Interlude Kitchen & Bar
CITY GUIDES | CALIFORNIA
The Best Elk Grove Restaurants: Here's How to Eat Well in Gold Country
By Mei Chen
Updated June 22, 2026
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, which has given me a useful excuse to spend more time in Elk Grove, where I have family and a running list of favorite restaurants. Over the years, that list has become a pretty good map of where to eat in Elk Grove, from soup dumplings and abura soba to Cantonese roast meats, tacos, sushi, and old-school California bistro cooking. These are the Elk Grove restaurants I keep coming back to.
Boulevard Bistro
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Boulevard Bistro feels like the Elk Grove restaurant people mean when they say they want somewhere nice but not stiff. Chef Brett Bohlmann, an Elk Grove native, turned a 1908 California bungalow in Old Town into a 30-seat fine-dining restaurant, with a menu built around regional American cooking, local produce, and California foothill wines. It’s the place for polished, grown-up dinner without the hotel-lobby gloss.
Best for: Old Town date nights and California bistro cooking
Brick House
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Brick House is the kind of restaurant that understands the appeal of a proper neighborhood spot: a bar, a patio, happy hour, live music, and a menu that doesn’t try to explain itself too much. The food leans Italian-American and steakhouse-adjacent, with pastas, fried calamari, grilled artichoke, burgers, and enough comfort food to keep the regulars regular.
Best for: Casual dinners, happy hour, and comfort food
Dragon Beaux
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Dragon Beaux gives Elk Grove one of the more serious dining draws inside Sky River Casino, which is not always where you expect to go looking for strong Cantonese cooking. The restaurant comes from Willy Ng and Jenny Huang, the Bay Area restaurateurs behind Koi Palace, and the menu runs through dim sum, Cantonese roast meats, hot pot, soup dumplings, lava bao, and rainbow taro buns. It’s flashy enough for the casino crowd, but the better reason to go is that the food has real pedigree behind it.
Best for: Dim sum, hot pot, and Cantonese cooking
Ever After Wine
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Ever After Wine is a locally owned wine bar and bottle shop from Elk Grove natives Nadia Mincey and Kelly Rhodes, who met in middle school, graduated high school together, and eventually came back around to each other with a wine-bar idea. The list leans toward natural and low-intervention wines, available by the glass, bottle, or on tap, but the food is more than a few polite snacks: look for seasonal specials, shared plates, salads, sandwiches, flatbreads, and the kind of dishes that can turn “one glass” into dinner. It’s the place for a low-key date night, a catch-up with friends, or a bottle-shop browse that becomes a second round.
Best for: Natural wine, shared plates, and low-key nights out
Interlude Kitchen & Bar
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Interlude is from the team behind Sacramento’s Prelude and Zinfandel Grille, and I still haven’t found an item on the menu I didn’t love: arancini with braised chicken and Calabrian chili aioli, wood-fired blackened prawns with mango salsa, and, at lunch, an Italian beef sandwich with provolone, giardiniera, and brodo. It’s a dressed-up dinner spot with enough actual cooking to feel like it might just be everyone’s new favorite spot.
Best for: Wood-fired cooking, cocktails, and polished dinners
Journey to the Dumpling
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Journey to the Dumpling started in Elk Grove before it became one of the Sacramento area’s better-known soup dumpling names. Husband-and-wife owners Chris and Yvonne Tan opened it after a research trip to China, and the menu still starts where it should: xiao long bao, pan-fried dumplings, noodle soups, spicy wontons, and a dining room that fills fast for good reason. Go when you want dinner to arrive in bamboo steamers and disappear almost immediately.
Best for: Soup dumplings and casual Chinese dinners
Fujiya
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Fujiya gives Elk Grove sushi a little more polish, with chef Han bringing Le Cordon Bleu training to a Japanese menu that moves from sashimi and ramen to more elaborate rolls. The signatures are not shy: truffle hamachi, wagyu tartare with taro chips, spicy gyuniku ramen, and a Sakura roll with salmon, tuna, yellowtail, crab, baby lobster, and no rice. It’s the kind of sushi spot where dinner can stay simple, but probably won’t.
Best for: Sushi, ramen, and a more polished Japanese dinner
Kajiken
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Kajiken is a chain, yes, but the Elk Grove location brings the city something specific: abura soba, the brothless ramen-style noodle dish from Nagoya. The bowl starts with chewy housemade noodles, oil, sauce, and toppings, then asks you to mix hard enough that dinner briefly becomes a construction project. Start with the original, or let the whole thing get louder with pork belly, spicy minced pork, ajitama, kimchi, or mentaiko.
Best for: Brothless ramen and Japanese noodle obsessives
Sheldon Inn
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Chef Rebecca Pasqual’s menu has the steakhouse comforts you expect—filet mignon, ribeye, lobster tail—but the more interesting details are tucked into dishes like Silva’s Portuguese bean soup, Dungeness crab cakes, burrata with naan, and a stout-marinated Niman Ranch pork chop. It’s the place for a birthday dinner, an anniversary, or any night when nobody wants to eat under fluorescent lights.
Best for: Special occasions and countryside steakhouse dinners
Station 16
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Station 16 brings seafood, cocktails, brunch, and a little downtown Sacramento energy to Elk Grove. Chef Minnie Nguyen’s menu doesn’t ask too much of you: oysters, seafood skillets, pastas, steaks, lobster rolls, and crabby things meant to be eaten with a drink nearby. Elk Grove needed something livelier, and Station 16 knows how to be that while still delivering some of my favorite meals in town.
Best for: Seafood, cocktails, and weekend brunch
Todo Un Poco
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
Todo Un Poco sounds almost impossible to explain neatly: Mexican and Italian food, side by side, from chef Marie Mertz. Then the menu starts to make its own case, with tacos dorados, queso fundido, pastas, pizzas, ravioli with carnitas, and a Punjabi pizza that uses cauliflower from a nearby garden. It’s personal, local, and a little unruly, which is more interesting than another menu organized by committee.
Best for: Mexican-Italian comfort food and family dinners
West Coast Taco Bar
$$$$$ | MAP | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM
West Coast Taco Bar began as a taco operation on wheels, and the Elk Grove restaurant still has that useful sense of motion. The menu is built around handcrafted tacos with enough personality to land the place on Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat in the U.S., which is a strange sentence until the first order hits the table. This is the slot on the list for tacos that don’t need a white tablecloth, a long explanation, or much patience.
Best for: Handcrafted tacos and quick, high-flavor meals
Utah Restaurants That Deserve Michelin’s Attention
From Salt Lake City ramen counters to a farm-backed dining room in Boulder, our unofficial Michelin Guide names 15 Utah restaurants worthy of recognition.
