doña
Dona Savitsky closed a twenty-year-old Temescal restaurant to run this one fast at lunch, and tripled her midday sales doing it.
Why go
Savitsky shut Doña Tomás in Temescal in 2019 after two and a half years of trying to make lunch work there, and she is blunt about why: the menu was very limited
and the midday trade didn't bring in enough to pay the bills.
1 She took the former Chow space at Piedmont and MacArthur, split the building three ways with the landlord so she paid for less of it, and opened doña in early December 2019 as a counter-service room.1 The number she gives for the change is the argument: We're doing three times, or more, the amount of sales at lunch.
1 She also owns Tacubaya in Berkeley.
Order this / avoid
- Avoid: turning up cold. Call ahead, because I cannot confirm the room is trading.
What locals & experts say
- Dona Savitsky, on the move, to Berkeleyside / Nosh:
It is, hands down, the best move I've ever made, besides moving Tacubaya two doors down.
1
Good to know
- Status: the venue's own web domain has lapsed and nothing published tells me whether the room is still open. Call before you go.
Verdict
listed — I cannot show that this room is open, and that caps the rung on its own. The lapsed domain is a signal, and neither The Oaklandside nor the Chronicle has reported a closure, which leaves the question genuinely open. What is solid is Savitsky's own account of the move, quoted from Nosh in 2020, including the sales number that justified it. Once somebody confirms the door, the cooking record needs building from scratch, because nothing published names a plate here.