In the mere months since it opened in January, Mother and its meatless cuisine have already made its stamp on the Sacramento dining scene. So what's next for the owners? Kate Washington in Sactown Mag has the details.

Their plan, all along, was to open a higher-end, meat-focused rotisserie, to be named Empress Tavern, located inside the venerable Crest Theatre on K Street. But then a Blimpie two doors down from the Crest closed, so the landlords asked the Empress crew if they wanted to move in, and Mother was quickly born, the first in a planned group of several restaurants... Thiemann hints that future concepts, after Empress, may include a casual ice cream and French fry joint (a natural pairing, he says, since his secret to great French fries is freezing them) and, eventually, a seafood restaurant.

Washington also reports what the restaurant's named after. Surprisingly (at least to me), it's not a parental unit or a direct reference to the land where the restaurants vegetables are grown.

The restaurant’s name itself evokes this feeling, referencing the idea of Mother Earth and of food culture (a “mother” is the starter that turns wine into vinegar), while also positioning the restaurant as the matriarch of its owners’ planned group of eateries...But the name Mother also hides a secret history: in 2007, Thiemann was working in New Zealand at a restaurant called Sweet Mother’s Kitchen. “One night, I was watching Trainspotting,” he remembers. “And this is really kind of bad—there’s this scene where [a character] goes and buys heroin from [a dealer known as] Mother Superior, and the transaction is like, ‘What’s on the menu today, sir?’ That stuck with me. I always wanted to name a restaurant Mother Superior, but we all agreed that here we were too close to the Catholic church,” referring to the nearby Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. So they dropped “Superior”—but kept the concept of Mother, and the idea of an ever-changing menu, albeit one with vegetables rather than drugs.

Read the entire article in Sactown Magazine.

Speaking of Mother, I had the chance to eat their $50 for 2 for the 10 course Chef's Menu on Wednesday evening after watching the USA Track & Field's men shot put finals from the West steps of the State Capitol. The meal was amazing. When I first started, I was afraid that I would still be hungry by the end, but we ended up taking about a quarter of the food home 'cause we were too stuffed to continue eating. I'd say about half of the food we had that night were dishes that you'd consider traditional "vegetarian" dishes while the other half were wildly inventive and unconventional. It was a good mix and well worth the money. But watch out, even on a Wednesday night, we still had to wait 45 mins for a table at 7 p.m. But still worth it.





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