Sacramento's plentiful farmers, restaurants join forces

Sacramento -- There's a new flavor in the Big Tomato: pride in this city's farms, food and restaurants.
Fed by a homegrown generation of chefs and farmers working collaboratively, this formerly beleaguered bastion of blah has blossomed into a vibrant village feasting on fresh, locally grown produce, meat and fish.

What sprouted organically from one restaurateur's idea two years ago is now being promoted as Sacramento's magic beanstalk, a civic cause culinaire that everyone from farmers and chefs to the mayor hopes will put Sacramento's cow-town reputation to pasture and place the capital city on the culinary map.

"People think of Sacramento as home of dysfunctional state government," says restaurateur Randall Selland. "But the diversity of crops and the quality of crops in our area - within 50 miles of downtown Sacramento - far exceeds anywhere else."

The city is the geographic heart of a region that encompasses the Capay Valley, the Sierra Nevada foothills, the northern San Joaquin Valley and Gold Country. Seventy percent of the land is agricultural, forest or other open space, with more than 7,000 acres of boutique farms.

Sacramento is also home to food education initiatives, including the California Food Literacy Project, a branch of Alice Waters' Edible Schoolyard Project, and Soil Born Farms Urban Agriculture and Education Project, which operates two urban farms on 55 acres in Sacramento and Rancho Cordova and has developed food-access programs with local schools.

Sacramento Food Bank distributes produce in a farmers'-market-style setting and recently built an outdoor demonstration kitchen to teach cooking skills in an economically challenged neighborhood.

And while the Sacramento area has two restaurants operated by TV food celebrity Guy Fieri, it's also a place where two restaurants own their own cattle farm, where farmers plant and grow to order for chefs, and where one urban farm recently purchased a commercial kitchen to make products from the fruits and vegetables it grows on reclaimed farmland 10 miles north of downtown.

Beyond growing locally

"We decided that doing local food doesn't mean just growing food locally," says Shannin Stein, manager of Feeding Crane Farms, a year-old, 3 1/2-acre certified organic farm that supplies 30 Sacramento restaurants. "It also means encouraging and supporting local food production on a much deeper level."

To capitalize on that cornucopia, Mayor Kevin Johnson and the Sacramento Convention and Visitors Bureau announced plans for a weeklong food festival in September. They envision events at area farms and wineries, a massive farmers' market on Capitol Mall, maybe a cattle drive in front of the statehouse.

The notion was planted by Josh Nelson, manager of the Kitchen, Selland's 21-year-old multicourse, seasonally focused dinner house that was nominated as the James Beard Foundation's outstanding restaurant in 2012, a first for a Sacramento restaurant.

"What sets Sacramento apart in my mind is that when I go to the farmers' market, I see the lady from my corner Thai restaurant, I see the lady from the Vietnamese restaurant shopping there," Nelson says. "I know a lot of (their) food is coming from the farmers' market. It's just not anything they're advertising."

Fresh fish like sturgeon, an ancient breed native to the Sacramento River, is also part of the city's larder. One source is Passmore Ranch, a small aquaculture operation in Sloughhouse, 25 miles east, whose sturgeon, trout, bass and catfish are served in fine restaurants such as Napa Valley's Meadowood.

For chefs like Pajo Bruich, the Sacramento native who's cooking modernist farm-to-fork cuisine at Enotria, it's not about food miles, but food minutes.

"I can get in my car and in five minutes be to a farm and be talking to the guy who is responsible for putting things in the ground. Restaurants are working with their purveyors and are putting out food that is really the personality of our community."

Farmers, chefs improve

That personality includes virtually everything from arugula to zizyphus, cinnamon basil, Hatch chiles, Tahitian blue and rampicante squash, Turkish orange eggplant, Indigo Rose tomatoes, tatsoi, baby Swiss chard and Tokyo turnips.

"Our farmers, quite frankly, have gotten much better," says Patrick Mulvaney, chef-owner of Mulvaney's Building & Loan, who arrived in Sacramento in 1993 as a "food snob."

"The difference between 1993 and 2012 is the small organic farmers and the quality and reliability of their produce, which has increased tremendously. That's amazing."

Enotria's Bruich had his produce epiphany when he interned at Benu in San Francisco last summer.

"I'm in a two-Michelin-star restaurant and I'm observing their processes, their techniques, their ingredients," Bruich says. "It became clear to me that we have a gold mine in Sacramento."

Mark Liberman agrees. The chef and partner at AQ in San Francisco is working on opening a restaurant in Sacramento. The city has finally come into its own, he says.

"There was always this availability of great produce, but not a lot of chefs who were doing great stuff with it," he says. "Today you have a lot of new-guard chefs who have worked in other food cities and come back to Sacramento."

Darrell Corti, Sacramento's epicure grise, has given his blessing to the Farm-to-Fork Capital claim - but with his signature dash of patrician caution.

Noting Sacramento's historic role in food processing, packing and distribution from the Gold Rush until the mid-20th century, the owner of the 64-year-old specialty grocery store Corti Bros. questioned the fate of the region's tomato and sausage industries and why Sterling Caviar, farmed in Elverta, 15 miles north of downtown, is virtually absent on local menus.

Currently, only 2 percent of food grown in the Sacramento region is consumed locally.

As in many places, it's still a matter of personal taste and of educating consumers. Many diners, Corti observes, "don't want to eat a good soup made with kale and root vegetables" in January.

Instead, he says, "they want to have a salad with this and that that's all out of season."