Chefs continue to be among the hottest stars in Sacramento, and American, culture. That’s thanks to the Food Network’s image-building power, our exploding love of food and all things culinary, and a new societal reverence for hands-on authenticity. The consensus is that chefs with some level of recognition can help draw customers — most of the time. But restaurateurs and chefs say the cultural pizzazz around chefs can be a double-edged sword, and it’s a force they need to use wisely.

It’s no news flash that chefs, just like everyone, can help construct reputations and build followings through social media. But many Sacramento chefs say that, given the competition in the restaurant business, and the number of bloggers, tweeters and Yelpers commenting on food, chefs can’t afford not to have a notable online presence.

Following a completely sold-out event in 2014, Sacramento Caffeine Crawl will return to the city next week with an all-star lineup of some of Sacramento’s finest coffee establishments.

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.