If there is any advice businesses can glean from the often surprising research and real life stories about our oddly emotional connection to tipping, it’s this: Don’t mess if you don’t have to.

In a part of the state with seemingly boundless natural assets, tourism is the number one industry for counties beyond Sacramento’s city limits. Aided by the rise of culinary travel, the farm-to-fork movement, and the craft beer and wine industries, this decade finds rural counties a bigger economic driver for the state than ever.

The influence of the Golden 1 Center kitchen will likely be national. It represents something more accessible than slow food, and more refined than the nuclear orange goop we associate with stadium cheese. 

A few months before the National Restaurant Association named artisan butchery and “new” cuts of meat among their top 20 food trends for 2016, Eric Veldman-Miller and Matt Azevedo opened a shop on the corner of 48th and Folsom streets, with the intent to serve locals with something new — in a way that is actually very old.

Sacramento is teeming with local restaurants and semi-local chains that aim for value and efficiency. Here are some of our favorites:

Americans spend very little of our overall incomes on food, only 10 percent, allowing us more expendable income than people in many other countries. In France and Japan, they spend 14 percent on food, and in the Philippines they spend 40 percent. In a system where food jobs rely on the success of food sales, cheap food creates a vicious cycle of poverty. Not surprisingly, the adverse is also true: More expensive food can create better jobs.

It’s been quite a year! Now that the champagne has been popped, gone flat and you’ve had time to recover, take a look at our most widely read local stories from 2015:

“There is an old adage that we eat with our eyes,” says John Weatherson, co-owner and co-chef, along with wife Nyna, of Restaurant Trokay. In his experience, the brain is conditioned to pre-determine the quality of a dish’s taste by the way it looks, and how a dish is plated ultimately helps to maximize the diner’s gastronomic experience. Located in the historic district of downtown Truckee, the couple’s culinary creations at Restaurant Trokay take center stage, but the presentation is no afterthought. 

South Sacramento urban farmer, Chanowk Yisrael, wants to see local food systems improve. Eight years ago, he started growing organic food for his family and eventually launched the Yisrael Family Urban Farm in Sacramento’s historic Oak Park neighborhood. Now, he’s expanding that vision to motivate Sacramento youth to become more engaged in changing our local food system — announcing today that he’ll be partnering with Slow Food Sacramento to charter the city’s first Food Academy.