After you break a leg and get laid up for three months, what are you going to do? If you're longtime Sacramento chef Mark Helms, who for the past three years has been executive chef at Tapa the World along J Street in midtown, you use your down time to plan your own restaurant.
And come late October or early November, with his right leg virtually healed, he'll open it. It will be called Ravenous Cafe, and it will occupy quarters currently occupied by Plan B Cafe at River Lake Village in the city's Pocket neighborhood. "I've had nothing but time on my hands," says Helms. His plans for Ravenous call for the space to continue to be a neighborhood restaurant with a New American menu - "what I like to eat myself," says Helms.
So where does that leave Lionel Lucas, who opened Plan B Cafe in April of 2007? He's delighted, given that the restaurant has been popular since it opened and he's been eager to move into larger quarters. He'll get that early next year at Arden Town Center, Fair Oaks and Watt. He's closing Plan B Cafe Oct. 18 to let Helms move in and to prepare to relocate the business. "It will be twice the size, with a patio four times the size," says Lucas of the new site. He hopes to open there in January or February. Given the larger size and what he expects to be an upgrade in ambience, he's dropping "cafe" from the name.
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