About Bacon & Butter
In Sacramento's farm-to-fork culture, the city's finest ingredients tend to appear at dinner. Bacon & Butter, opened by siblings Amber Michel and Executive Chef Billy Zoellin on Broadway in the South Land Park neighbourhood, made the heretical argument that those same ingredients belonged at breakfast. After over a decade of service, five consecutive Michelin Plate awards, and a queue that regularly extends out the door before the eight o'clock opening, the argument has been conclusively won.
The restaurant's name is a statement of intent. Bacon here means house-cured bacon — bellies sourced from heritage-breed pigs, cured with spices, smoked to a deep mahogany, and served with a fat-to-lean ratio that suggests the curing was done by someone who genuinely understands the chemistry of pork. Butter means the same: cultured, high-fat, applied generously to biscuits that are made from scratch each morning and arrive at the table warm enough that the butter disappears into the crust on contact.
The menu is structured around the great American breakfast canon but executed with the ingredient discipline of a Michelin kitchen. Eggs Benedict comes with Niman Ranch ham, eggs poached to a precise medium-liquid yolk, and a hollandaise that is made to order and does not break. The fried chicken and waffles — the dish that most defines the Bacon & Butter experience — pairs a buttermilk-brined, crispy-fried thigh with a light Belgian-style waffle and a house-made maple syrup that has been spiked with Calabrian chilli. The combination is perfect: sweet, salty, fatty, mildly spiced, texturally complete.
The breakfast burrito is aggressively oversized, constructed with scrambled eggs, house chorizo, roasted potatoes, cheddar, and a tomatillo salsa that provides the necessary acidic counter to the richness of everything else. The flapjacks are made with buttermilk and a proportion of whole-wheat flour that gives them a slight nuttiness absent from the all-white-flour versions found elsewhere. The French toast, made from thick-cut brioche, is as good as French toast gets in Sacramento.
The Wait and Why It Is Worth It
Bacon & Butter does not take reservations for parties under eight. This means that weekend mornings involve a wait, and the wait can extend to forty-five minutes during peak summer and holiday periods. The queue moves as quickly as the turnover allows — the service is efficient, the tables do not linger excessively — but the wait is real.
It is worth it. Michelin does not award Plate recognition to brunch restaurants as a consolation prize. The five consecutive awards are a measure of consistent quality, consistent sourcing, and consistent execution across a volume of covers that most brunch operations would find difficult to sustain. The combination of queue acceptance and quality delivery is not accidental; it is the result of a kitchen that has figured out what it is doing and keeps doing it correctly.
Best Occasion Fit: Birthday
The celebratory energy of Sacramento's best brunch makes Bacon & Butter a natural birthday destination for the diner who treats weekend brunch as a serious meal rather than a fast-food convenience. Groups of four to eight can book in advance; the team handles the occasion with genuine warmth, and the food delivers the kind of memorable eating that makes a birthday brunch feel like an event rather than a meal.
The first date potential of Bacon & Butter is underrated. A weekend brunch date at a Michelin-recognised restaurant that costs $35 per person all-in communicates taste without intimidation. The communal dining room and ambient weekend energy reduce the pressure that a candlelit dinner can create. The food is good enough to carry the conversation. For the brunch-specific birthday or first date in Sacramento, this is where the decision ends. For evening occasions, Allora and The Waterboy serve the same impulse in different registers.