The recipes come from the grandmother who raised Sara Luviano in the Mexican state of Michoacán.

Today, Luviano and her daughter Zulema Acevedo run La Mini Birrieria, a restaurant that opened on Northgate Boulevard in 2022. It serves food like quesatacos and burritos covered in birria, a Mexican stew. The restaurant is growing quickly and has recently announced plans to expand into a larger space next door.

“We don’t know a lot about businesses,” Luviano says through an interpreter as she sits at a table in her current space on Northgate. “We just started this business as an adventure.”

Now, this adventure could be helping bring forward revitalization plans along Northgate.

“We’re seeing in Northgate is what I call a lot of momentum that’s been years in the making,” says Cathy Rodriguez Aguirre, CEO of the Sacramento Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “But there’s been a lot of work behind the scenes.”

Already, the street quietly has a lot going for it. Sacramento City Council member Karina Talamantes says that Northgate boasts a highly diverse community living up and down the boulevard. “The amount of pride that everyone has to be from the Northgate area is incredibly beautiful,” Talamantes says.

Then there is the abundance of Mexican restaurants, which few parts of Sacramento might be able to compete with.

“When I first moved into the neighborhood, my fiance and I were honestly shocked at the number of taco places there on the Northgate corridor,” Talamantes says. “We actually grabbed one taco from every single taco stand … and we had our own version of taco tasting at home.”

It’s definitely not just La Mini Birrieria. Tacos consumed as part of reporting for this story included al pastor from Taqueria Los Mejores, carne asada from Tacos La Piedad and an especially succulent shrimp offering from Algo Bueno.

Still, though Northgate has unsung gems among its businesses, it lacks other amenities that might be commonplace in other parts of the region. There is no property business improvement district, or PBID. Traffic calming measures have been slow to be introduced to the street. And overhead power lines are still visible in some places.

What it does have is an active group in the Gardenland Northgate Neighborhood Association.

“They’ve really been the group that’s been working really hard to make sure that people realize here are the resources that we need, here’s what happening in our community,” Rodriguez Aguirre says. “And now you’re seeing a lot of momentum from the work that they’ve done.”

The association’s president is Marbella Sala, who was born in Mexico City and came to the United States at 5 years old. She’s lived in the Northgate area long enough to know the history of a series of dilapidated wooden fences that currently stand along the boulevard across from La Mini Birrieria.

“It’s been like this for 35 years,” Sala says.

So Sala and others have been working to get a sound wall built that could span much of the boulevard beginning at West El Camino Avenue. The work isn’t easy; Sala says she’s been having to push back on the city wanting homeowners to pay if people crash into the sound wall.

All the same, local officials have been onboard with getting the sound wall built, acknowledging that the aging fence has had to go, according to Mikel Davila, a senior development project for the city. He notes that Sacramento City Council adopted a commercial corridor framework for Northgate in September 2021, allocating $5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding. 

“This ARPA investment was just a huge infusion to look at the corridor from all the facets of commercial corridor revitalization,” Davila says.

The city also committed $2 million in funding to the Hispanic Chamber to support small businesses along the corridor, which Davila called “sort of still a work in progress.” There are also new banners for Gardenland and Northgate along the street and two new traffic lights, according to Talamantes.

More work could lie ahead. The parking lot Sala is standing in could see a transformation. Right now, La Mini Birrieria is at one end. Next to it is the former site of Rico’s Italian Pizza, a business of more than 30 years that closed in recent months. La Mini Birrieria will move into its 3,350 square feet of space, according to a press release from the restaurant on Feb. 22.

Sala envisions multiple murals outside and a sitting area. Further down, she notes that $100,000 in ARPA funding is going toward a $200,000 project to create an outdoor space by Tacos La Piedad. She hopes that work will be complete by the fall.

In time, this entire parking lot could be a taco plaza.

“Everybody has to come and help finish it off,” Sala says.

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