
Quick Bites in the Capital Region
5 hotspots for fast-casual dining
Sacramento is teeming with local restaurants and semi-local chains that aim for value and efficiency. Here are some of our favorites:

#MyArtofBeer VIP Contest
Calling all Sacramento beer lovers! With so many wonderful, local craft options in the Capital Region, we want to know how you like to sip! Here is your chance to nab VIP tickets (a $160 dollar value) to the upcoming Art of Beer event.

The High Cost of Cheap Food
The problem with calling the food movement ‘elitist’
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.

A Year in Review
Our top 10 most popular stories of 2015
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:

Feast Your Eyes on This
True gourmet dining starts with the plate, a canvas for culinary art
“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.

Sacramento Urban Farmer to Start Food Academy after Visit to Milan
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.

A Sour, Hard-to-Eat, Occasionally Deadly Fruit Makes a Comeback
Let’s face it. The grapefruit is cumbersome and often sour. Also, it can kill you. So of course Stewart and Lynda Resnick decided it will be their next celebrity plant product. The Californians and their company, the Wonderful Co., have made a lot of money turning unassuming agricultural commodities into well-known brands.

Welcome to the Neighborhood
Cask & Barrel brings approachable dining to Del Paso Boulevard
At Cask & Barrel in north Sacramento, there are no entrees. The restaurant has a small kitchen staff and high-end food at low prices. Chef Gabriel Glasier and his pastry chef, business partner and fiancée, Kristel Flores, are bringing something different to a corner of Del Paso Boulevard that’s proved to be enigmatic, to say the least, for two decades.

Making Way for a New Type of Dining
David Hardie may have let go of Enotria, but he’s got something fresh for the historically problematic spot
Give David Hardie credit. The owner of the building and restaurant that was named Enotria for two decades went “all in,” as he says, on trying to make that spot exciting and a draw to diners.

Brewed by Design
The brewery tasting room is a new kind of social space, where ambience matters as much as ale
Wine tasting is often an experience shared only by the taster and pourer. A brewery tasting room, however, needs to facilitate the gregariously social aspects of craft beer, making space for interaction and mingling. Room to brew, room to chat and room to sample flights of beer make for highly dynamic spaces that bring to life the distinct personalities of brewers and their art.