Your Friends and New Neighbor

Good Neighbor took over the Beast & Bounty space at the Ice Blocks on R Street. (Photo by Zach Clevenger, courtesy of Urban Roots)

Rob Archie’s neighborly instincts have by now become legendary.

When the beloved East Sacramento pub The Shack shut down in 2022, he counted himself among its many heartbroken longtime patrons. Not ready to say goodbye, Archie and his Urban Roots Hospitality Group swooped in and resurrected it as Cervecería.

Now the Urban Roots team has transformed the midtown building that previously held upscale Beast & Bounty, which closed in early 2025, into Good Neighbor. Full service yet insistently casual, the new restaurant at the Ice Blocks complex offers a cozy throwback feel, ample outdoor seating and what Archie calls “high-quality but familiar food” ranging from wood-fired pizza to steak frites.

Owner or co-owner of six popular spots around town, along with a beer enterprise stretching throughout the western United States and all the way to Japan, Archie maintains he has no intention of dominating the Sacramento food and drink scene. It’s just that opportunities keep popping up.

“I never had a plan to expand past Pangaea,” Archie says, referring to his first venture, Curtis Park’s Pangaea Bier Cafe, which opened in 2008 and helped define Sacramento’s beer scene. Needless to say, plans changed, and he partnered with brewmaster Peter Hoey to launch Urban Roots Brewery & Smokehouse and Bawk! chicken shop a decade later, adding The Roost speakeasy in the back of Bawk! in 2021.

“Sometimes, I just see things that I am like, ‘I will regret it if I did not do that,’ and yeah, we end up doing things like Good Neighbor,” Archie explains. An admirer of midtown’s Ice Blocks, Archie reimagined the once-trendy Beast & Bounty location as a hangout spot that’s open every day and where people can just drop in. Kind of like that friend’s house down the block where there’s always a garage beer at the ready and a pot of something on the stove.

Steak frites with hanger steak and tallow fries (Photo by Zach Clevenger, courtesy of Urban Roots)

Although Good Neighbor is the Urban Roots group’s first full-service restaurant, Archie and Hoey have taken steps to ensure diners feel relaxed and unhurried. The team converted Beast & Bounty’s bocce ball court on R Street into a covered front patio and added seating to its 17th Street patio, as well as to the courtyard it shares with Philz Coffee and other businesses. “You can eat and drink throughout the entire property,” Archie says. “It makes it so people can drink and eat at their own pace.”

Good Neighbor holds 72 seats outdoors—four more than inside. Tables inside and out feature special ordering “cubes,” or kind of three-dimensional, interactive devices that allow diners to page their server throughout the meal. Archie said Good Neighbor is the only regional restaurant he knows of with the illuminated cubes. The Urban Roots team also revived the 17th Street offshoot space that formerly held the Milk Money doughnut shop. Now called Side Hustle, the shop sells liège waffles, ice cream sundaes and boozy milkshakes along with gourmet hot dogs.

The restaurant opened in late October, just as Sacramento’s patio dining season was winding down. But when we visited in mid-November and early December, it was easy to envision a bustling outdoor scene come spring. Good Neighbor was already doing great business within its dining room, a distinctive space with two-story-high ceilings and a historic, unadorned brick wall facing R Street.

At night, the brick wall, ambient lighting, smell of wood fire from ovens inherited from Beast & Bounty, and a menu Archie deems “Americana” but harkens back to “California cuisine” combine to give the place a comforting atmosphere reminiscent of East Sacramento’s 33rd Street Bistro. That neighborhood favorite retained its 1990s vibe until it closed in 2020. (Which, by the way, isn’t a criticism.)

From left: Good Neighbor owners Peter Hoey and Rob Archie with Urban Roots culinary director Greg Desmangles (Photo by Zach Clevenger, courtesy of Urban Roots)

Guided by Archie and created by Urban Roots culinary director (and Archie’s nephew) Greg Desmangles and Good Neighbor chef de cuisine Zach Schechtman, the new spot’s mix of arancini and fritto misto small plates with sandwiches and pizza “kind of speaks for itself,” Archie says. “You don’t have to go through a chef ’s ego to order.”

Yet culinary expertise runs throughout the layers of Good Neighbor’s standout pavé fries, a croissant-like potato confection with a perfectly crisped outside and delicate, creamy interior. The sour cream dip served with the fries is a lovely, if unnecessary, accompaniment.

Wood fire increases the earthiness of the slightly nutty mozzarella, fontina and Parmesan blend on the “Trio of Cheese” Neapolitan-style pizza, which benefits from the judicious ladling of sparky tomato sauce atop a thin crust.

The mussels and chorizo entrée offers a perfect balance of salt and sea. Although the side of tallow shoestring fries included in the dish did a good job mopping up the umami-packed broth, the crust from our pizza worked even better. A bit of dining MacGyvering is always welcome among friends, or at least neighbors on good terms.

The flame-broiled burger with a half-pound beef patty, grilled onions, sharp cheddar cheese, Bibb lettuce and special sauce (Photo by Zach Clevenger, courtesy of Urban Roots)

If you are new to a Rob Archie establishment, some advice: Order the burger. Before Urban Roots existed as a brand or even a beer, Pangaea won local burger battles, edging out competition from Localis, LowBrau, Willie’s, and others. The variations served by Urban Roots Brewery & Smokehouse, Bawk! and Cervecería add a patty or subtract a pickle or two, but do not veer far from the formula of perfect bun-meat ratio and prominent char. Thanks to the in-house wood fire, Good Neighbor’s “Flame-Broiled Burger” ups the ante on that last front.

The new restaurant offers Hoey’s lauded Urban Roots beers, of course, but the list is limited to six taps. The drinks menu—and the newly built, backlit bar shelves—highlight spirits. Our favorite cocktail creation by Urban Roots beverage director Justin Sheffey and Good Neighbor bar manager Chris Osman is the “Blush,” which holds vodka and a Parmesan-infused vermouth that nicely rounds out the drink’s strawberry, yuzu and lemon components.

Although the ’90s influence is prevalent, Good Neighbor most directly evokes the 1970s, with its bubble-lettered signage and row of formidable ferns hanging from its ceiling. The inspiration is less era than specific person, however: Archie’s late grandmother Emily Collins.

A great cook and bon vivant, Collins “just had a knack for hosting” in her Woodland home, Archie says. “When she cooked breakfast, every plate had to be warmed. Everything was toasted, and the microwave was never used.”

His grandmother died several years ago at age 101, after a lifetime of “drinking Scotch and soda and eating bacon and eggs,” Archie says with a laugh.

Rob Archie’s late grandmother Emily Collins served as Good Neighbor’s muse. (Photo by Zach Clevenger, courtesy of Urban Roots)

A giant photo of Collins circa the ’70s hangs on a wall of Good Neighbor, opposite the bar. In it, she sits at a table looking movie-star beautiful while holding a cigarette, with a bottle of Scotch and gold Pyrex bowl close at hand. “That image really helped us pull together this idea of, ‘Where do you want to just sit for a while?’ ” explains Whitney Johnson, the veteran Sacramento restaurant designer (Kru, Shady Lady Saloon) who helped re-envision the space. “We were like, ‘That’s the table we want to be at.’ ”

Nostalgia suffuses Sacramento’s newer restaurants, or at least the higher-profile places. Last year, Kru chef-owner Billy Ngo opened Chu Mai, which sits a block from Good Neighbor at 17th and S streets and honors Ngo’s late mother and the dishes he grew up eating. Meanwhile, Stepdad’s—co-owned by Camden Spit & Larder chef-proprietor Oliver Ridgeway—assumed a yacht-rock theme upon its June 2025 opening in the Land Park space that formerly held Dad’s Kitchen.

These spots seem aimed, at least partially, at neighbors fortunate enough to live without roommates in their Tudors, Craftsmans or R Street Corridor condos and lofts. People who are done with the “scene,” but not with going out.

“I’m almost 40 and Rob just turned 50. We have kids, we’re busy,” Johnson says. “We joked a lot about people our age having a place to go—that [Good Neighbor] is the ‘missing middle’ of spaces for people with expendable income who want to sit down and have a steak dinner, or just want to have cold beer.”

Good Neighbor’s inviting and dramatic two-story-tall dining room (Photo by Zach Clevenger, courtesy of Urban Roots)

On our visits, most patrons appeared to be elder millennials. But other diners looked like they could tell you all about life in the ’70s. All the better to appreciate the detail of Johnson’s design, from the herringbone-patterned wood floors that were stripped and stained a dark brown to avocado-husk green walls and orange paneling. For the fabric covering the restaurant’s bench seating, Johnson chose a shade of royal blue not seen since the original run of Maude  on CBS.

The Urban Roots team had never hired an outside designer before Johnson, but “I really wanted this project to capture a feel,” Archie says, deeming the finished space “beautiful.”

Moreover, Archie says that he hopes the “by Urban Roots” tag that adorns Good Neighbor and the other parts of his unplanned yet burgeoning empire signals “love, kindness and quality.”

“What I want people to be assured is, ‘You’re going to have quality food in an inspired setting with kind people,’ ” he says.

1701 R St. 916-758-6194. goodneighbor916.com