Taste
Lessons Learned As people get vaccinated and restrictions ease, three restaurant owners take stock of where they stand after a year of pandemic.
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BY MARYBETH BIZJAK
impler menus. New technologies. Work-life balance. Those are just a few of the changes wrought by COVID -19 at local restaurants. We caught up with three Sacramento restaurateurs for their stories of the pandemic. MICHAEL HARGIS— During the pandemic, Michael
Hargis proved to be one of the most agile and innovative restaurateurs in town. He convinced the city to close a portion of 20th Street to traffic in order to move LowBrau beer hall to the street. He turned meat-
centric Block Butcher Bar into a vegan sandwich takeout spot, used a delivery service to boost Milk Money’s doughnut business by more than 100 percent and opened a pizza-and-wine “streetery” near the Ice Blocks. The pandemic gave him a chance to step back and simplify. “We learned to be more casual,” he says. “I know there are people in town pressing for Michelin stars, but for us, dining is entertainment and fun. We want things that are approachable.” As Sacramento County began to allow limited indoor dining this spring, Hargis was both excited and “riddled with anxiety” as he prepared to reopen Beast + Bounty, his hip live-fire restaurant on R Street, with a new chef and a rejiggered menu focused on pizza and salad. Throughout the pandemic, he’d learned the value of flexibility. He recently decided to move Love Child, his vegan sandwich business, into an Airstream trailer on the street near LowBrau and turn Block Butcher Bar into a bottle shop. He also began exploring new, contactless ways of ordering. “Younger guests are used to doing everything on their phones,” he says. “At a casual place like LowBrau, you can get direct, quicker service.” And he’s optimistic for the future. “There will be a lot of opportunity in this city,” says Hargis. “People want to be together. The question I ask myself is: What can we do to continue to generate culture and experiences in this city?” MARVIN MALDONADO —Pre- COVID, Federal-
ist Public House functioned as a community watering hole, where strangers sat, cheek by jowl, at long outdoor picnic tables, eating pizza and drinking beer. COVID, of course, put an end to that forced intimacy. But the spirit of community persisted, even as the physical closeness did not. “The one compliment we keep hearing from guests is that it still feels like the old Federalist,” says owner Marvin Maldonado, who got rid of the community tables and expanded the restaurant into an adjacent parking lot. “You can still see the table next to you, 6 feet away, and you can still hear and see the movement and excitement of the restaurant. The core atmosphere still exists to this day.” One of Sacramento’s original shipping container restaurants, Federalist was very much a seasonal experience: alluring when the weather was nice, not so much when it was cold and rainy, or when temperatures soared into the Michael Hargis susa n y ee
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