Food reporter’s notebook: The best Sacramento-area restaurant meals I ate in January

Vibrant sambar with idli, hefty sandwiches from a Placer County cheese shop and super-fermented kimchi stew helped make up some of the best meals I ate in January.

All these reviews were first published in The Sacramento Bee’s free weekly Food & Drink newsletter, along with other stories from the Sacramento-area dining scene, insider analysis and opening/closing news. Visit sacbee.com/foodnewsletter to sign up.

Annachikadai

Indian restaurants around here tend to highlight dishes from the country’s northern half like aloo ghobi, naan and samosas. But South Indian cuisine gets its star treatment at Annachikadai, the low-key destination restaurant at 1167 Riley St. in Folsom (sister locations are in Mountain View and Pleasanton).

For the uninitiated, South Indian cooking tends to incorporate more beans, fruit and spices such as cardamom and tamarind moreso than North Indian. Hinduism is the dominant religion, and many items tend to be vegetarian-friendly as a result.

That natural reliance on meatless ingredients shined in dishes like idli with sambar ($8), where a fluffy, tangy rice cake was born to soak up the vibrant tamarind-lentil stew. The spicy gongura dosa ($9) was another vegetarian hit, a gigantic crepe dangling off the plate and filled with a tart-hot hibiscus leaf paste.

Among meatier options, fish curry with parotta ($11) rendered tilapia as melt-in-your-mouth as I’ve ever experienced, and I scooped up every drop of the deep brown tamarind curry with flaky, chewy parotta discs. A house specialty called idicha chicken ($11) featured tender boneless pieces coated in an exceptionally flavorful masala, simple but excellent.

Annachikadai advertises everywhere that its food comes on banana leaves, the way owner John Annachi’s parents served meals after cooking in kadais (essentially Indian woks) at their restaurant in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. That presentation was absent on our visit, the only blemish on one of the best meals I’d had in quite some time.

Jiu Jiu Korean BBQ

My dining companion was craving Korean food after finishing Michelle Zauner’s excellent memoir “Crying in H Mart,” so off we went to Jiu Jiu Korean BBQ, a relatively recent addition to the La Riviera area’s robust scene. With a Sacramento address (9729 Folsom Blvd.) but in sight of the Rancho Cordova welcome sign, Jiu Jiu has flown a bit under the radar since opening in August 2019.

That’s a shame, because Dong Hu Qian and Chun Bernal’s restaurant is turning out some of the region’s best Korean food. Barbecue is part of Jiu Jiu’s identity, including all-you-can-eat menus for $30 or $39, and tabletop grills fired up pork belly and kebabs around us. But most barbecue orders had a two-dish minimum, and I don’t always find that giant hunks of meat best reflect the range of flavors Korean cooking can hold, so we passed on them in favor of more nuanced options.

The galbi-tang ($20) was our favorite, a cloudy, savory stew served still-bubbling in its mini-cauldron as is customary. Stuffed with short ribs, strips of fried egg whites, daikon and japchae, it was an intense, complex umami bomb. The short ribs slid easily off the bone without falling apart, and cute little pots of rice added some body.

Want funky? Try the kimchi jjigae ($14), where intentionally over-fermented sour kimchi is the dominant flavor. Stir-fried with scant pork slices and abetted by soft tofu, onions and rice, it was fun to share, but I’m not sure I’d want this tangy stew to be my lone entree.

The temperature changed with bibim-naengmyeon ($15), a cold pile of sweetened gochujang, thin beef strips, daikon, cucumber and an egg boiled somewhere between hard and soft. I recommend coughing up an extra $3 for long, extraordinarily chewy soba noodles — the buckwheat’s earthy taste helped balance.

Banchan was straightforward but delicious — think pickled daikon, broccoli cooked in sesame oil and bean sprouts. Jiu Jiu’s housemade kimchi is also available to-go at $3 for five ounces or $10 for 32 ounces.

Newcastle Cheese Shop

Newcastle is a Placer County town of 1,200 people, with the slowest internet in the U.S. (as of 2019) and one fun deli owned by Tag “Ziggy” Zygalinski. I stopped off at Newcastle Cheese Shop last weekend on my way to a hike in Auburn.

There’s old-timey charm to spare at 455 Main St., where checkered picnic tables and faux flowers line a wood deck next to an antique shop. Inside, a display tells the story of Newcastle from a railroad stop to a modest agricultural hub.

Signs and T-shirts bearing a cartoon rodent tease at Newcastle Cheese Shop’s most famous sandwich: the Rat Trap ($9). It’s a pile of turkey, ham, roast beef, pastrami, cheddar, Jack cheese and provolone, plus the standard sandwich fixings (lettuce, tomato, onions, mayonnaise, mustard and pepperoncini) that would make Dagwood proud. I wanted the sturdiness of Dutch Crunch but had to settle for soft sourdough after a morning rush cleared the shop out.

The set options are pretty limited aside from a veggie sandwich and a couple of salads, so I crafted a build-your-own sandwich ($9) with wafer-thin slices of honey turkey and pastrami alongside cheeses listed as “smokey sharp” and “hot pepper,” both of which were tasty but lacked the oomph their names promised.

Other cheese options like Point Reyes bleu, horseradish havarti from Wisconsin or Hoffman’s roasted garlic cheddar were unlisted on the menu but in the display case, and could be added to sandwiches or taken home, Zygalinski said. Next time!

Sides included an extraordinarily lumpy potato salad ($4), which wasn’t overdone with mayonnaise, and got a nice kick from a dusting of cayenne powder. There was a gooey, bean-heavy chili ($3.50) that came with a few elusive butt pieces of that Dutch Crunch. I washed everything down with a housemade iced tea ($1 with free refills), then headed out to hike it all off.

Dubplate Kitchen & Jamaican Cuisine

Dubplate Kitchen & Jamaican Cuisine brought new flavor to Arden Arcade when it opened at 3419 El Camino Ave. in late 2018. It’s hard to find items like ackee and saltfish (Jamaica’s national dish), calallo (a leafy green stew) and bammy (cassava flatbread) elsewhere around greater Sacramento.

Unfortunately, those iconic dishes weren’t in stock at Dubplate either when I visited. Curry goat ($15) was, though, and it was stellar — thoroughly spiced without the meat’s gamey flavor, it slid off the bone easily. Like all Dubplate entrees, it came with pea-studded rice, plantains and boiled cabbage.

There’s a surprising number of mock meat alternatives to traditional dishes, like vegan oxtails ($14) made with Gardein soy protein. That and similarly plant-based options such as faux fish or curry “chicken” represent admirable steps to modernize comfort foods for 2022 and its range of diets. Unfortunately, the spongey soy protein cubes felt far from oxtails’ stringiness and taste despite the best efforts of an oaky, clove-heavy sauce.

Sides are fun and generally approachable, like crispy yuca fries ($4.50) served with lime and a tangy barbecue sauce-like dip. Large fritter balls called festival ($1.50 apiece) reminded me of plain funnel cake.

Dubplate makes some juices in-house — I went for beet juice with carrot milk ($7 per bottle) and was pleasantly surprised by the kick of cayenne. The six-table dining room is decorated with Bob Marley records, faux stained-glass windows and bamboo fences partially shielding industrial appliances; delivery and catering are also available through Grabull.