Sacramento’s newest fine-dining downtown restaurant offers Italian, Mediterranean and more

Sacramento’s newest downtown restaurant, Willow, is easy to miss even though it’s less than a block away from the promenade leading into the Downtown Commons entertainment complex and The Golden 1 Center.

Willow opened in mid-September at the corner of 4th and J streets, at the edge of downtown, on a block that doesn’t see a lot of pedestrian traffic. Neighbors are not other restaurants or nightspots, but rather the concrete superstructure containing the lanes of I-5.

The restaurant is on the ground floor of the new Exchange Sacramento hotel, but with only 100 rooms, the eatery’s partner Nick Duren knows he needs more than captive hotel guests to survive.

Duren envisions locals feeding Willow’s business. His hook is to offer something different downtown cuisine-wise, but also familiar and popular: Italian and Mediterranean food.

The food, he believes, will draw customers, regardless of location.

“We view the restaurant as more of a destination,” Duren said.

He said the first thought was to offer California cuisine at the new restaurant.

“California cuisine is always a low hanging fruit to attach yourself to,” said Duren. “And we put that concept on the table, punched a bunch of holes in it, recognizing that we have three fantastic restaurants downtown that serve California food locally with Camden, Grange and Ella.”

Duren is no stranger to Sacramento fine dining. He was the general manager of Grange, located in downtown’s Citizen Hotel, and also worked as a waiter at Ella.

Duren has been a one-man publicity machine for Willow, appearing on local television talks shows with Chef Russel Middleton and contacting media outlets to let them know about the new dining destination in town.

Duren said business has been building with groups starting to book the restaurant. He is not counting on downtown office buildings that are still only partly filled with the advent of remote work. Instead, he is hoping that a reduction in COVID fears, and the start of the Sacramento Kings season, will bring more people from the Sacramento region downtown for an evening on the town.

Obstacles to overcome

Even then, he acknowledges, concerns about crime can make visiting downtown a hard sell. The availability of fancy restaurants in the Sacramento suburbs, he said, also means suburbanites no longer need to come downtown for a top flight dining experience.

“Some of the harsh feedback you get from people is they don’t want to come downtown anymore,” he said. “Residents in Roseville, El Dorado Hills or Folsom don’t have to leave any more to go to a good restaurant. Ten, 20 years ago, they had to come downtown.”

The pandemic cost downtown some of its iconic restaurants, including The Empress Tavern, DeVere’s Irish Pub and Pizza Rock, to name a few that closed.

The pandemic also forced Duren and his business partner, Sunny Dale, owner of The Exchange Sacramento hotel, to scale back what is an 88-seat restaurant by around 20 percent. Original plans also included an outdoor patio dining area on the third-floor of the 10-story building that could have been a second restaurant.

“We created what we thought would be successful coming out of the pandemic,” Duran said, taking into account fewer patrons.

A hopeful sign for downtown

Scott Ford, economic development director of the Downtown Sacramento Partnership, said the opening of Willow is a hopeful sign.

“I think for a while there during the pandemic there was a pause on investment downtown,’ he said, “but there seems to be momentum going forward.”

In addition to Willow, a new restaurant and bar called Tom’s Watch Bar, will be opening in DoCo in 2023 along with a coffee cafe named World Traveler Coffee Roasters, filling spaces that have been vacant long-term.

Willow and The Sacramento Exchange Hotel are housed in a 10-story building that was when it opened in 1914, was Sacramento’s tallest skyscraper. It housed the California Fruit Exchange , a cooperative marketing group founded in 1901 to represent fruit growers. It remained an office building until being renovated.

On a recent visit, the restaurant was mostly empty.

A look at the menu

Chief Middleton’s dinner menu at Willow includes a flakey Branzino coated in their chimichurri sauce, an Agnolotti Del Plin doused in a traditional sugo di arrosto sauce and the Paccheri sprinkled with freshly grated parmigiano reggiano at $46, $28 and $26, respectively.

Everything is a la carte, but the prices aren’t any worse than Sacramento’s other fine dining establishments. Still, it helps to have an expense account.

For diners looking for something more simple but still pricey, the $24 6-oz burger with onion jam on a brioche bun, fries included, can be found on the restaurant’s bar menu.

“The bar menu is definitely something we wanted to be very conscious of, particularly for hotel guests, a single traveler or someone on a business schedule,” Duren said. “Maybe they’re not able to dedicate 2 hours to a fine-dining experience.”

While Willow is inside The Exchange Hotel, it has a separate second street entrance, allowing for more visibility and enabling diners to avoid the hotel lobby.

Middleton said there is also a second reason for the street entrance, allowing the restaurant to be in but not formally part of the hotel. He said that enables the Curio Collection by Hilton Hotel to not be bound by Hilton rules such as serving an omelet for breakfast..

He said the restaurant can be creative at breakfast, for example, offering a “hen egg frittata” with blistered tomatoes, cauliflower, arugula and basil instead of an omelet.

This story was originally published November 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.