At Cask & Barrel in north Sacramento, there are no entrees. The restaurant has a small kitchen staff and high-end food at low prices. Chef Gabriel Glasier and his pastry chef, business partner and fiancée, Kristel Flores, are bringing something different to a corner of Del Paso Boulevard that’s proved to be enigmatic, to say the least, for two decades.

Give David Hardie credit. The owner of the building and restaurant that was named Enotria for two decades went “all in,” as he says, on trying to make that spot exciting and a draw to diners.

Wine tasting is often an experience shared only by the taster and pourer. A brewery tasting room, however, needs to facilitate the gregariously social aspects of craft beer, making space for interaction and mingling. Room to brew, room to chat and room to sample flights of beer make for highly dynamic spaces that bring to life the distinct personalities of brewers and their art.

When Scott Ostrander heard that Sacramento had declared itself America’s Farm-to-Fork Capital, he was working at Alinea, a 3-Michelin-star restaurant in Chicago. As a Sacramento native and an advocate of food-literacy education, he took the news as a sort of pied-piper call to return to his roots. 

Sacramento dining is about to get a little more convenient.

California just passed a bill to sharply limit the use of antibiotics in farm animals, making it the first state to ban the routine use of the drugs in animal agriculture.

Where in your local supermarket do you find the curry leaves? How about dumplings filled with red bean paste, or maybe smoked duck. Does your local grocer have fresh menudo, warm tortillas right out of the oven, or miso broth prepared that morning on-site? Independent grocery stores focused on specific ethnic cuisines are thriving in Sacramento, enjoying a boom in customers from beyond their base cultural markets.

After years of bickering, U.S. sugar companies and their rivals, the makers of high-fructose corn syrup, are going to trial over what exactly constitutes a “natural” sweetener.

Let’s eschew the wonders of hops and malts for a minute to explore the fizzy but kid-friendly offerings of Sacramento beverage artisans.

Some families love being together, some enjoy short visits and others have a hard time just getting through Thanksgiving dinner. So how do families who have decided to go into business together make it work? Recently I had sat down with three families-turned-business-partners to find out.