Mulvaney's Building & Loan Sacramento CA, Midtown

Mulvaney's B&L brings handcrafted new American cuisine to your table. Our relationship with the food and where it comes from is the driving force of the way we do business. Our restaurant menu changes daily as we focus on the subtle changes of the seasonal harvest of our local farms. As Patrick Mulvaney often says, “whatever comes in the front door goes on your plate.”

Our down to earth yet whimsical style is what makes us smile. Please come, sit and eat.

WHAT’S IN A NAME

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey learns that his family business—Bailey Bros. Building & Loan—is more than a business. It’s the glue that holds the community together. We lovingly honor that notion by incorporating the Building & Loan name into our own as a way of embracing the community that has been so good to us.


WHO WE ARE

Mulvaney’s B&L is many things. We’re a restaurant that specializes in hand-crafted New American cuisine, a farm-to-table devotee that celebrates the efforts of the growers, ranchers, brewers and winemakers who are our neighbors, purveyors and friends.

Set in a historic 1893 firehouse, with its original brick walls and soaring ceilings, Mulvaney’s B&L is also a nexus of Sacramento: a place where we serve up impeccable and creative fare (our menu changes daily in step with the local growing seasons), and facilitate the connections of the guests we love to host.

Our “wonderful old B&L” is the brainchild – no, the passion – of owners Patrick and Bobbin Mulvaney, who bring more than a half century and six time zones’ worth of experience to their mission. We strive to provide our guests with the best our region has to offer and a place to have their own culinary experience.


There was a time when Sacramento didn’t want to be an ag town. It has been nearly 20 years since the idea for Soil Born Farms was planted. Agriculture, as it has since the 1840’s, was booming in the Sacramento Valley. There were some early voices singing the virtues of our agricultural heritage to the growing population of city slickers back then.

Leadership at the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op and Harald Hoven, the master gardener at Fair Oaks’ Rudolf Steiner College were raising consciousness on the value of urban gardens. And community garden advocates such as Sacramento’s Bill Maynard, the leadership at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center and Mary Kimball at the nonprofit Center for Land Based Learning were spreading the gospel.

But not much of the “culture” of our agriculture was seeping into the rapidly expanding urban environment of Sacramento. In fact, it seemed there was a push regionally to shake off our “cow town” identity…

Written by Shawn Harrison and Patrick Mulvaney — Special to The Bee


Our Green Promise

We see ourselves as stewards of the land we love and, in our small way, protectors of the future.

Our Green Promise isn’t a marketing campaign. It’s a description of the way we do business, which is a direct reflection of the way we live and the values we hold dear.

It starts with our purveyors. We choose to work with farmers, ranchers, and winemakers who tread lightly upon the earth.

It continues to the ingredients we use and how we use them. When we get a duck, we use it all—in numerous dishes. We use every part of the pig but the oink. We can’t even tolerate to see butter burned, since that would fail to honor the people who worked so hard to produce it.

We’re avid com-posters. Now that we use an anaerobic digest-er, we’re more than 99-percent landfill-free. Our waste used to fill three dumpsters a week; now it barely tops a five-gallon bucket.

All our wine bottles are recycled; the clear ones find a second life in the restaurant as water pitchers. Our cardboard is recycled. Our daily menus are printed on 100-percent post-consumer waste; they’re then re-used for in-house printing needs before they return to the recycling bin. The ashes from the grill, the grounds from drained espresso cups, and leftover table water all feed our garden.

Our to-go boxes are Bio-Pak. Our disposable service-ware is environmentally friendly; our disposable cutlery is made from a bamboo byproduct and the plates and cups derive from sugarcane. It’s all sustainable and biodegradable.

Our primary equipment-rental company uses a bio-fuel for its fleet and environmentally-conscious cleaning products for its dishes and laundry.

Our restaurant typically has a half-dozen bikes parked outside, including a “shop bike” we use for getting around downtown and midtown, to the bank, business meetings, and running staff or products to offsite events.

And what about our excess food? We send it directly to homeless services. You may even see Patrick carrying a box of sandwiches out to the railroad tracks for our resident street people; as a way of returning the favor, they keep an eye out for our property.