CITY GUIDES | CALIFORNIA

Sacramento’s Essential Restaurants

The city’s defining meals unfold on tables supplied by the farms just beyond town.

By Mei Chen
Updated Aug. 13, 2026

Canon

AUTHOR BIO: Mei Chen has worked for nearly a dozen start-ups in as many years, taking her to several West Coast cities. While she’s sure her current day job is permanent, she also has her eye on Carmel.

I go to Sacramento regularly for work, sometimes several times a week, and I’ve developed two lists of restaurants there. One is for dinners with colleagues. The other is for the places I visit alone, where I can settle into a corner, order something good, and forget for an hour that anyone needs an answer from me.

Through both, I’ve come to love Sacramento’s food scene, from Michelin-starred tasting menus to family-run institutions and neighborhood pasta spots. These are the best restaurants in Sacramento, whether I’m there for work or trying briefly to escape it.

Adamo’s

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The Adamo family makes the pasta at this Midtown restaurant, where the menu lands somewhere between Italy and the Italian American cooking many of us grew up believing was Italian. There’s pappardelle with a slow-cooked beef Bolognese, spaghetti carbonara with bacon and egg, and four-cheese ravioli slicked with Calabrian chile and garlic oil. The portions are generous, garlic bread comes alongside the pasta, and nobody will suggest that you need six courses to understand what the kitchen is trying to say.

Best for: Housemade pasta without the ceremony

Allora

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Allora occupies an old florist shop in East Sacramento, although there’s little rustic about what chef Deneb Williams sends out. Diners choose three, four, or five courses from a menu built around seafood and handmade pasta. Carne cruda comes with tartufata, egg, capers, and garlic toast, while tuna tartare gets a crisp base of fried rice. Elizabeth-Rose Mandalou oversees a wine collection of more than 250 bottles, much of it Italian and stored in a 22-foot cellar. This is Sacramento going all-in on dinner.

Best for: A serious Italian dinner with wine to match

Canon

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Brad Cecchi came home to Sacramento after leading the kitchen at Michelin-starred Solbar in Napa Valley, then opened Canon in an East Sacramento warehouse in 2017. The menu is made for sharing, although civility may become difficult once the housemade tater tots arrive beneath a mole that takes about 60 ingredients to produce. Cecchi pulls freely from Southeast Asia, North Africa, and Latin America, piling a dozen or so touches onto dishes that might sound simple at first. Michelin has given Canon a Bib Gourmand since 2019.

Best for: Sharing plates until something too good arrives

Ella Dining Room & Bar

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A few blocks from the State Capitol, Ella is where Sacramento goes when lunch requires a reservation and possibly a vote afterward. Hundreds of white shutters hang from the ceiling, giving the restaurant a surreal European quality, while politicians and lobbyists gather below them over oysters, steaks, pasta, and glasses of California wine. The Selland family opened Ella in 2007, and it still feels like the city’s dining headquarters. Happy hour offers a less expensive way in, with cocktails and small plates at the long bar.

Best for: Power lunches and dressed-up dinners

Frank Fat’s

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Frank Fat came to California as a teenager, worked as a dishwasher, and opened his own restaurant near the State Capitol in 1939. Lawmakers began gathering there, deals were struck over dinner, and Sacramento developed a political dining culture with honey-walnut prawns at the center of it. The restaurant still serves its brandy-fried chicken wings, Mongolian beef, and much-copied Chinese chicken salad beneath red lanterns and dark wood paneling. Then comes the banana cream pie, which has no obvious connection to China and no need to explain itself.

Best for: Sacramento history with honey-walnut prawns

Hook & Ladder

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A hardware store once occupied this brick building near Midtown, and the restaurant takes its name from a volunteer fire company that helped rebuild Sacramento after its early fires. These days, the flames are contained to Hook & Ladder Manufacturing Co.’s kitchen, where menus move from pizzas and burgers to grilled meats and salads crowded with whatever nearby farms are producing. Two patios fill up during brunch, and the bar pours local beer, California wine, and cocktails that frequently involve ingredients you wouldn’t expect to find floating above the ice.

Best for: Seasonal cooking and cocktails on the patio

The Kitchen

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Before dinner begins at The Kitchen, chef Kelly McCown explains that guests are free to wander, visit the cooks, ask for seconds, and interrupt whatever carefully choreographed sequence is about to unfold. Then the first course arrives, followed by oysters, ceviche, handmade pasta, trips behind the counter, and an intermission that involves yet more food. The Selland family opened The Kitchen in 1991, and it became Sacramento’s first Michelin-starred restaurant nearly three decades later. Dinner lasts hours and costs hundreds. Restraint is not part of the production.

Best for: Sacramento’s biggest special-occasion production

Kodaiko Ramen & Bar

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A staircase beside a downtown storefront leads underground to Kodaiko, where murals cover the walls and bowls of ramen emerge through the low light. Billy Ngo and chef Takumi Abe opened the place as a sibling to Kru, although Kodaiko has developed its own late-night personality. The kitchen makes broths and noodles in-house, then veers into dishes like karaage with yuzu-Tajín mayonnaise, shrimp toast covered in tobiko and bonito flakes, and Brussels sprouts in chile caramel. It’s easy to lose track of the hour down here.

Best for: Ramen followed by another round

Kru Contemporary Japanese Cuisine Sacramento

Kru

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Billy Ngo opened Kru in 2005, long before Sacramento began getting much national attention for its restaurants. Nearly two decades later, he became a James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef: California, and the reservations became considerably harder to secure. Ngo brings local rice, Delta sturgeon, and California caviar into a sushi menu that changes daily according to what arrives. Nigiri and sashimi remain the best introduction, although the five-seat omakase lets Ngo take over for three hours. Sometimes surrender is the sensible strategy.

Best for: Sacramento’s definitive sushi dinner

Localis

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Localis does not publish its menu in advance. Committing to dinner here means handing chef Chris Barnum-Dann several hours of your evening and trusting that his 10 courses will lead somewhere interesting. The themes and ingredients change regularly, driven partly by what nearby farms are producing and partly by whatever has caught Barnum-Dann’s attention. He also serves as sommelier, selecting the wines himself and earning Michelin’s 2025 California Sommelier Award. Sit at the counter if possible, where the cooking unfolds a few feet away and Sacramento’s Michelin-starred restaurant feels unusually personal.

Best for: Giving the chef control of the evening

Magpie

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When Magpie opened in 2005, Sacramento had not yet turned farm-to-fork into a civic motto. The restaurant was already buying from nearby growers, changing dishes with the harvest, and putting vegetables at the center of plates without treating them as punishment. The Sacramento Caesar combines sturdy local greens with grilled vegetables and white-anchovy dressing. There’s also a burger with Sierra Nevada cheddar, lamb meatballs in red-wine demi-glace, and a whole roasted chicken meant for sharing. The list of natural and California wines follows the same local logic.

Best for: Local produce without the farm-to-fork sermon

Mulvaney’s B&L

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Patrick Mulvaney writes his menu according to what arrives from the farms around Sacramento, meaning tomorrow’s dinner may look nothing like tonight’s. In summer, that might mean hand-pulled mozzarella with heirloom tomatoes, gazpacho, or peaches worked into dessert. The house-smoked salmon with Irish brown bread tends to stick around. Mulvaney runs the restaurant from an 1893 firehouse, its brick walls and high ceiling carrying plenty of history. The B&L stands for Building and Loan, a reference to It’s a Wonderful Life and the communal spirit Mulvaney has built here.

Best for: Sacramento’s farm-to-fork philosophy in practice

Origami Asian Grill

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Origami looks like a counter-service restaurant because it is one. Then a half chicken arrives lacquered with maple, Sichuan peppercorn, orange, and rosemary, and the definition begins to feel insufficient. Chefs Scott Ostrander and Paul DiPierro worked in far more formal kitchens before opening this East Sacramento spot, where ramen, rice bowls, bánh mì, and cold noodles are built from seasonal produce and meat sourced nearby. Lunch can still be quick. It simply tastes as if somebody spent considerably longer thinking about it.

Best for: A fast lunch made with serious technique

Pho Momma

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My Le and Tuan Le opened Pho Momma in a Folsom Boulevard strip mall in 2023, serving bowls built on clear chicken or beef broth and crowded with noodles, herbs, and whichever cuts of meat you choose. The short-rib pho is the order for anyone who believes subtlety can wait until tomorrow. Handmade spring rolls, chile-oil wontons, salt-and-pepper chicken wings, and fried crab-and-cream-cheese wontons make it easy to cover the table before the soup arrives. Michelin awarded Pho Momma a Bib Gourmand in 2025, although the prices remained refreshingly earthbound.

Best for: A deeply comforting bowl of pho

Revolution Winery & Kitchen

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Barrels and tanks occupy part of Revolution because the wine really is made here, using grapes harvested from vineyards around the region. Much of it travels only a few feet before reaching what the restaurant says is California’s largest wine-tap system. Chef-owner Gina Genshlea builds the menu to meet it, from salmon pasta with summer vegetables to a Mediterranean salad piled with falafel, hummus, and garlic chickpeas. Vegan diners get a burger with cashew burrata rather than the usual collection of side dishes assembled onto one plate.

Best for: Local wine with unusually good vegan options