Five Cool Sacramento Restaurants
Sacramento has its share of unique restaurants — old-style delis to French cafes, bagel shops to an age-old Italian restaurant with a Spanish name. Here are five unique Sacramento restaurants:
* Cafe Rolle (5357 H Street) — Owner William Rolle is a native of France where his father has a cafe in Lyon by the same name. Cafe Rolle is the great place to talk about all things French, and it's a great little spot along H Street for all things salmon. The decor is a combination of French posters, Tour de France memorabilia and and ode to the ways of French life. Rolle and his colleagues make a mean salad Nicoise. Most important, if you're looking for fresh salmon or pate or a classic French dessert, this is the place.
* Espanol (5723 Folsom Blvd.) — The homestyle Italian restaurant is an iconic, several-decade regular haunt for locals who pack the place for daily specials, especially corned beef and cabbage. You want to be seen, head downtown. You want comfort food, like minestrone and chicken fried steak, this is the place. Perry, one of the three sibling owners, may get honors for the hardest-working business owner I've ever met.
* Lucca (1615 J Street) _ Lucca is a crossover restaurant. It's fine for a casual pizza, burger or salad, and it works well as a dinner house for a business meal or dining celebration. It's not a bad place to watch a sporting event on television, either, if your style is anything on the dignified style of a raucous sports pub. As the former home to a car repair shop and more recently a gardening and landscape store, Lucca's interior is spacious and varied. It affords guests four distinct seating options, including a covered, heated side patio, a narrow section away from the small, front entry bar, a parallel section across the bar and a cavernous back room. Lucca offers a good cross-section of lunch and dinner selections, categorized succinctly under four categories — appetizers, salads/soup, pasta/risotto and mains.
* New York Bagel Boys (6260 Folsom Blvd.) — Donna and David Levin have been at the bagel game since 1978. The bagels are boiled, they're chewy and they're made in the back room on a wondrously ancient machine that just keeps churning. In the wintertime, the place makes a "mean" vegetarian chili and the specialty bagel sandwiches are decadence wrapped in tinfoil.
* The Shack (5201 Folsom Blvd.) — began in the 1930s as Doc's Place, a drive-in only joint. The large peace sign made of PVC pipe has been gone for a while now. Long-time owner Ralph Neel is gone, too. And the place has been renamed The Shack. Yet it's still much the same as it was 70 years ago. Fresh turkey sandwiches, all kinds of submarine sandwiched and salads and a wood-burning, pot-belly stove, old wooden booths and a good dose of the way Sacramento was nearly 80 years ago.
Sacramento blogger James Raia is a freelance writer and publisher. Visit his web sites, ByJamesRaia.com, TheWeeklyDriver.com and GolfTribune.com.
