Downtown Sacramento cafe known for Middle Earth theme, tabletop games is closing. Here’s when

There & Back Cafe, a downtown Sacramento haven for cozy drinks and board games, will close for good on Monday, its owners announced on social media.

The cafe at 1020 11th St., which took its name from an alternative title for “The Hobbit,” opened in 2022 as a spin-off of owners Ross and Heidi Rojek’s neighboring bookstore Capital Books.

At that time, downtown Sacramento had been ravaged by COVID-19 closures and a shift toward remote work. But the Rojeks bet on — and invested in — a downtown revitalization effort that still seems to be finding its footing.

“We learned a lot, met really great people, and do not regret the attempt,” the Rojeks’ closing post read. “Maybe it would have succeeded in a different location or with better facilities, but as is, we just couldn’t find a sustainable path forward.”

There & Back Cafe (originally known as There & Back Again Cafe) became a third space for people, particularly teens and young adults, to sip color-changing soft drinks or cozy teas over one of the many tabletop games available for checkout. A regular food menu of “Smeagol’s smoked salmon toast” or “drunken Druid” sandwiches for first breakfast gave way to prix fixe theme dinners riffing on “The Princess Bride” or Studio Ghibli movies.

The cafe struggled to make ends meet, though, and had been operating while behind on rent. The Rojeks have been losing money every month, and although the losses have been dwindling, they didn’t see substantive change on the horizon, their post said.

“After trying so hard to make ends meet at the cafe, we consistently come up short every month to cover all the bills, with rent being the largest,” the post Thursday read. “That gap has been getting smaller, but we haven’t yet seen enough of a trend to tell us we would eventually break even soon enough to move the dial.”