Casa Bella

The queso fundido in a cast iron skillet is a stunning starter. (Photo by Jacob Cantu, courtesy of Casa Lola)

Step inside Casa Lola, and you’re transported to a vibrant Mexican village captured right at the “magic hour,” with warm, sunset-hued lighting giving everything an incandescent glow. “Pink is the color of my grandma’s home in Mexico,” co-proprietor Sylvia Moreno says. “I wanted Casa Lola to be fun, festive and colorful.”

Jointly owned and operated by her fiancé Mason Wong and his brothers Alan and Curtis, Casa Lola is the first project Moreno has launched with her future in-laws. The Wong brothers—who also run local mainstays like Iron Horse Tavern and Cafeteria 15L—were born into a Sacramento hospitality family, while Moreno, a realtor by trade, hails from a proud, close-knit family of Central Valley Mexican farmworkers. The restaurant they’ve made together is a reflection of their combined traditions, brought to life through good old-fashioned California dreamin’.

Casa Lola is pretty in pink with sunset lighting and hanging bougainvillea. (Photo by Jacob Cantu, courtesy of Casa Lola)

The décor illuminated by that pink glow is a kaleidoscope of a South of the Border street scene: Rustic, vintage windows and doors are set into faux-finished walls, behind wrought-iron balconies draped in hot pink bougainvillea blossoms—Moreno’s late mom’s favorite flower. Below that, stylized tropical birds take flight across murals by prolific area artist Madelyne Joan Templeton. Designed by the Napa-based creative firm Shopworks in collaboration with the Wong-Moreno team, the dining room is magically immersive, making you feel swept away to another time and place where everything is slightly more vivid than mere reality. No wonder the festive restaurant, which celebrated its grand opening in December, is already attracting a brisk business in birthday celebrations (expect fireworks sparklers, clapping and singing).

Meanwhile, beneath all that bright funshine lies the backbone of a serious restaurant, led by longtime regional chef Fidel Lopez, who has a quiet, assured authority over a menu that elevates traditional Mexican dishes with technique and attention to detail.

Lopez, 49, moved to Sacramento from Mexico at 17, and has worked at various kitchens ever since—including cheffing for the Wongs at this space’s previous incarnation as Firestone Public House when it opened in 2012. The following year, he honed his culinary skills at Paragary Restaurant Group’s Centro Cocina Mexicana under the guidance of executive chef Kurt Spataro, taking over as chef de cuisine in 2014, a position he held for the next 10 years.

When you order your entrée at Casa Lola, you’ll be offered a side of rice and a choice of refried or black beans. (“It’s all about the rice and beans. They have to have a lot of taste,” Moreno says. And Lopez’s rice and beans, like his credentials, are impeccable.) Choose the former, even if you think you don’t like refried beans. Lard-free, these have a soufflé-like texture and a savory, umami-kissed earthiness. Don’t be surprised if you greedily polish them off before touching anything else on your plate.

The secret ingredient is love, according to Lopez, who like the Wongs and Moreno, is all about family. His instructions to the kitchen staff: “Cook with love, like you’re making food for your husbands or wives.”

Sylvia Moreno with fellow Casa Lola owners (from left) Alan, Mason and Curtis Wong (Portrait by Ryan Donahue)

The chef’s three decades of experience also steer his hand in complex dishes like his deft interpretation of a classic mole, served either over a half-chicken or the way I tried it, draped over tender chicken enchiladas. In lesser hands, mole can come across as heavy—dark and sullen as a goth teenager—but this version is lighthearted without being shallow. It’s still got mole’s signature moodiness, but it’s also playful and a little sly—the taste equivalent of Billie Eilish’s darkly humorous “Bad Guy,” to stick with the teen-music metaphor.

The carnitas—pork shoulder, the fat rendered away through many hours of slow cooking, leaving behind an unctuous mouthfeel—is a treat for carnivores, the aromatic citrus and black pepper top notes yielding to meaty succulence. While it’s excellent in a taco, it’s a standout as a plated dinner entrée, where you can indulge in bites of carnitas alone to savor its many layers of flavor without any noise from salsa or tortilla—you can always improvise a taco, too, out of the entrée’s fixings.

The menu’s sunniest item—and Moreno’s favorite—is the aguachiles. Tender, sliced shrimp layered with diced cucumber and mango, bathed in bright chile sauce, and topped with a green fan of avocado, it’s as pretty and colorful as a beach day in the tropics. The crunch of the produce and the juicy softness of the shrimp harmonize beneath the palate-warming buzz of chile and citrus. It’s a showstopper of a dish, a summer vacation on a plate, guaranteed to create a sense memory you will carry with you for a long time.

The cocktails and mocktails echo the food menu, elevating classics. Even the skinny margarita actually hits as one of the better margaritas in town, dominated by fresh lime and tequila—it’s the closest thing I’ve tasted in a long time to the Platonic ideal of the drink that I once sampled at a little cantina in San José del Cabo, no suffocating sweetness, no neon-colored bottled mixer. The nonalcoholic beverages, including the horchata (milky and spice-forward) and jamaica (hibiscus), are also flavorful and quaffable. That’s the approach at Casa Lola: Give the people what they want—but better. It’s a philosophy the Wongs have evolved over many iterations.

The sizzling molcajete mixto with grilled shrimp, chorizo, chicken, steak, cactus and onion (Photo by Jacob Cantu, courtesy of Casa Lola)

“This is the 14th restaurant we’ve opened,” Mason Wong says. He, Alan and Curtis—along with their sisters Sharon Wong and Susan Fong—followed in the footsteps of their parents, who opened the family’s first restaurant, Luau Garden, in 1976—which means that 2026 is the 50th anniversary of his family’s legacy. “Shoot! Time flies by,” Wong says.

And actually, going further back, the Wong siblings are third-generation Sacramento restaurateurs. Grandfather Kim Poy Wong arrived here from China in 1937 with his wife and son—the Wong siblings’ father, Sun—in tow, soon establishing himself as a chef and baker and working at a hotel in the historic West End neighborhood. Mason Wong remembers his grandfather vividly, as the families shared a duplex. “My grandfather was an amazing cook and baker,” he says. “We used to get up at 6 in the morning, and he’d be making pies and other desserts.” So the Wong kids ate dessert for breakfast every day without even realizing this was “kind of weird.” They learned to think unconventionally in the process.

Before taking up the family trade, Sun G. Wong would become Sacramento’s first person of color to serve as a city council member in 1966, completing three terms. Five years after he left office in 1971, Sun and his wife May opened the aforementioned Luau Garden, a Hawaiian-themed Chinese food buffet, on Arden Way, which quickly became a beloved local institution, followed by The Rage nightclub next door in 1978. May Wong presided over Luau Garden as hostess, and all five Wong children grew up working in the family business.

In 2005, the siblings took a chance on a corner of downtown near the Capitol that at the time rolled up the sidewalks when the office workers went home, opening a trio of concepts at 15th and L streets: the fast-casual Ma Jong’s Asian Diner, nightclub Park Ultra Lounge and fine-dining restaurant Mason’s. The latter was a subtle tribute to their parents—May and Sun—who combined their two monikers into one in naming their middle son.

Executive chef Fidel Lopez has crafted a menu of elevated yet authentic Mexican dishes. (Photo by Jacob Cantu, courtesy of Casa Lola)

Opening three businesses at once was a bold move, but the siblings researched meticulously. (The brothers and sisters divided and conquered. While Sharon and Susan worked more behind the scenes, Mason, Alan and Curtis took on the role of managing partners, forming MAC Hospitality Group after their sisters stepped away from the company’s operations about a decade ago.) The brothers visited high-end restaurants all over town before launching Mason’s, and then later broadened their horizons. “We would travel from city to city. We’d probably eat at four or five restaurants a day and order 10 or 15 things on the menu,” Mason says. “We would just take a little bite at each restaurant and move on to the next one. Everybody thinks it’s a lot of fun, but it’s actually a lot of work.”

The work paid off. Mason’s was wildly successful, a see-and-be-seen spot widely praised as helping to transform downtown. In 2006, then-Sacramento Bee  dining critic Mike Dunne listed Mason’s as one of the top 12 restaurants around the region of that year, along with stalwarts like Biba, Mulvaney’s B&L and The Waterboy.

The Great Recession dealt a blow, but the Wongs were able to pivot nicely, launching the Mix Downtown nightclub in 2009, and replacing Mason’s in 2010 with the more priceconscious and still-thriving Cafeteria 15L. (Luau Garden closed in 2011, a consolidation move. Park Ultra Lounge and Ma Jong’s both closed in 2020, casualties of the pandemic—but also having run their course after 15 years.)

Just as the Wongs were part of downtown’s renaissance, they jumped into the redevelopment of the historic R Street Corridor, opening Iron Horse Tavern in 2015, which serves classic pub fare (the stunning mac and cheese trio once made our cover). In 2018, the brothers opened their first Mas Taco—a fast-casual fusion concept (they had us at banh mi tacos)—next door, and a second Iron Horse at the Palladio in Folsom.

Are you keeping count? Today, the Wongs operate three Mas Tacos, two Iron Horse Taverns, the Mix nightclub and now, Casa Lola. Mason Wong, 65, no longer stays up until 3 a.m. keeping an eye on the nightclub. “That’s a younger gentleman’s game,” he says. “I’m trying to get my nephews to handle more of the late-night stuff.” That’s generation four and counting.

Tres leches cake topped with toasted meringue (Photo by Jacob Cantu, courtesy of Casa Lola)

While the Wongs were putting down roots in Sacramento, Sylvia Moreno’s family was doing the same at the other end of the Central Valley, in the Tulare County town of Porterville, where she was raised by an equally warm familial embrace. She grew up the ninth of 11 children, in a family of agricultural workers where food was the currency of love. “I’m very traditional and very family-oriented,” Moreno says.

“That’s a big part of our lives—food and family,” Mason Wong adds.

The Wong brothers brought the industry expertise to the table, but Casa Lola is named after one of Moreno’s sisters, a recently retired bus driver in Houston. “She’s a very colorful woman,” says Moreno. “She’s very outgoing, very social.” All qualities that imbue her namesake establishment. Were her other sisters a little jealous? Sure, Moreno says with a wink, “but Lola is just such a pretty name!”

Days after opening Casa Lola, the restaurant’s blended family is in full swing. Swirling through the dining room, Moreno has fully embraced the hostess role May Wong played at Luau Garden. Mason, meanwhile, can be glimpsed in the background bussing tables—that, he laughs, is the eternal fate of a family restaurateur. And he wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Casa Lola. 1132 16th St. 916-446-0888. vivacasalola.com