With a new Vacaville store and six locations poised to open in the Sacramento area, Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market Inc. is revving up competition in the already-crowded Northern California grocery scene.

If you want to talk sides, Mike Brown is your man. As the owner of midtown’s Capitol Dawg, Brown knows his various hot dogs draw in the crowds, but it’s the side dishes that complete the meal.

The next time you dine at Burgers and Brew, Crepeville or Chops Steak, Seafood & Bar, you’ll likely eat something purchased from Restaurant Depot. Those popular eateries are among the regular customers of the privately owned food-service wholesaler at 1275 Vine St. in the River District.

Inside a concrete warehouse a few miles past Sacramento International Airport, an 80-pound white sturgeon is hauled onto a table, sliced throat to tail and relieved of its egg-stuffed ovaries. Workers at Sterling Caviar LLC pack the meat on ice, ship the roe elsewhere and repeat the process.

If there’s anyone more excited than a kid in a candy shop, it’s a middle-aged woman in a cupcake shop. The national cupcake craze also has hit all regions and demographics, according to those in the bakery industry.

When Gay Callan left her Bay Area sales job to grow grapes in the Sierra foothills in the early 1980s, people told her that she — a city slicker and a woman to boot — was crazy.

Michael Frenn was a committed Coors Light drinker. For him, it was as American as baseball and apple pie.

Just as winemakers won’t put just any old juice in a barrel, they won’t use any old barrel either. For one wine, it’s French oak. For another, American. For yet another, Hungarian. In some cases the wine goes into a steel tank and never touches oak of any kind.

It was the end of 2008 when the economic dominoes began to fall: Lehman Brothers was upside-down, housing crashed, the stock market swooned, banks faltered and the domestic car industry all but went belly up. It wasn’t the best of times to be a high-end American steakhouse.

Bold wines are big sellers these days, and to meet consumer demand, winemakers across California are pushing their wines to the max by replacing white varietal vineyards with reds and allowing fruit to stay on the vine a little longer.