She’ll cook at Sacramento’s Tower Bridge Dinner on Sunday. Then her restaurant will close

Katerina Balagian will serve Seasons Kitchen & Bar’s flagship muhammara, torshi pickles and goat tagine to 880 guests at Sacramento’s annual Tower Bridge Dinner on Sunday.

Less than a week later, the restaurant will close for good.

Seasons will shut down after dinner service on Friday, Balagian confirmed to The Sacramento Bee. Attached to the Hilton Garden Inn in downtown Davis, it transformed into a Cali-Middle Eastern fine dining destination restaurant in Balagian’s year-plus stewardship as chef.

Balagian’s inventive menu and hyperlocal sourcing cast her into the Sacramento spotlight, but Seasons had served customers for 20 years before she came aboard. Opened in 2003 at 102 F St., it specialized in a range of American dishes such as fresh pappardelle with meatballs, buttermilk fried chicken and wood-fired pizzas, the last of which continued under Balagian.

Seasons’ 18 employees received emails Friday through the hotel’s operator, Aimbridge Hospitality , informing them that the restaurant was closing and they would be laid off. Aimbridge, which operates the franchise on behalf of owner Presidio Co. , will hire two cooks and two servers for Hilton Garden Inn guests’ breakfast service and the same plus two bartenders for dinner, according to the email.

“I’m a little bit frustrated, a little bit disappointed, trying to focus on leaving the staff in a good place,” Balagian said. “Throughout this past year, everybody that I’ve worked with has been amazing, and that’s really why I kept on so long.”

Balagian said she and Guneet Bajwa, Presidio’s co-managing principal, had chafed repeatedly to the point where she filed an OSHA complaint against the restaurant in late August. The complaint describes a kitchen with no air conditioning, a leaky roof over the dish area and dangling electrical sockets, despite a 2019 renovation.