Last Friday we celebrated our daughter’s birthday with yet another takeout meal. Except it wasn’t just another takeout meal. It was a takeout meal from Localis Restaurant (at 21st and S streets in midtown Sacramento).
My husband and I had been to Localis once before about a year and half (aka a lifetime) ago for our anniversary. That was in the beforetime. Candlelight, music and other people nearby. Bliss.
This time we ordered from home. Like some other Michelin-rated restaurants, this top class establishment eschews Grubhub and the like for an app called Tock. My daughter swears by it in San Francisco for her fine dining but I have never used it before . And I still haven’t. I just ordered through the Localis website. But if you wanted the food delivered, you would need to use Tock.
Anyway, I digress. Localis, which prides itself on local meals inspired by what is seasonal, creates a new menu every few weeks. There are relatively few choices. It is a prix fixe tasting menu of 3 courses or 4. You can choose to add wine pairings or not. And there are optional additional sides.
For 4 of us we chose to order two 3 course “tastings” and two 4 course “tastings.” We ordered wine pairings for the two 4 course meals with the idea that otherwise there would be too much alcohol. “Tasting” menus terrify me because when there are 8 or 9 courses and it’s pricy each “tasting” is like a bite and so I always worry that I won’t get enough food. My daughter, who lives in San Francisco where fancy people do fancy things routinely, assured me that with only a 3 or 4 course menu they actually had to provide an appropriate amount of food.
When I arrived at our appointed time to pick up the food, I waited in my car only 2 or 3 minutes until a masked waiter brought out a huge bag with the food in it and a smaller bad with the alcohol and stuff that needed to be refrigerated immediately.
Each course of the meal for each person came, in restaurant parlance, already “plated” on a sturdy cardboard plate with a clear plastic tight snapped cover. In other words each course was ready to eat and did not need to be nor would it benefit from being moved to another plate.
The first thing to eat is not called the first course but an “amuse bouche” (there’s a lot of French in upscale restaurants, this literally means amusement for the mouth) which was a delightful appetizer — I can’t remember what it was but it was delicious.
First course was some sort of vegetable stuffed with crab and laid in a curry sauce. That was the course that only two of us got, so we split it up. Every bite stunning so we regretted not getting this course for everyone. This course came with the first wine-pairing. We were so glad that we only ordered 2 pairings for 4 people. For 2 you get a tiny bottle, probably contains about 6 oz. of wine. We each had a bit of this Riesling from Austria and read about it—delicious.
Second course was trout with vegetables and potatoes. It came with a Beaujolais pairing. Also fabulous (sorry I’m short on details, can’t find the menu that came with it but honestly each bite I had was better than about anything I’ve ever had in Sacramento). My husband and I parent-sprained our adult children about the Beaujolais Nouveau craze in the 90s during this course.
Third course was small rack of “Barbecued” lamb with vegetables and something. I ate all the vegetables and something and handed over the lamb to the 3 meat eaters in the family and concentrated on the third wine pairing. They were all in heaven. I think the wine was a Petite Syrah, the first from California. (You’d like a locally oriented restaurant would also have all local wines and jeez, we ARE in Northern California)
then there was a sorbet palate cleanser (which we got out of the fridge). We all agreed that It was a treat in itself and really did prepare us for wanting dessert instantly rather than after a break.
Dessert was sort of a deconstructed apple pie, baked apple, freshly baked cinnamon bun and some sort of sauce to heat up and pour over it. Served with a vanilla gelato and paired with a cocktail that also suggested heating a portion of it, so we did. All absolutely perfect.
The bill, including 20% tip in advance (a weird thing about pre-ordering), came to just under $400 for 4 people so this is NOT an every day experience. Nor would it be even a typical regular birthday meal. We rationalized it because we are not traveling or spending money on other extras now and, unlike so many, our income has not diminished in the pandemic and we want to do what we can to boost the local economy.
I removed one mask from this only because we didn’t actually get what we thought we were ordering. The menu online is confusing. We thought we were ordering the extra lobster ravioli course for 2 of us. Apparently we didn’t. Had I picked up or called Localis back when they called an hour or 2 before our reservation to remind us of the reservation and go over the order to see if we had an dietary restrictions, I would have been able to find this out in advance.
The only other downside of their is the sheer quantity of packaging to produce this pre-plated experience. Wow, you are “recycling” (quotes because there is almost no market for recycling plastic and so most of it sits somewhere for years) tons of plastic—the covers for each dish. That adds up to 14 large plastic domes (everything else was cardboard).
Still since this literally was the best full meal experience I’ve had in Sacramento