Where you can eat in the Sacramento-area and raise money to help people in Ukraine
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Milestone Restaurant & Cocktail Bar has a recipe for helping.
Alexa and Nick Dedier’s restaurant in the El Dorado Hills Town Center has been offering a borscht special since Friday, with proceeds from the dish going toward relief efforts to ease Ukrainian suffering and help those fleeing the country following Russia’s invasion last week.
Milestone’s borscht recipe comes from general manager Jeffrey Young’s wife Jessica and her mother, who immigrated from Ukraine before Jessica was born. It’s made from chicken and beet broth, potatoes, white beans, celery, onion, cabbage and a dollop of sour cream. At $25, it’s not a particularly cheap soup, but it’s for a good cause.
The restaurant and bar at 4359 Town Center Blvd., Suite 116 sold 17 borscht specials over the weekend and raised $800 thanks to additional donations, Jeffrey Young said. Money will be given to Agape Ministries, a Christian nonprofit with 42 orphanages in Ukraine, or Convoy of Hope, another Christian organization now providing support on the ground.
Chef de cuisine Josh Khim asked Jeffrey Young if he could find a borscht recipe the morning after Russia’s invasion began, Young said. One of Khim’s close friends, adopted from Ukraine as a young child, was among the first people to eat it, and chef and customer shared an emotional moment after. Later, Khim told Young that borscht was one of the last meals that the friend’s grandmother made him before she died.
Jessica Young said participating in mostly-uninterrupted American life as her family in Ukraine comes under attack has been surreal.
“I’ve never felt anything like this before,” said Jessica Young, born Jessica Choban. “My uncles are currently there, and their bags are packed, ready to cross the border into Romania. I have cousins in Romania now with plans to go into Germany soon. It’s a mess. It’s really bizarre.”
In Sacramento, Freeport Bakery is selling Ukrainian flag cookies for $2.95 each and sending the proceeds to a charity called Bstrong. Ginger Elizabeth Chocolates is selling chocolate boxes to benefit chef Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen, which has been feeding thousands of Ukrainians at the borders to Romania, Poland, Hungary and Moldova.
What I’m eating
Sacramento’s plant-based dining scene is growing and getting better all the time, a phenomenon I explore in my stories about vegan restaurants. My research included a stop at Bambi Vegan Tacos, Lizz Gibb and Chad Novick’s six-month-old midtown restaurant where Easy on I once was at 1725 I St.
Novick was a former cook at Mother, Sacramento’s best all-vegetarian restaurant before its January 2020 closure, and you can see that influence in Bambi’s food (“Vegan Tacos” will soon be dropped from the name, Gibb told me). Rather than rely on artificial meat or revert to salads, Bambi roughly reimagines comfort food in a plant-based light, maintaining the spirit of a dish while highlighting veggies and legumes.
That approach was clearest in the melty melt ($11), a tuna melt adaptation featuring charred artichokes, whole garbanzo beans, oyster mushrooms, sweet onions and a lemon-garlic-caper vegan aioli on toasted sourdough. Did it taste like a tuna melt? No way — the aioli shared a goopy quality with melted cheese, but the tart, bright flavors were the sandwich’s own.
Tacos were interesting and surprising as well, particularly the Baja ($6.50) with its cider-battered cauliflower and a hearty apple-avocado slaw that transported one’s mind straight to a Southern California beach.
The Bambi ($4) showed some Sacramento love by riffing on the Jimboy’s classic, with diced crimini mushrooms instead of a ground beef and a faux Parmesan skirt. A garden chorizo taco ($7) acquiesced to allow fake nacho cheese, but the imitation spiced sausage is actually just ground seasonal vegetables with smoky spices.
Housemade o-chata ($7), or horchata made with oat milk, paired excellently with our tacos, though Bambi’s cocktail list looked interesting as well. We almost passed on dessert before our server mentioned the weekly rotating sugar cookies ($5 for two). Decorated with jamaica frosting and crystallized hibiscus, they tasted like a more floral and flavorful take on those pink-topped Safeway cookies. A+, as my friend said.
This story was originally published March 4, 2022 at 3:25 AM.