Empress Tavern — Restaurant in Sacramento

A month ago, I made reservation at Empress Tavern for a colleagues birthday luncheon. I made reservation through open table and I received confirmation, several reminders about my upcoming reservation. Unfortunately on the day of the reservation, we saw a closed sign posted outside the doors. The sign in bold said “the restaurant is closed for maintenance. We were doomed neither the restaurant nor open table made any attempts to notify about the closure.

Despite the first incident, we decided to give the restaurant a second chance through opentable. I guess our stars were aligned and it was our lucky day; the restaurant was open for regular business.

The restaurant is tucked along the K Street next to Crest Café. Upon our arrival to the restaurant, we noticed another couple waiting for the doors to open. Unfortunately, they don’t have a sign outside their main door indicating its “OPEN”. After we opened the door, we realized it was dark inside. Here’s the inside tip, search for the arrow signs. The entrance leads to staircase that goes downstairs into a cellar-like room. Honestly, I felt it had the wine cellar vibe. By the way, the staircase is dark like a scary movie. I wish they had lighting for kids or adults so they don’t take a wrong step. We had reservation for 6 people; the hostess sat us in a dent lounge area. In the middle of the restaurant they have the bar area in case you are there for drinks.

Overall, the ambiance is beautiful but lightening is an issue. If you need to read the menu, use the phone flash light. LOL

Menu: Lunch menu have limited option. Few people on our table were disappointed they didn’t have the award winning burger on the lunch menu. Most of us ordered the Trout sandwich. The server said trout was a popular choice on our table. It’s usually not the case on the rest of the tables. The trout was deep fried, served with pickles and French fries. I personally felt the trout had the fish smell, little greasy and it was a thin slice. A little bigger piece would have been appreciated. I would rate the sandwich as an average.

Next time if we go back to empress, I’ll share the lunch with another person. The portions are big. One of my co-worker loved he’s chicken sandwich. He said, it was juicy, flavorful, had a little spicy kick and the bun was soft. He thinks they used chicken thighs and presuming that could be the reason it was delicious. Service – Service was great for the following reasons: Waiter stopped several times to check on us. refilled the water bottle packed our leftovers togo

Few of my co-workers want to go back to try out other items on the menu. I would absolutely recommend this restaurant for a lunch on a hot day because it’s cold and nice inside the restaurant. Also, it would be a perfect date night, gathering with friends/family because you can share the $90 chicken bucket, happy hour or special occasion.

Overall my...

I'm wavering between 2.5 and 3 stars for a variety of reasons.

The place itself is gorgeous. The beautiful fin de siecle wallpaper, the brick, everything.

The food and service are OK.

This was our experience last week:

Party of 8, big check (about $500 or so). several things on the check that we didn't order, but they didn't charge us for 2 cocktails which sort of balanced out and we were so tired and hot - the place is an oven - that we were ready to go and just paid it anyway.

Fried chicken was flavorful but very dry. And "extra spicy" was definitely not especially spicy. The plate was littered with a few pieces of pickled vegetables that looked like an accident.

The bone marrow was paired with escargot, which were possibly canned or stored too long as they were rubbery and tasteless. Not really a good combination anyway. The croutons with the bone marrow had great flavor but almost broke my teeth.

The cocktails were good. Although I did ask for a campari cocktail that wasn't too sweet; server said "how about a negroni?" and i said sure if it wasn't sweet. it came out very, very sweet. oh well :/

The salads were good, but the "family size" salad bowl that came with the chicken was almost about for 2 people, not a family of adult human beings.

Finally and most seriously, as far as the savory food goes, it must have been salt night, or the chef who tasted everything had a cold; everything was FANTASTICALLY salty. I like salt, I'm not especially sensitive to it, but when everyone at the table notices that the food is so salty that a few things are almost inedible, that's a problem.

"it might take 15 minutes for your souffle." No problem. 35 minutes later, it arrived - it was OK, nothing really special. Not sure how the little cigar of pastry shell complemented it or related to it, but whatever.

Meh. I tried it, I paid for the privilege, I don't need to go back for dinner. I might go for a (simple) cocktail or a beer sometime, though.

I will say that their graphic design / identity is fantastic, though. Too bad the rest of...

I love the ambiance of this place. The food and drink selections are good too. They make specialty cocktails that are all named after Beetlejuice, which was pretty cool and made for a nice conversation starter amongst people. We had a large group so we were seated in the back at a nice long table with super comfy chairs. My only complaint is that there were tons of nats! We had multiple bugs fly into our drinks, which the waiters kindly replaced for us, and we spent a good deal of the meal time swatting the bugs away from our food.

Update I went just recently (July '18) rrirned to this restaurant and sat at the same table in the back. Luckily there were no gnats this time but there were a couple of large flies. We ordered almost exactly the same that we had before and all the food was good. When we got our check however, there was a $600+ fee added to our bill. When we asked the wait staff, we were told it was a "table fee". We tried getting clarification on what that meant (was it reserving the table, not having every seat filled, etc.) but they refused to answer us directly. We mentioned that this wasn't a fee we had encountered in the past with similar sized groups at this table but we were further ignored. Needless to say, we have decided to not return to this...