When Sacramento’s Grange reopens tomorrow, it will have a refreshed look.

I’m curious to see how this farm-to-fork downtown restaurant will re-imagine itself, as I had the chance to check it out a month before the redo, when I was invited in as a guest of Grange and the swank Citizen Hotel.

Downtown Sacramento is undergoing its own renaissance, what with the opening of Golden 1 Center, home of the Sacramento Kings, just a stroll away.

With Chef Oliver Ridgeway’s farm-to-table sensibilities and an industrial, masculine setting of concrete columns, soaring windows all around, and black steel pendant lights, the restaurant has long been a popular venue. The bar area in particular gets packed early in the evening whenever there is an event going on at the arena.

I started with a Blueberry Shrub ($13), a refreshing sip of gin, lemon, thyme, and Luxardo sour cherry syrup, made extra puckery with Buckeye Creek blueberry rice vinegar. It’s a great way — and a pretty one — to rev the palate up.

The lobster rolls ($13 for one, $24 for two) sounded so intriguing on the menu, we had to order them. That’s because the creamy lobster meat is snuggled inside rolls made with squid ink, giving them the look of lava rock. I can’t say that I necessarily tasted the sea minerality that squid ink usually imparts when it’s used in to make pasta. The roll was rather dense, too. It was a fun idea, but one that didn’t necessarily deliver in taste.

Tempura green beans, on the other hand, did. I especially liked the charred lemon slices mixed in, cut so thin that you could happily eat them, too.

The pan-roasted duck breast ($39) in red wine-currant jus is a top-seller and it’s easy to understand why. It’s hefty — cut thick with the chew of a steak — and super juicy. Unlike so many restaurants that tend to like to serve duck more on the medium-rare side, this one here was cooked through more toward medium. Even so, it didn’t suffer in any way from the longer cook.

The Storm Hill Zabuton ($29) is another strong-seller. It’s smoked until the meat is as fall-apart tender as short rib. It’s finished with an almost mole-like sauce, thick, rich and complex with a touch of chile.

Scallops ($33) are seared beautifully, laid over a creamy sauce made of pureed Yukon Golds and apples, then topped with mustard seed relish. It’s sweet, piquant and lively. The only miss was that the scallops were a little gritty.

Beef fat potatoes ($9), thick, crisp and rich, happily reminded me in flavor of the potatoes my Dad used to make by laying a bed of them underneath a big roast in the oven.

A cast-iron pan of Mexican street corn kernels ($8) had all the zest, spicy and creamy flavor of the on-the-cob version, only this one was easier to eat.

For dessert, the chocolate-filled fritters ($11) were accompanied by a thick rich caramel sauce to dunk in. They arrived hot out of the fryer, with a little spiciness to the chocolate a la Mexican-style, but were just the tiniest bit underdone in the centers.

The peach clafoutis ($11) also arrived warm with a big scoop of ice cream. I liked the idea of the molasses drizzle on top, adding a little something-something, but it may have also overpowered the actual taste of the peaches.

Besides being centrally located, the boutique hotel that houses Grange, also boasts an elegant yet whimsical style. The 1926 building sports many touches of that era, including a marble foyer.

The lobby is done up to look like and old-world library. Even the rooms have a sort of Federalist look with its bold striped wallpaper, hatbox lights, framed political cartoons and 1920s-style tile floors in the bathrooms.

It’s definitely not your cookie-cutter hotel, which is a very nice change of pace.

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