When husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Ellen Chen and Mario Del Pero—owners of Mendocino Farms Sandwich Market, which opened its first Sacramento location at the Ice Blocks in December—were dating, Chen asked her boyfriend an unusual question. She asked if she could work for him.
Del Pero, a Yuba City native, was hard at work developing a food concept in Southern California (where he and Chen had gone to school) when Chen’s consulting business was acquired.
The bucolic 10-acre property owned by Earl and Adriana Stephens was just an empty cattle pasture when Earl purchased it in 2006, three years before he met his future wife at a farmers market. Thirteen years later, that once barren land now boasts a house, a working farm and one of the most unique craft breweries in the state. All three were designed by Earl, a licensed engineer, and largely built from scratch by Earl and Adriana, the owners of Dueling Dogs Brewing Co. in Lincoln.
There are only two wineries currently operating in Winters, the small farming town 45 minutes west of Sacramento, but Nicole Salengo still fervently believes in the area’s potential to become a winegrowing region. “I believe every hill in Winters should be planted with wine grapes,” says Salengo, a former geology student and head winemaker at Winters-based Berryessa Gap Vineyards.
When Danny Johnson traveled to Dublin last March, his objective was to compete in the World Butchers’ Challenge, an international event that pits the most skilled butchers on the planet against each other. WBC started in 2011 as a two-team faceoff between New Zealand and Australia, but the competition expanded every year afterward. A record-high 12 countries sent teams to Ireland in 2018, the first year that the competition was conducted outside of Australia.
Let me introduce you to Kelly Siefkin. She’s vice president of communications and marketing for Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services. She talks fast, and is quick with numbers and statistics, so I’m struggling to keep up. Today, she’s wearing a green-patterned dress with green earrings and black flats, and carrying her cell phone. We’re touring the food bank campus on Bell Avenue—110,000 square feet on 12 acres. It’s a big facility, but the food bank feeds a lot of hungry people in and around the farm-to-fork capital.
August is harvest time in the hop fields of California, so Rohit Nayyar has left the air-conditioned comfort of his RoCo Taproom & Bottleshop in West Sacramento to brave the sweltering Yuba City heat. “During the hops season, it’s all hands on deck,” says Nayyar, who is more known for selling and pouring beers than for harvesting their raw ingredients. However, growing hops has also increased Nayyar’s appreciation of how they eventually get used by brewers. “You’ll understand how many hours go into growing these hops, just to get the one pint of beer.”