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Chris Barnum-Dann sat in the darkened SAFE Credit Union Performing Arts Center, eyes fixated on the stage. An hour earlier, he and his Localis staff were serving Thai beef tartare atop tapioca chips and cucumber rounds delicately stacked with black garlic and sunflower petals to some of the best chefs in California, who were in town for the lavish Michelin awards ceremony hosted by Visit Sacramento.

The emcee was about to announce the award for top sommelier. Barnum-Dann’s eyes looked at the big screen on stage and watched intently as jumbled letters moved around, teasing to form a name.

“When the name started coming together and I saw the hyphen, oh, my gosh, it’s gonna be me!” he says. The self-described dramatic and driven man says he was “totally shocked.”

His Localis family went nuts, screaming, clapping, slapping him on the back. It was the latest honor for not only one of the hottest chefs in Sacramento, but the entire state. Because Chris Barnum-Dann is somewhat of a rarity in the culinary world — a triple threat, if you will. There aren’t many chefs who are also sommeliers and own their own restaurants.

“I wanted to be the best at everything I’ve ever done in my life,” he says.

Localis (Latin for local), an intimate fine dining restaurant in Midtown Sacramento which just celebrated its 10th anniversary, has been honored with a Michelin star for the fourth year. Dining at Localis is an event, where Barnum-Dann puts together what he calls a different tasting menu every five to six weeks. It’s 10 courses that each come with an optional wine pairing at an additional cost. (Craft cocktails, sake, ciders and non-alcoholic beverages are also offered.) The courses are delivered to each diner at the same time in unison, with Chef Barnum-Dann holding court and telling the story behind each course.

The menu is created by what inspired Barnum-Dann that month — typically seasonal food. Maybe it’s wagyu flat iron steak from Mishima Reserve, stuffed with morel mushrooms and a bit of arugula, or smoked and seared octopus with a gruyere crisp and artistically arranged mustard flowers. Each dish is enriched with the bounty of local farms, bakeries and meat producers, including Twin Peaks Orchard in Newcastle, Laughing Duck Farm in Auburn and Azolla Farm in Pleasant Grove.

This Sacramento chef who lives in Auburn — and loves wine from Burgundy but is lukewarm on cabernet — beat out the best sommeliers in Napa Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. Barnum-Dann never even drank wine until he was a young chef and a wine sales rep invited him to a tasting. He earned the coveted top sommelier award for his skill in matching wines with food.

When he received the award onstage, the host asked what his most challenging pairing was. Barnum-Dann said matching a wine with a spicy dish late in the menu when diners are looking for a richer, heavier wine. In awarding Barnum-Dann the top honor, Michelin wrote: “Barnum-Dann’s pairings — spicy Thai food and an off-dry Riesling, an octopus piccata with an Austrian red — reflect a supremely sophisticated and creative palate.”

“When someone hands you a Michelin star, whether you like the Michelin Guide or not, whether they’ve got everyone right or not, doesn’t really matter to me. The bottom line is, they are a gold standard in our world. If you can get a Michelin star, you are in the very, very, very, very, very tiny percentile of restaurants on earth that are at that level,” he says.

His fans appreciate it. “One of my favorite restaurants in the world!” wrote artist David Garibaldi on Instagram.

“Chef Chris, his team, the whole vibe are very welcoming and exciting at the same time,” Teri Bennett, a partner at Pinnacle Advocacy and regular diner at Localis, tells me. “Chef has an amazing ability to create vibrant dishes that appeal to all your senses; he’s truly a culinary artist! And for every dish he presents, he tells the story behind it and recommends the perfect beverage pairings. Truly, every course is magical!”

The making of  a chef

Barnum-Dann worked hard to climb to the top of the culinary mountain, traveling the world to taste different cuisines, visiting 14 Michelin-starred restaurants in one year, and entering and winning season one of the Food Network’s “The Globe” cooking competition in Los Angeles. But life wasn’t always glamorous.

During a midday interview at Localis, the restaurant is closed but hopping as chefs prep for dinner. More than a half-dozen staff are packed side by side behind the counter, creating a symphony of food sounds — chopping vegetables, blending melons, stirring sauces and grinding fresh herbs. I gave Barnum-Dann the seat at our table closest to the kitchen so he could keep an eye on his staff. He sets his tattooed arms (one tattoo features an octopus playing drums made of vegetables) on the table, pours a cup of steaming black coffee and laser-focuses his eyes on me. He tells me his story.

It began in Forest Hill, where he grew up and attended Placer High School. Although he got good grades, he left an unhappy home at 17 and joined a death metal band called Dismal Lapse. The band traveled around the U.S., and what he remembers most from that time was all the different places he ate — the jambalaya in Louisiana and the Cubano sandwiches in Miami. “That was really the first time I fell in love with food,” he says.

He got a job as a master electrician to support himself, and had a daughter at 20. But he also carried a darkness and depression within him. A lifelong “raging atheist,” he felt he was against the world and the world was against him.

He says his girlfriend left him because he was always traveling with the band, so he looked for a new direction. That’s when an ad for a culinary school came on the TV. He immediately signed up and started working the next day at Hapa Sushi in Auburn.

At his next job at a Mediterranean restaurant, the owner spontaneously sent Chris on a world adventure to discover the seven main cuisines of the Mediterranean region. He had never been out of the U.S. at that point. It was during his stop in Spain at the restaurant Akelare in San Sebastian that he had his epiphany: Cooking was his passion, and owning a fine dining restaurant was his future.

“I always felt like fine dining is the epitome of working the hardest, trying your hardest, being the best, not only at plating, but in cooking and in timing. There’s so many elements to it. It’s the hardest form of cooking, and I think I’ve always been very attracted to the idea of a challenge, and fine dining and Michelin stuff has always been a challenge for me, and I love it,” he says.

His local career continued after he talked his way into the kitchen at Ten22 and worked at various other restaurants around the region, including Winchester Country Club and Wise Villa Winery, then became executive chef of Localis, which opened in 2015. In 2016, he became co-owner of Localis with his wife Jessica.

Localis is open Wednesday through Saturday. The sous chef begins the prep process in the early morning. Barnum-Dann rolls in around 9 or 10 a.m., then the rest of the team shows up at noon. Though he says he wasn’t inspired by his mother’s cooking, he does replicate the classic onion dip and chips he had in his youth. Except his onion dip is a three-day process served on a potato pillow with caviar. It’s often the first item on his tasting menu, served with champagne.

He was inspired to create his tasting menu, which isn’t listed on the Localis website, because he wants to expand the diners’ eating experience. He says people typically scan menus and quickly decide what they want, often the same thing. “When people are forced to try something, they’re blown away,” he says. “Since Day 1, ‘Trust us to feed you’ has been our motto. It’s on the back of my T-shirt. It’s what we believe,” he says.

(Fine dining is) one of the cultural styles of dining that’s gonna stay forever. People will always pay for fine art.

— Chris Barnum-Dann, owner and chef, Localis

Chef Derek Sawyer was executive chef at Allora and Hawks restaurants before coming to Localis about six months ago. He says he and Barnum-Dann have a great working relationship and are good friends.

“When it comes to the cooking aspect, we never criticize each other, but only the dishes in an effort to make the tastiest, most gangster flavor profiles. He is constantly looking for new and exciting ways to renovate old dishes and make new dishes come to life through story and memory. His flavor palette is like nothing that I’ve ever seen before in a chef, and his work ethic is also unmatched.”

Lifting the veil

Barnum-Dann is an intense man who is brutally honest and open about his life. He says he knows some people don’t like him, are jealous of him or even hate him.

For the 10-year anniversary of Localis, Barnum-Dann did a 10-part video series on YouTube and Instagram that gave insight into his philosophy of cooking and life. Lesson 5 is “Limits Create Creativity.” When he travels abroad, he knows he can’t replicate the flavors of a country in Sacramento, so it challenges him to do his own interpretation of it. Lesson 8 is “Learn From Anybody.” He learned to shuck shrimp from a dishwasher, and when a line cook asked him to taste his buttermilk ice cream while Barnum-Dann was preparing chile verde, the unlikely pairing became a popular entree.

But in another episode, one stunning phrase passed quickly but stood out. Barnum-Dann mentioned “my suicide attempt.” “Do you want to talk about it?” I ask.

He said it wasn’t when he was a struggling musician who left home, nor was it when he was working nonstop toward becoming a chef. It was just a few years ago in 2020 during COVID, but he insists it had nothing to do with the pandemic. He didn’t like the person he had become. He was distant from his wife and children. He wasn’t a nice person.

“It was a lifetime of unhappiness,” he says. “I’m not good for my kids, I’m not good for my wife, I’m not good for the people who work for me. I’m not good, and I don’t know how much I can do to change everything in the world and how I view the world, and that was the day that I just wanted to die.”

Then something happened. “There was an awakening for me in my heart,” he says.

He tried searching through psychology. He read philosophy. He took an IQ test and scored “extremely high,” which explained to him why he was, well, different and aloof. His journey led him to becoming a Christian, which he still finds unbelievable. “Being a Christian is the hardest thing I’ve done.” But it saved his marriage to Jessica, whom he’s been with for more than 20 years and married since 2012, and his relationship with his children Emma-lee, 22, Walker, 11, Weston, 10, and Willow, 3.

He cites the book “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism” by Presbyterian pastor and Christian apologist Timothy J. Keller as his guidepost and has read it more than 30 times. “I live my life by the Gospel every single day.” He’s also taking better care of himself. He recently lost 45 pounds through intermittent fasting and running 5-7 miles a day either downtown or at his home in Auburn. He’s also proud that there’s a low turnover of staff at Localis.

“I find it incredibly important that I share deep stories, things that changed my life.”

As for the future of restaurants — it’s tough. The pandemic and lockdown made everyone think they could cook as well as a chef. He says restaurants need to distinguish themselves from the cookie cutter concept of serving the usual burgers and chicken wings.

“I think we need more chefs owning restaurants and doing the food they’re passionate about,” says Barnum-Dann. Fine dining is “one of the cultural styles of dining that’s gonna stay forever. People will always pay for fine art.”

Will a second Michelin star be next?

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