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

There’s great food to be found around Sacramento. This month, the best of the best included a veteran sushi chef’s nigiri in Carmichael, old-school steak sandwiches near Land Park, vegan tacos in midtown and more.

All of these reviews were first published in The Sacramento Bee food and drink reporter Benjy Egel’s free weekly newsletter, along with other exclusive local restaurant and bar news. Visit http://sacbee.com/foodnewsletter to sign up for future write-ups.

Sacramento’s plant-based dining scene is growing and getting better all the time, a phenomenon I explored in an exclusive look at the city’s rising 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. It’s easy to 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.

Flour Dust Pizza Co.

Mano and Stefanie Vrapi have made a serious impression on Sacramento-area diners over the last few years. Their Flour Dust Pizza started as a food truck in 2016, then blossomed into a full-scale restaurant in December 2019 at 5080 Foothills Blvd., Suite 5 in Roseville.

Opening just before the pandemic was inauspicious, but Flour Dust captivated eaters to the point where they named it the region’s best pizzeria in a December 2020 poll and voted it onto The Sacramento Bee’s 50 Best Restaurants list three months later.

Flour Dust’s most popular starter is the hand-pulled mozzarella ($13), a glob of cheese in olive oil surrounded by pizza crust flatbread. Piled on the flatbread with carmelized onions and red peppers, it created a pleasurable sweet-salty harmony.

Independents similarly played nicely in the apple salad ($13 for a small, $17 for a large), a medley of slivered Granny Smiths, mixed greens, chevre, candied walnuts and red onions. Tied together by an apple cider reduction glaze, it was bright and inspired, a far cry from the usual pepperoncini-topped salad that comes with office pizza parties or youth soccer end-of-season bashes.

Mano Vrapi learned to make Neapolitan-style, wood-fired pizzas in Florence, a training that shows in pies like the seasonal Brandon ($18) topped with roasted potato slices, housemade Italian sausage and pesto, or the Ali’s Special ($18) with crushed pistachios, habanero honey and red onions between ricotta, chevre, Parmesan and mozzarella.

The crust was excellent, with stellar leoparding (slight charring around the edges), and the pistachios gave the Ali’s Special some nice texture contrast. Yet most toppings were pretty mild in flavor, I thought. Vrapi’s head is in the right place; if he can make the toppings sing or find better suppliers, Flour Dust will be golden.

Jamie’s Broadway Grille

You won’t find infusions or edible foams at Jamie’s Broadway Grille, a restaurant that feels even older than its 36 years. Yet some classics stay classics for a reason, and this is one that’s held up well to the winds of change, even adding DoorDash delivery service in recent years.

One really needs to eat at the nondescript shack at 427 Broadway in Sacramento to experience Jamie’s in full, though. With dark wood, green trim and wild game heads sticking out of the walls, it feels like a homey blend of American heartland and Irish pub, accented further in $5 pints of Harp Lager.

The unfamiliar patron might not associate Jamie’s and seafood. Old-school Sacramentans know the calamari ($14 for a small, $16 for a large) is not to be skipped, a light layer of garlic- and basil-inflected breadcrumbs covering the rings’ outside while leaving the sides naked. Jamie’s piping-hot clam chowder ($7.50 for a cup, $9 for a bowl) is still probably Sacramento’s best, too, a velvety concoction that’s hearty without being sludgelike.

Meat formed most of late founder Jamie Bunnell’s masterpieces, and the garlic steak sandwich ($15.50 for a small, $21 for a large) endures. It’s just sliced filet mignon nuzzled between soft garlic rolls, with all other accompaniments — mayonnaise, tomato, lettuce — available to add on, but man, is that meat flavorful. With a crunchy pickle spear and crispy fries included, it’s a timeless lunch that’s hard to be beat.

Sactown Hmong BBQ

I’ve searched high and low for great barbecue around Sacramento since returning from Texas four-and-a-half years ago, with some success but a fair amount of disappointment along the way. Sometimes, it seems, you have to go outside the brick-and-mortar lines into the world of pop-ups.

Placing a Sactown Hmong BBQ order means waiting for chef/owner Ger Her to release the next pickup date on Instagram and Facebook, texting Her your order, paying through an app (preferably) and then driving to his south Sacramento home for your goods once you get the address. It’s a limited, all-pork menu. While each item comes with a log of sticky rice and fiery herbal hot sauce, there are no other sides or condiments.

The diagonally sliced Hmong sausage ($11) is a must-try. It features lemongrass and ginger generously intertwined with pork. Its flavors are the most assertively Hmong — a Southeast Asian ethnic group with roughly 40,000 Sacramento-area residents — of any of Her’s meats. This is one sausage I wouldn’t mind seeing made, or eating again.

Spare ribs ($16 for a half rack, $32 for a full) were more traditionally all-American, with a house rub adapted from Austin-based barbecue guru Aaron Franklin’s YouTube tutorials. Coated in a peppery brown barbecue sauce and cooked a pretty pink, the ribs were nicely executed and separated from their flat bones relatively easily.

Diced grilled pork bellies ($11) were perhaps a little overdone, though they woke up quickly with a bit of that slow-burning hot sauce made with Thai chilis, fish sauce and cilantro. I’d love to see Her, who cooked at Luigi’s Pizza Parlor in Oak Park for 12 years before launching his pop-up, sell a couple sodas or iced tea as well. After all, what’s a barbecue without a beverage?

I first wrote about Sactown Hmong BBQ in December as one of 10 great pop-ups around the Sacramento area.

Shige Sushi

Shige Tokita is the godfather of Sacramento’s sushi scene, the mentor of acclaimed chefs such as Lou Valente of Southpaw Sushi, Ray Yamamoto in Oto’s Marketplace and Ju Hachi founder Taka Watanabe. I drove to Carmichael for dinner at Shige Sushi, Tokita’s humble strip mall location at 5938 Madison Ave., to experience the O.G. at work.

Tokita can do the sauce-covered giganto-rolls preferred by some, such as a chef’s special ($12 for five pieces) with hamachi, salmon, tuna, avocado and masago. But Shige Sushi is a sushi purist’s destination. The seven counter seats are reserved for customers ordering nigiri served on wood blocks, like the hotate (scallops), tai (red snapper) and ruby-red katsuo (bonito), all served in pairs for $8.

The nigiri rice was well-packed, and the seafood, some of which comes imported from Japan, was choice. Unfortunately, the latter was often covered up, rather than complemented, by a heavy-handed streak of wasabi, making it hard to fully appreciate.

Shishito tempura ($6.80) was excellent, battered and fried just enough to let the usually-not-hot peppers shine through. I also liked the simplicity of Tokita’s ikayaki ($14), a large plate of grilled squid rings and tentacles served with soy sauce and ginger.

This story was originally published April 1, 2022 at 5:25 AM.