Garden Party
A new design-forward beer garden in East Sacramento offers dozens of craft brews on tap and craveable mix-and-match dishes from 10 different purveyors. At Garden at the Line, you can have your fresh Kru sashimi and eat your hot Nash & Proper fries too.
The massive artwork beckons from blocks away: A 2-story-tall, mazelike assortment of greenery segmented into geometric patterns. The piece, not coincidentally, evokes views of the Sacramento region from an airplane window.
This ultimate accent wall overlooks East Sacramento’s Garden at the Line, a beer garden that embraces the second part of the term just as tightly as the first. Dozens of potted plants punctuate the expansive outdoor space, enhancing the cozy yet sophisticated feel generated by fire pits and plentiful, stylish seating in various shades of green.
The garden motif creates an oasis effect on one of the least hospitable-seeming parts of Elvas Avenue, just before it hits 65th Street.
“When you think of this kind of corridor through here, and Sacramento in general in the summer, it feels kind of dry and barren,” says Garden at the Line’s GM Adam Ono. “I thought the idea of having a garden space would counteract the Sacramento summers.” The Garden’s ownership team—which includes leaders from Sutter Capital Group, Pizza Guys and Mark III Construction—agreed.
Open since December—so thus far spared the summer heat—the Garden appears more thoughtfully designed than most local beer gardens and industrial-park tasting rooms. It further distinguishes itself by valuing food as highly as the more than two dozen beers it offers on tap.
The Garden’s adjacent “ghost kitchen,” The Line, serves food to Garden patrons from 10 purveyors, including off shoots of two of Sacramento’s most acclaimed Japanese restaurants—Kru, led by Billy Ngo, a 2024 James Beard Awards finalist for best chef in California; and Binchoyaki Izakaya Dining, owned by Craig Takehara, a 2023 semifinalist in the same award category, and his chef wife, Toki Sawada.
Nashville-style hot chicken sensation Nash & Proper also occupies one of the 200-square-foot kitchens, which share a central ordering system, walk-in refrigerator and freezer, and a white-walled hallway that looks like something out of Severance, but with better lighting. Takehara prefers to think of it as dormitory-like, camaraderie included. “It’s nice to have all those restaurant owners there who understand all the things we go through,” he says.
Kru To-Go’s 15-piece sashimi mix served with preserved wasabi root
Kru To-Go was the first to sign on at The Line, which opened in 2022 and offered only takeout and delivery before its long-planned companion green space finally opened after construction delays.
Takehara and Sawada were also early Line adopters, drawn by good friend Ngo’s participation and a chance to launch their pandemic-postponed bento box concept, Kizuna by Binchoyaki.
“Startup costs are a lot cheaper than having to build a whole other restaurant,” Takehara says of his space at The Line. Operating out of a small kitchen is also “similar to Japan,” he explains. “In Japan, everything is in a small space.” Binchoyaki’s kitchen area is also famously intimate, with a grill fueled by ultra-hot-burning binchotan charcoal taking up a good chunk of the room.
Binchotan-less, Kizuna offers bento boxes along with mother-ship staples like “krispy rice” with spicy tuna and tori karaage (fried chicken), as well as other rice dishes and ramen. Takehara and Sawada trained Kizuna’s cooks at Binchoyaki and sometimes pinch-hit in the ghost kitchen. All The Line’s purveyors are local, and kitchens individually staffed.
Kru To-Go, for instance offers “the same cooks, same training and the same standard that Billy has at Kru,” Ono points out. “There really is no difference,” apart from a more limited menu at The Line.
Oh, and there’s that other slight difference of being able to just walk into the Garden at the Line, take a seat, order from the QR code on the table and receive ultra-fresh, buttery-textured sashimi that all but requires a weeks-in-advance reservation to access at Kru. Not to mention the rare ability to order that sashimi along with dishes from nine other restaurant concepts serving everything from Japanese to Mexican to American to vegan. (Pro tip: Not all purveyors are open all the time—for instance, Kizuna only operates Wednesday through Sunday—so if you have your heart set on, say, the krispy rice, check the online ordering menu before you head out.)
The taproom offers dozens of craft beer on draft from breweries like Sacramento’s Urban Roots and Santa Rosa’s Russian River.
On one visit to the Garden, my dining partner and I sat at a firepit-adjacent table, surrounded by couples in their 30s, kids and dogs. Undeterred by ordering cold food on a January evening, we melted into the first taste of Kru’s hamachi nigiri before savoring the slight, wholesome crunch of a Midtown Roll made with lettuce, cucumber, avocado and seaweed.
Ono, a certified sommelier and veteran beverage director who worked for the parent company of San Francisco’s famous Bourbon & Branch speakeasy, might recommend a fuller-bodied white wine to go with the Midtown Roll. Or perhaps sake, included on the Garden’s menu specifically for Kru and Kizuna.
Along with beers from Sacramento’s Urban Roots, Santa Rosa’s Russian River Brewing and other California craft beermakers, the Garden offers over a dozen wine options and 24 nonalcoholic drinks, from NA beers to a house-made lemonade.
“You go to most beer gardens, and it is 90% beer,” Ono says. “But we also are here to service the kitchens next door. Having a wider array of beverages to pair with the food and a larger diversity of clientele who are going to come to try the different foods—it is important to not just focus on a single category like beer.”
To his point, The Line kitchens also produce more typical beer garden fare, like Nash & Proper’s exquisitely overloaded Proper Fries, which merge hot fried chicken chunks, well-crisped potatoes, earthy and spicy “fuego” sauce, ranch dressing and pickles, hitting all salt-fat-acid-heat receptors along the way.
Nash & Proper gained fame as a brewery-hopping food truck. But Kizuna’s hops-ready bona fi des are similarly legit, despite its sister establishment Binchoyaki’s fancy culinary reputation. “We have always served food that goes great with beer,” says Takehara, whose original restaurant’s “izakaya” designation translates roughly to “pub.”
The crisp, tender shrimp tempura served in the Kizuna bento box I ordered seemed destined for the hoppy, fruity Alvarado Street IPA with which I paired it. Similarly meant to be was the pairing of orange cream “dirty soda” (Sunkist, vanilla, sweet cream) and burger from Okie Dokies, another Line purveyor.
Brainchild of Nash & Proper cofounder Jake Bombard, Okie Dokies started at The Line and serves up Oklahoma-style smash burgers that incorporate thin slices of onion with meat, pre-grill. Consisting of two patties and cheese on a bun perfectly proportioned to contain them, the Okie Dokie burger is the Platonic-ideal version of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger. Or maybe it’s just that tasting it triggers one’s Hamburglar instincts.
Okie Dokies’ signature double burger with double cheese
“I have to keep myself from having one every day,” Ono says. Housed in the same kitchen as Nash & Proper, Okie Dokies “has really blown up and taken off ” with burger lovers, he adds, becoming the first Line-originated sensation.
Sawada says she notices patrons who flock to the Garden want food that is not just delicious, but Instagram-worthy and kid-friendly. To that end, she and Takehara introduced a Garden at the Line eat-in-only special: Japanese Cup Noodles that Kizuna enhances with soy milk and other special ingredients. The instantly addictive seafood iteration I tried came with green onion and mentaiko roe.
“Who can say no to cup o’ noodles?” Sawada asks, obviously rhetorically.
Garden at the Line’s owners enlisted a pair of Sacramento creatives, architect Craig Hausman and designer Dacy Kolsky, to help transform two empty lots into an inviting outdoor space and two long-moribund buildings (formerly warehouses for a plant nursery) into the Garden’s roll-up-doored, light-filled main bar and separate private event space.
“The owners knew they wanted to call the space ‘The Garden’ but otherwise I had free creative rein,” says Kolsky, who designed Downtown Commons’ Darling Aviary rooftop bar and midtown’s Flamingo House social club. “I knew we weren’t going to use gravel and picnic tables. Sacramento seemed hungry for something different.”
Kolsky’s Garden greens flow into chartreuse and turquoise, and the beer garden features vibrant botanical murals painted by local artists Shaun Burner, Franceska Gamez, Stephen Williams, Molly Devlin and Jake Castro.
But the visual showstopper, amid all 20,000 square feet of The Line and Garden at the Line, is Kolsky’s faux “living” wall, which holds the Garden’s only fake fl ora (the designer wanted to use real plants, but “Sacramento’s climate had other ideas”) and was inspired by aerial views of the local region.
“There’s really nothing like flying home from a trip and seeing that patchwork from the sky,” Kolsky says. “Sacramento natives are very loyal, and I wanted to pay homage to that. Being born and raised in California, I feel grateful to be surrounded by so much beauty.”
And now, diners can feel grateful to have so much to look at—and taste—in this stretch of East Sacramento.
6415 Elvas Ave. 916-526-3914. gardenattheline.com
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