This story is part of our January 2026 issue. To read the print version, click here.

It’s late November at Canon, and Brad Cecchi is out on a last-minute supermarket run, picking up a couple of gallons of milk so his staff can finish preparing and packing up 65 Thanksgiving dinners for customers who don’t wish to make their own holiday meals this year. Within a couple of hours, he’ll be in the kitchen, overseeing Saturday night dinner service at the popular East Sacramento restaurant he opened to great acclaim in 2017.

It’s been a busy autumn for Cecchi, who sits atop a booming multiverse that includes three restaurants, a design consulting business, a prepared meal program and a food innovation incubator. But when Canon’s executive chef left in October, Cecchi willingly jumped back into the kitchen full time, a job that eats up 60 to 80 hours of his week. Finding a replacement can wait. “I have to put in the time to usher in the next 10 years of Canon,” says Cecchi, who just signed a new, decade-long lease on the restaurant space. Being a hands-on, in-the-kitchen-all-the-time chef for a few months will give him the chance to see what’s working and what needs tweaking.

It wasn’t always like that. Like many young chefs, he had stars in his eyes — Michelin stars. After graduating from El Camino Fundamental High School in Carmichael, he attended the vaunted Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park in New York. Returning home, he helped open Grange, the chic farm-to-fork restaurant inside The Citizen Hotel in downtown Sacramento, starting as a line cook and eventually working his way up to executive sous chef.

Diving into the city’s fledgling farm-to-fork scene, he impressed local chefs and restaurateurs, including Clay Nutting, co-owner of LowBrau Bierhalle and, later, Block Butcher Bar. Nutting tried to hire him away, but Cecchi had bigger ambitions.

In order to level up as a chef, Cecchi had already decided he would have to leave Sacramento. So he moved to Cleveland to run the restaurant and food operations at a Grange-like restaurant at a Westin hotel. After less than a year, he returned to California, working at Solbar restaurant in Calistoga’s Solage luxury resort, first as chef de cuisine and then as executive chef. While he was there, Solbar earned a Michelin star — twice.

Meanwhile, Nutting had been keeping tabs on Cecchi’s career from afar. After splitting from his LowBrau partner to open his own restaurant, “Brad was the first person I thought of” as executive chef, Nutting says. But while Nutting wanted an employee, Cecchi wanted a partner. After some back and forth, they sealed a deal to become 50-50 partners in Canon.

“He’s an extremely talented chef. A hard worker. Incredibly humble. Very kind. He lifts heavy things. He doesn’t need direction or the spotlight. It sounds like I’m writing his dating profile.”

— Mike Testa, president and CEO,
Visit Sacramento

There, Cecchi wowed Sacramento diners with bold global flavors and artistic small plates that begged to be shared — dishes such as housemade tater tots with a 60-ingredient mole, and chicken drumsticks in Urfa chile sauce with yogurt. Larger platters, also meant for sharing, might include a bison rib eye or roasted steelhead trout in lobster broth. His food, never bashful, had as many as a dozen complicated “touches” — chef speak for garnishes and other additions.

At the age of 34, Cecchi had achieved his dream: back in his hometown, running his own restaurant, cooking his food his way. In 2019, the Michelin Guide rewarded Canon with a Bib Gourmand, a designation for restaurants that offer cooking of excellent quality at great value. At that point, many chefs would look for other culinary hills to climb: reaching for a Michelin star, perhaps, or opening a new restaurant.

Not Cecchi.

Related: Star Power: The Michelin guide helps put Sacramento restaurants on the map

Instead, he waded into community waters, seemingly doing everything everywhere all at once, cheffing it up at local events like the Farm-to-Fork Festival, the Tower Bridge Dinner and Bacon Fest. Mike Testa, president and CEO of Visit Sacramento, the city’s tourism board, met Cecchi more than a decade ago in the run-up to the inaugural Tower Bridge Dinner. An unabashed admirer as well as a friend, Testa ticks off Cecchi’s positive attributes: “He’s an extremely talented chef. A hard worker. Incredibly humble. Very kind. He lifts heavy things. He doesn’t need direction or the spotlight.” Testa stops short and says with a laugh, “It sounds like I’m writing his dating profile.”

In 2024, Cecchi used his formidable skills to help Testa bring Terra Madre Americas to Sacramento. The three-day event — part conference, part street fest — was held for the first time this past September at SAFE Credit Union Convention Center downtown, drawing a stunning 165,000 people from the region and beyond.

Visit Sacramento signed a 10-year contract with Slow Food International to host the event every other year, alternating years with Slow Food’s massive Terra Madre Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy. The hope is that the event will put Sacramento on the global food map and cement Sacramento’s place as a culinary tourist attraction, the way it has for Turin. In the lead-up to the conference, Cecchi proclaimed Terra Madre “our Super Bowl, our Olympics, our Ryder Cup, all the things rolled into one.” Testa ended up inviting Cecchi to join Visit Sacramento’s board, and the chef now serves as the organization’s culinary adviser as well as culinary director of Terra Madre.

With Nutting, Cecchi eventually opened a second restaurant, Franquette, in West Sacramento two years ago. More casual than Canon, it’s part of Fulcrum Property Group developer Mark Friedman’s Bridge District project. Cecchi began advising Friedman and other developers on how to design new restaurant spaces so tenants wouldn’t have to invest beaucoup bucks on basic improvements.

Related: Wine Bar Brings Punk Art to West Sacramento’s Bridge District

A third Cecchi-Nutting restaurant, Cantina Pedregal, opened in 2024 in Folsom. A collaboration between Cecchi, Nutting and Roseville restaurateurs Patricio Wise and Cinthia Martinez, it was a rare misfire.

Cecchi and Nutting had looked at a space that had recently housed a pizzeria and thought it was perfect for a second outpost of Nixtaco, the hip Roseville taqueria that also boasts a Bib Gourmand. Instead, the foursome — all friends — took a flyer on a chef-driven restaurant, heavy on technique and presentation (Cecchi’s specialties) and focused on the cuisine of Northeastern Mexico (Wise and Martinez’s homeland). While the restaurant received a lot of buzz from foodies, including Eater SF, Folsom suburbanites didn’t embrace the concept. Eventually, Cecchi’s initial instinct proved correct: The space now houses another Nixtaco, with Cecchi and Nutting retaining their ownership stake.

“Doing business in restaurants isn’t what it used to be,” Cecchi says. “The ability to make money is much more difficult.”

The COVID-19 pandemic marked another shift in Cecchi’s development as a chef and business person. In 2020, he signed on for the James Beard Foundation’s prestigious Bootcamp for Policy and Change. Cecchi came out of the program fired up. “I found my advocacy voice,” he says.

As the hospitality industry reeled from the pandemic’s government-mandated restaurant closures, Cecchi, Nutting and Chef Patrick Mulvaney created a program called Family Meal to support local restaurant workers and farmers. Canon and Mulvaney’s B&L turned their restaurant spaces into commissary kitchens that eventually produced more than 2 million packaged meals for low-income families, seniors and others in need. He’s now working with local health systems UC Davis and Kaiser Permanente, along with the United Way, to turn Family Meal into a medically tailored prepared meal program for at-risk populations such as Afghan refugees and young people exiting the foster care system.

Related: How Are Sacramento Restaurants Handling the Coronavirus?

Cecchi has also teamed up with Honey Agency founder Meghan Phillips to start an organization called Food Frontier. “The future of food is challenging us as the population grows globally,” he explains. Cecchi believes the Sacramento region could become the Silicon Valley of food: an innovation center that finds solutions to meal insecurity and other issues around food. This past June, the group took two dozen local business leaders to Europe to learn about food innovation at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and tour food research stations in Belgium.

Before Cecchi jumped back into the kitchen last autumn, you were more likely to find him wearing a collared shirt and nice jeans than a chef’s jacket as he pursued the many avenues that take up his typical day. Now back in chef’s whites at the age of 42, he has discovered that his cooking has changed as he has matured. “I’m different, and so is my food,” he says. “There are fewer ‘touches’ than before. What I really enjoy is taking the bounty of Northern California and the techniques I love and mashing them together.

“Being a chef is hard,” he continues. “It’s a labor of love. But I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. All the moving around I did, it was always to find my way home.”

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