese-and-black-pepper pasta that was the first dish Jonathan made Katie early in their courtship at Grange Restaurant & Bar. A sweet story, but more than a decade later, it made for an imbalanced flagship where excessive pepper overwhelmed the pecorino and housemade bucatini.

Sautéed prawns ($25) with fregola, preserved tomatoes and arugula were decent, though the pearly pasta was a bit oily for my taste. Kinner-Kerksieck’s suggestions of two Italian wines, Paolo Scavino’s lightly acidic 2019 nebbiolo ($16/$48) and Terre di Chieti’s 2020 pecorino IGT ($10/$32), both paired excellently with the two above pastas.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and blood,” reads the beginning of a framed Theodore Roosevelt quote hung in Cacio’s restroom. It’s surrounded by articles full of praise from various area publications, including this one. I loved Cacio’s setting, service and wine, and wanted to like the food just as much, but some fine-tuning is still needed. Hopefully they’ll see that as constructive criticism.

Openings and closings

• Dust Bowl Brewing’s new 6,000-square foot taproom is now open in Old Town Elk Grove, as Bee reporter Darrell Smith wrote last week. The Turlock-based brewery, which also has a taproom in Monterey, has beer on 30 taps as well as burgers, flatbreads and tacos at 9676 Railroad St.
• Zia’s Delicatessen closed its Capitol-adjacent Sacramento sandwich shop last Thursday, another downtown restaurant knocked down by the pandemic, as my colleague Hanh Truong wrote. Those craving the Crilly family’s meatball subs and Italian cold cuts can visit them at Zia’s remaining location in downtown Davis.
  
  
• Speaking of Davis, Village Pizza & Grill is closing on a prominent downtown corner after 12 years, town scribe Wendy Weitzel of the Davis Enterprise reported. Aziz Fattahi started selling excellent thin-crust pizzas at the unpretentious Village Bakery in 1997 and opened student-friendly Village Pizza & Pints in fall 2019, but his full-service restaurant couldn’t survive the pandemic.