Sacramento’s soup season is here, at home and at this Mexican restaurant

The following is from City of Treats, a food and drink newsletter by Abridged Senior Food Editor Benjy Egel. Want it sent directly to your inbox? Sign up here.

It’s a familiar scene among Sacramento’s restaurateur families. Mom, an immigrant with little or no professional cooking experience but a deep wealth of home recipes, gets a marketing boost from their kid, a second-generation American with a knack for capturing an audience.

Such is the story of Algo Bueno, the Rodriguez family’s four-year-old restaurant in North Sacramento’s Gardenland neighborhood. It stands out in Northgate Boulevard’s sea of Mexican restaurants thanks to its soup flights, a cozy concept tailor-made for social media that I wrote about last week.

While Zenaida Rodriguez leads a crew of women shaping meatballs and peeling peppers in Algo Bueno’s kitchen, her son Marco gets the soup flights in front of tens of thousands of eyeballs on Instagram. That combination of style and substance drew me into Algo Bueno, particularly as Sacramento’s nightly fog continues to settle in.

Prefer to eat your soup at home? Adapt the classic broccoli-cheddar combination for a bowl of broccolini-Parmesan soup, Cooking In Season recipe developer Zoe B. Soderstrom’s latest creation.

Even if you’re making instant ramen, consider adding Korean soy-marinated eggs for a burst of flavor and protein. They’re also great in rice bowls or on their own, as I found recently.

And in Citrus Heights, two brothers tapped their Italian heritage to create a pizzeria worth checking out. Toppings vary, but that floppy crust remains the same (unless you opt for gluten-free dough).

One last recommendation, this one from wine contributor Mike Dunne: make a reservation if you plan to eat around Downtown Sacramento this week, particularly for nicer meals. Roughly 14,000 industry pros descended on the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center today for the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, which will run through Thursday.

Benjy’s Bites

Here’s my favorite item or two from a local restaurant this week. Send me yours at begel@kvie.org.

916 Pizza | 6916 Sunrise Blvd., Suite H, Citrus Heights | 916-560-9546

916 Pizza’s hot honey rico pizza. (Benjy Egel)

Citrus Heights’ best pizza may well be 916 Pizza, brothers Nick and Steven Castangia’s dimly-lit slice of the expansive Woodmore Oaks Shopping Center. Opened in 2023, it’s traditional in construct — long-fermented dough is tossed by hand and baked in a shining red Marana Forni pizza oven — with flecks of American inspiration in the toppings.

Thin, floppy crust supports clouds of ricotta, pepperoni cups and torn basil in the hot honey rico pizza ($21.50 for a 12-inch pie/$26.50 for 14-inch), a relatively restrained inspiration that catches the eye. The pulled pork pizza ($21.50/$26.50), meanwhile, offers more bold flavors atop a housemade white sauce, with parallel drizzles of chipotle and barbecue sauce covering the top.

Egel’s Nest

I live, play and cook in this community just like you. This recurring section is a window into my life outside of restaurants and bars, always with a food and/or drink angle.

I’m not the biggest egg aficionado, but I’ve found a few ways recently that transform their flavors to my liking. One is mayak gyeran, a Korean preparation so addicting that it literally translates to “drug eggs.” Simple and savory, I gobbled up these marinated eggs (and traded a couple to a friend for a New York Times pickle biscuit) within a few days, then made a second batch with the remaining liquid.

Recipes abound online, and I liked this one from the blog Belly Full for its taste as much as its short list of ingredients. Boil the eggs to your preferred level of doneness (I like the jammy consistency 6.5 minutes produces), peel them and marinate them in a mixture of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sambal oelek and other ingredients for at least eight hours. I added a few to rice bowls and they’d spruce up instant ramen, but I mostly just ate them straight out of the jar.

In the news

In the news

Marco Rodriguez grew up asking his mom Zenaida for the Mexican meatball soup albóndigas instead of birthday cake. Now the duo (along with other family members) runs Algo Bueno, the Northgate Boulevard restaurant known for its flights of soup. Customers can sample three cups of birria, pozole, carne en su jugo and more, served on wooden boards as at craft breweries. Read more here.

Zoe B. Soderstrom’s latest Cooking In Season recipe riffs on broccoli-cheddar soup, subbing broccolini and Parmesan cheese for its two main ingredients. It’s lighter, nuttier and a touch sweeter than the classic, and requires just 10 minutes of prep time.

Restaurant Josephine owners Courtney McDonald and Eric Alexander were named semifinalists last week for the James Beard Awards’ “Best Chef — California” category. The couple opened their French-inspired restaurant with Eastern European touches in downtown Auburn in 2021. While the menu rotates seasonally, some dishes remain constant, like the duck liver mousse with Siberian pinecone caramel.

Happening this week

• Fountainhead Brewing (near Hollywood Park) and South Slope Wines & Bistro (Elk Grove) will both host chili cook-offs Saturday afternoon. You can register on either business’ website to enter your chili, or show up to taste favorites for less than $25.
• I’ll be judging the 7th annual Davis Odd Fellows Chocolate Festival on Sunday — come say hi! There’ll be samples, items for purchase and a chocolate fountain from 2-4 p.m. in downtown Davis. Tickets are $10 apiece, with a $5 vendor credit included upon purchase.
• Remember Lou’s Sushi? It’s back in midtown Sacramento, now in LowBrau’s attached space at 1050 20th St. as of last Saturday. Still run by Lou Valente, the chef who launched the original Lou’s at 28th and P streets as well as Southpaw Sushi on Del Paso Boulevard, this iteration focuses more on hand rolls than its predecessors.

Benjy Egel is the senior food editor at Abridged. Born and raised in the Sacramento region, he has covered its local restaurants and bars since 2018. He also writes and edits Abridged’s weekly food and drink newsletter, City of Treats.