Capital Region restaurant owners weigh the future of curbside pickup, which kept many businesses afloat during the pandemic.

More than a few downtown eateries have become casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those that remain are embracing long-term survival strategies.

Small businesses continue to open, and some longtimers — like Tess’ Kitchen & Culinary — have found ways to thrive under new owners.

Sacramento has been invaded by Nashville-style hot chicken.

As farmers and event organizers adapt to climate change and the ongoing spread of the pandemic, mandarin oranges have offered a bright taste of normalcy during grim times.

In the Capital Region, there’s an emerging market among boutique vineyards and wineries focused on low-intervention farming and production methods.

Many Sacramento entrepreneurs, when forced to consider what it means to launch a business during a time of crisis, realized there could be plant-based opportunities.

West Sacramento’s Washington District has transformed in the past decade, due to efforts by the City of West Sacramento, developers and food entrepreneurs.

Folsom’s Sutter Street banks on its dining options to draw foot traffic. Now, the community is working to lift restaurants out of record-breaking lows. 

While the shelter-in-place measures have helped slow the spread of COVID-19, they have taken a huge economic toll and have been devastating for breweries, especially small breweries that once relied on sales for consumption in their taprooms.

In the Capital Region, a homegrown meal prep market has been thriving for years. There are more than a dozen meal prep services in the region, ranging from the home-based and dubiously legal to nationally distributed brands. 

Though restaurants are among the businesses hit hardest by the coronavirus, local restaurateurs have pooled their resources to help seniors, low-income families and others access food. 

Based in Auburn, the Common Cider Company produces around 75,000 gallons of hard cider monthly. Owner Fran Toves began brewing cider on a dare in 2012.

The Sacramento food scene is often defined more by its restaurateurs than its restaurants. Some culinary titans roll out an array of unique concepts throughout their careers. However, microcelebrity status doesn’t come without challenges.

Comstock’s spoke with Paul Towers, executive director of Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a Davis-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting family farmers and community-based agriculture, to find out how small farmers in the Capital Region are faring during the coronavirus pandemic. 

The coronavirus quarantine has devastated the Sacramento restaurant scene. We talked to several prominent local restaurateurs to see how they are handling the situation. 

Tonja Wilcox has created a lot of watercolor paintings of trees, mainly birch and aspen, but the exact number is unknown. “I stopped counting after 600,” says the Sacramento-based artist.

In May 2019, the Davis City Council approved the “Food and Economic Development (FED) in Davis” report that urges the city to rethink its relationship with food.

While the general American drinking public prefers lagers over ales, craft breweries often give these cold-fermented brews the cold shoulder. Yet some area brewers believe the balance is starting to shift.

The famed Buckhorn empire stretches across the country, with 12 restaurants from the Bay Area and Capital Region to New York City.

Unlike a typical orchard with rows of olive trees, Coldani Olive Ranch’s olives are grown on trellises, resulting in dense, long walls of olives for its oil label, Calivirgin. 

Operated by a local nonprofit, the Alchemist Microenterprise Academy is a business training course geared toward food entrepreneurs from underserved communities.

Merle Axelrad says she fell into the medium of fabric collage 27 years ago when she was nine months pregnant, on maternity leave from her job as an architect, and made a baby quilt. Now, most of her works are public art, corporate and private commissions.

With as much as 10 percent of all food products sold around the world mislabeled, experts at UC Davis and elsewhere are working hard to ensure what’s on the label accurately represents what’s in the food.

“We are flower nerds to the max here,” Melissa Cowan, owner of Placerville Flowers on Main says. “We squeal on the daily when new products come in or when seasons change.” 

Colonized in the late 1800s, Fair Oaks Village is the quaint, charming center of town. It is currently experiencing a renaissance, largely driven by a burgeoning dining scene.

Outside the Hyatt Regency in downtown Sacramento, tower cranes rise above the skyline, harbingers of the city’s burgeoning building boom. Inside, the designers who are determining the new face of our city took to the runway to envision our future through fashion. 

Though Legado Whiskey is a dark American rye, the company is as unaged as moonshine. The owners have leveraged their story — homegrown, women-owned — to reach consumers around the Capital Region, a key strategy in the crowded craft beverage market.

Across the Sacramento region, food truck owners are riding their mobile success into more stationary ventures, from sit-down restaurants like Culinerdy Kitchen to food-court outposts and drive-through kiosks.

Amid the clatter of machinery and the beeping of forklifts, workers wearing white hair nets tend their stations around the assembly line in the warehouse-like production kitchen of Mad Will’s Food Company on the outskirts of Auburn.

Defining “outsider art” isn’t easy — the term encompasses work by self-taught artists and the artwork of the developmentally disabled — but its popularity is soaring. In Sacramento, Short Center North’s art program is one example.

It’s around 1992, and a long-haired dude in his early 20s is sitting with his friend at Taco Loco, a popular Mexican eatery on J Street in Sacramento. They’re eyeballing the customers, waiting to pounce.

After several weeks of rumors, two years of lobbying from Visit Sacramento and over a decade of fruitless attempts by local chefs to capture the attention of the most influential food guide in the world, Michelin finally rolled into town in March.

Throughout the region, public and private-sector players are rethinking women’s health, expanding and diversifying their approach to maternal and infant health.

How are Sacramento’s restaurateurs appealing to new diet preferences?

Corti Brothers’ Rick Mindermann is bringing a new-school mentality to the old-school market. 

Mike Appezzato has only been in business for a year, but he’s already uprooting his company to move it to Sacramento.  

Realty One celebrated the grand opening of their second office in the Capital Region with the new Sacramento headquarters at 2335 American River Drive. More than 150 guests enjoyed the festivities including a ribbon cutting, photo booth, red carpet entrance, live DJ, prizes and more.

There are good reasons to focus on the special challenges posed by family businesses, like how to keep family resentments from turning to business rivalries and avoid nepotism that results in the wrong people working in key positions. But for some Sacramento immigrant family businesses, blood ties have been the key to survival.

Out on County Road 26, just west of Interstate 505 in Yolo County, Park Winters sits holding court against a backdrop of the Vaca Mountains as it has since George Washington Scott built the mansion in 1865. Now under the ownership of partners John Martin and Rafael Galiano, this 151-year-old 10-acre property is thriving with new life. 

How did Nagle, now 62, go from weed-puller to angel investor? He shares his maxims of leadership, including how he somehow reads 300 emails a day, makes work an obsession and why he feels soccer is the future of America.

A veteran’s inability to find and keep employment is a main cause of homelessness, according to Bettis. A stable income and stable housing go hand-in-hand. That’s where the VOA of Northern California and Northern Nevada comes into play.