Neighborhood Favorite is a new monthly web column that profiles independent restaurants around the Capital Region to showcase the diversity and resilience of our local food entrepreneurs. In the first installment, we visit one of Sacramento’s longest-standing Lao restaurants.

Look back on 2020 with a list of our top-read stories and our editors’ favorites.

As they talk up their brands from Cambridge to Nashville, the brothers are working to build generational wealth for their families — and to reclaim the value that might once have been associated with the Burgess name.

The City of Sacramento is banking on the relative health of the technology sector and other insulated fields to help displaced workers get back on their feet.

Tens of thousands of acres of almond orchards are pulled up each year in California. Knotty Wood is out to put those trees to better use. 

In September, women made up 80 percent of the people who dropped out of the workforce. We asked the first female president and CEO of the Sacramento Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce about the reasons behind the discrepancy.

A wide range of projects and initiatives on and off the Davis campus are set to be funded by the campaign, called Expect Greater: From UC Davis. For the World.

Comstock’s spoke with Rodriguez Aguirre about SHCC and how it has worked to meet the needs of its members during the pandemic. 

Culinerdy Cruzer, which was part of Sacramento’s first wave of gourmet food trucks when it opened in 2014, is hitting the highway next month.

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. 

Chelsea Minor has spent the months of the coronavirus pandemic ensuring that customers are informed about new measures and adaptations at the 126 supermarket locations that Raley’s operates. 

Lisandro Madrigal knew 2020 would be a landmark year for Chando’s Enterprises, the Mexican restaurant group he started in 2010. But after dining rooms closed in March, every taco, burrito and mulita had to be packaged to go.

Comstock’s spoke with Law about the ways both the center and the local entrepreneurial scene are evolving in the face of a crisis.

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. 

Across the Capital Region, construction continues as usual on housing, infrastructure and other projects, even as workers in other sectors shelter at home.

Raksmey Roeum-Castleman, administrator at Telecare Corporation, oversees 25 employees in three health care programs at Telecare, teaches health, kickboxing and yoga at San Joaquin Delta College and collaborates with Southeast Asian advocacy organizations around the country.

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.

Olivia Kasirye, public health officer of Sacramento County, is often called on to be a stable figure at the center of a crisis.

Molly Hawks, chef and co-owner of Hawks and Hawks Provisions and Public House, led a high-end restaurant to success in the midst of the Great Recession.

“If customers believe that you’re passionate about what you’re doing, they feel it,” says Karen Bond, CEO and cofounder of the medical technology company Cedaron.

“I do bills that are tough, and I’m not doing the ones that you see on the front page of the papers,” says California Assemblywoman Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, who has authored or co-authored 49 bills.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the myth of the American Dream has centered around cities. As the story goes, the most promising rural youth leave their hinterland homes to seek their fortunes in the metropolis, perhaps never to return. 

Part of this month’s Rural Living series

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

In ordinary English, “disruptor” might conjure up images of a kid acting out in class, or someone holding up traffic. Among the startup set, though, disruptor has become one of the highest compliments one can receive — or give to oneself.

Even the founders of Kiki’s Chicken Place, Sacramento’s latest temple to the twin gods of tenders and wings, are surprised by how fast their chain has spread. 

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.

A “sammich” from the Nash & Proper food truck is not merely a sandwich; it’s a feat of engineering. There’s intent behind every stratum of the structure, from the coarse-cut slaw that props up the top bun to the pickles laid carefully on the bottom so they hit your tongue first.

Sacramento is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the country, and the metropolitan area’s dining scene is just as varied, due to local chefs and restaurateurs who recognize the connective power of the table.

Sacramento is on track to get a dedicated makerspace for food entrepreneurs who want to launch and scale their brands. 

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

At Mezcalito Oaxacan Cuisine in Rocklin, the mole takes two days and nearly two dozen ingredients to complete. The recipe reads like a catalog of the Mexican state of Oaxaca’s agricultural bounty: plantains, green apples and raisins; warm spices and half a dozen kinds of chiles; a liberal dose of sparsely-sweetened chocolate.

Dutchman’s Stroopwafels may be the first business to cook on a bicycle in Sacramento, but local entrepreneurs have been finding creative ways to combine the area’s twin passions for cuisine and cycles for decades.

Sacramento’s effort to expand mobile food codes is part of a statewide push to legitimize California’s long tradition of sidewalk vending.

While a cottage food career comes with plenty of challenges, Karla McNeil-Rueda has leveraged it as an opportunity to create her own vision of success.