When I sit down at Juno’s for one of the best burgers of my life, Chef Helms starts by telling me he doesn’t want to be a namedropper. The fact that he mentored under legendary French Chef Jean Luc Chassereau of The Cookery and Reda Bellarbi Saleha of Aioli Bodga Espanola is not the point. 

Somewhere between board meetings, the kids’ soccer practice and family doctors appointments, women are ignoring an essential task: taking care of their hearts.

Celebrating 30 “wonderful years of life,” this year, Carina Lampkin has been cooking since landing her first job at an Auburn restaurant more than a decade ago. 

Alexander Gonzalez, 66, stands in front of the climbing wall at The WELL gym at Sacramento State. Gonzalez has served as campus president since 2003 and has no plans to retire. 

For more than 40 years, Brice Harris has sat front row in the nation’s community college system. First as a part-time faculty member at a small campus in Kansas City, later as president of Fresno City College and since 1996 as chancellor of Los Rios Community College District. He has spent his career working within multi-college systems. This month, he retires.

When Laurie Grimsman graduated in June from the Graduate School of Management at UC Davis, she was 51 and a self-proclaimed “age outlier.”

Kim Parker, 46, is the executive vice president of the California Employers Association. A nonprofit, the CEA provides human resource solutions for small to medium-sized businesses throughout the state. Parker is also president of the national Employers Association of America. 

Life often has been unkind to economic development directors since California put its redevelopment agencies out of business last year. Randy Starbuck tells it first hand.

Immediately south and southeast of Elk Grove are thousands of acres of mostly undeveloped farmland that officials think the city will someday need. The plan is to add nearly 8,000 acres — about 29 percent of Elk Grove’s current size — to its fold. But critics say Elk Grove has plenty of unused land within its borders, and California is losing farmland fast.

Jot Condie, 46, the California Restaurant Association in 1998 as its chief lobbyist. In 2004 he was promoted to president and CEO. 

If two words could sum up the collective attitudes of those who buy and sell businesses, they’d be “enough already.”

When Dr. Dena Davidson graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Optometry in 1995, she thought her income expectations were pretty reasonable.

Bill Mueller, 47, is CEO and managing partner at Valley Vision. One of four partners in the regional Next Economy initiative, Valley Vision serves as the project manager of the Capital Region’s latest economic development effort.

When Albert and Frances Lundberg fled the Dust Bowl-ravaged cornfields of Nebraska in 1937 to settle in the greener pastures of the northern Sacramento Valley, they did so with hope for the future.

Jeff Michael, 42, is the director of the Business Forecasting Center at the University of the Pacific. 

Some developers are building again, prodded by increases in buyer traffic at model homes and an uptick in sales over the fourth quarter of 2011 and the first months of 2012.

The Capital Region’s commercial real estate market in the past five years has shifted from a system dominated by a few big brokers to a diverse pool of smaller offices and team players. As post-recession business gains steam, that market is being eyed for its unplowed territory.

The Capital Region’s industrial real estate market is bouncing along the bottom, but local brokers are cautiously optimistic that signs are pointing to a steady, albeit slow, recovery this year.

The Great Recession has cast a long shadow over the Capital Region. The economy has been static. Recovery has been slow. But in the hard-hit hospitality business, the pause has spurred opportunity for reinvention.

Ronald Fong, 52, has served as president and CEO of the California Growers Association since 2008. The CGA is a nonprofit, statewide trade association representing more than 500 retail members operating 6,000 food stores and 200 supply companies in California and Nevada. 

Sanjay Varshney, 44, is dean of College Administration at Sacramento State. Last month, in conjunction with the Chartered Financial Analyst Society of Sacramento, he published the seventh issue of the Sacramento Business Review. It offers a look at emerging economic trends and forecasts for 2012 in the Sacramento region, comprised of Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer and Yolo counties. 

West Capitol Avenue is looking pretty snazzy these days. Modern buildings with shiny, chrome lettering line clean, wide sidewalks. Newly planted trees lead to bright bus stops stylized with sculptured ‘W’s nearly 10 feet tall.

On a breezy, blue-sky day in late November, West Sacramento city and regional planning officials gathered near Raley Field to celebrate the opening of Tower Bridge Gateway, a reconstructed boulevard connecting Highway 50 to Tower Bridge.

Among the Capital Region’s top-notch talents, some designers stand out for their ingenuity, skill and varied contributions to the fabric of local culture.

There’s a spark of life in housing construction this year. A tiny, weak spark, but a real one nonetheless. Builders are putting up more apartments in the Sacramento region.

Is the master-planned community dead? Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times painted the picture for homebuilders quite clearly when it posed that question.

To sell a house in today’s market, real estate agents can’t simply shove a sign into the lawn, schedule an open house and expect offers to roll in. Competition is fierce. Increasingly, the agents who are successfully selling homes in this marketplace have embraced high-tech marketing, including videos.

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.

Owner Ray Enos and some of his staff at Downtown Ford have witnessed two generations of employees’ families grow up under their noses.

Hedge funds are back. Worries about European debt crisis, war in the Middle East and the potential for rating agencies to downgrade America’s treasuries have rattled shareholders. But those fears haven’t held back investors from pouring record amounts of capital into the cowboy country of largely unregulated, nontransparent funds.

Thousands of Sacramentans soon can walk out their front doors and take a few steps to the American River Parkway, to light-rail, to shops and restaurants and maybe even to their workplaces.

Exciting news in the accounting world might sound like an oxymoron, but this is the post-Enron and post-housing bubble economy. The guys and gals in the green eyeshades are under a new spotlight, and the changes they’re making to the practice of accounting are more than just fodder for ledgers.

The construction site was nearly immaculate. There were no free-standing ladders, power cords were coiled neatly and only a stray nail, crushed cup and small pile of sawdust littered the floor. The 91,000-square-foot factory was full of skylights with chartreuse buttresses and turquoise shelving, creating a bright, showroom feel.

Think Sacramento’s plan for a sports arena and triple land-swap sounds complicated? It’s peanuts compared to what commercial real estate brokers are going through to gain and maintain tenants in suburban office properties these days.

Some banks in the Capital Region are placing more emphasis on customer service and trust as they battle for quality clients in an ever-changing market.

Opportunity, timing and a willingness to assume entrepreneurial risk led Kevin Hernandez to plan his second startup on the trendy stretch of Stockton’s Pacific Avenue, known as the Miracle Mile.

In the 35 years Ken Ruzich has managed local levees, no water event has been more memorable than the 1986 flood that nearly toppled levees along the Yolo bypass. If it wasn’t a 100-year flood, he says, it was close enough: “It was our benchmark.”

An unemployed engineer and an e-waste recycler walk into a bar. The engineer takes the recycler’s electric bike for a spin. And, a year later, The Electric Bike Shop opens its doors in East Sacramento.

Doctors in the Capital Region aren’t just checking your temperature and blood pressure when you come in for a checkup these days; in growing numbers, they’re also checking your mood.

McClellan Jet Services is Sacramento’s one-stop shop for all things airplanes.

Once a U.S. Air Force base populated by concrete buildings and gun-toting soldiers, McClellan is now an eco-friendly business park home to a menagerie of green companies.

Pick up a newspaper’s business section today, and chances are you’ll find more bad news than good. Headlines scream of layoffs, cutbacks and commercial developments with high vacancy rates.

Raising cattle on the Van Vleck farm near Rancho Murieta is a legacy that has passed from father to son for more than 150 years. Now struggling to keep the family ranch, Stan Van Vleck came up with an electrifying idea: Install solar panels to boost income.

Chris Huppe spent more than a dozen years working on better ways to use the green waste from his landscape maintenance company.

In an economy where company officials are making hard financial decisions, spending thousands of dollars on training might seem like an unnecessary expense.

Transforming the Power Inn area bears a striking resemblance to the way an ancient lake transforms into a meadow. It takes a lot of infill, it happens over decades and the result can be a jewel that brings new vitality to the landscape.

For decades America has been steadily approaching a major social development — a time when the number of women in the work force would surpass the number of men. That moment has now arrived, brought on by, of all things, a recession.

Promenade Parkway is a lonely stretch of road south of Elk Grove. Behind a chain-link fence, a steel skeleton of what was supposed to be the city’s first mall with a Macy’s department store and a 16-screen theater sits in the shadow of developer General Growth Properties Inc.’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy negotiations.

In lean times, some businesses scrap corporate retreats as an unjustifiable expense to shareholders and staff, while others say that employee getaways are as valuable as ever. But all agree, 2010 is looking up.

When Meg Whitman arrives in Sacramento to campaign for the gubernatorial race, she stays at the Citizen Hotel. “It’s her home away from home,” says Mark Mathews, the hotel’s general manager.