Anticipation is building for two big food events that are happening in Sacramento next month. The 12th annual Tower Bridge dinner is set for Sept. 7, and three weeks later, Sacramento’s Farm to Fork festival returns for its 12th year Sept. 26-28. This year, it will converge with the international food festival Terra Madre to become Farm to Fork at Terra Madre Americas. 

Terra Madre is organized by the Slow Food network, which holds its flagship biennial conference in Turin, Italy. Terra Madre Americas will also be a biennial conference taking place in Sacramento on alternating years with the Turin event. The first full-scale Terra Madre Americas (after a teaser edition held last year) will feature food, wine and coffee tasting, chef demonstrations, education sessions and a marketplace with outdoor vendors. 

Celebrity chefs scheduled for Terra Madre include Alice Waters of Chez Panisse; Jeremiah Tower, who worked at Chez Panisse and pioneered California cuisine with Waters and Wolfgang Puck; and Sean Sherman, an American Oglala Lakota Sioux chef who has helped revitalize Indigenous cuisine. Musical guests around the live outdoor stage at DOCO include Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Spoon, The War on Drugs and others.

Ahead of Farm to Fork at Terra Madre, Visit Sacramento recently unveiled the menu for the Tower Bridge dinner, always an epicurean event. This year’s chefs are paying homage to the Americas as a tribute to the food festival. This year will feature three entrees instead of four, but each is carefully crafted to represent the cultures of the Americas. Also new this year, the chefs collaborated on the courses rather than creating one individually.

“We’re trying to use as many cultural influences that are native, or not necessarily native, that are part of what makes California amazing,” says chef Jeana Marie Pecha of Omakase Por Favor. “So you’re going to see Asian, Japanese influences; you’re going to see Native American influences; you’re going to see northern Mexican influences as well as Indigenous, Black culture and Native American culture within all of the dishes. So that was very important when we’re talking about the Americas,” says Pecha.

The four chefs who created the 2025 Tower Bridge dinner along with Pecha are Devin Dedier of Vacanza Romana, N’Gina Guyton, formerly of Jim-Denny’s and South, and Bucky Bray of Nixtaco Folsom.

“We really wanted to make sure that it was a full collaboration, as opposed to anyone thinking of one chef in one course, one chef to the other course,” Pecha tells Comstock’s. “So by doing less, not only are we saving food, because people have a lot to eat at the Tower Dinner, we’re also able to work so closely together.”

The second course features a blue corn rabbit tamal with mole negra, mole blanco, pinenut sikil pak (a squash seed dip), aji amarillo (Peruvian yellow chili pepper) and grilled summer vegetables. “We wanted to throw in a bunch of different flavors with the sauce as well, so we have creamy, spicy, umami, nutty,” says Bray of Nixtaco Folsom.

The ingredients were provided by Ray Yeung Farms in West Sacramento, Devil’s Gulch Ranch in Marin County and Pleasant Grove Farms in Sutter County, which was featured in Comstock’s 2024 Family Business issue. To keep with the Indigenous theme, portions of this dish are served in hardened and handcrafted decorative gourds inspired by those used by Indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas, made by Welburn Gourd Farm in San Diego County.

The fresh-milled, heritage grains come from Capay Mills in Yolo County, the fruit from Bea’s Blackberries in Clarksburg and the rice from True Origin Foods in Olivehurst, a favorite of Sacramento chefs such as Billy Ngo of Kru and Chris Barnum-Dann of Localis.

“Acorns are one of the most Indigenous vegetables that we have here in California, one of the most used in history here specifically, so we wanted to incorporate that in a big way on this creamy bed of polenta underneath it,” Bray adds.

This distinct menu serves as a prelude to the Terra Madre Americas festival, which is merging with the annual Farm-to-Fork Festival this year. This is the first time the international food festival will be in Sacramento. The weekend will be filled with food, wine tastings and chef demonstrations. Admission is free.

“I can’t stress this enough, there’s so much collaboration that has gone into every single one of these dishes,” says Chef Pecha. “It’s been the most amazing experience.”

–

Subscribe to the Comstock’s newsletter today.