04/10/2025
:D Guess what? Sacramento Food Tours in Sacramento's Comstock's magazine
Selling Sacramento
Robert Vee is a chef-turned-entrepreneur who calls himself “a food tour evangelist.” After successfully starting a food-tour business in Austin, Texas, Vee launched Sacramento Food Tours in 2017. An early hurdle Vee had to overcome was introducing the concept to customers. “It was still a learning curve to the general populace, even to our target market,” he says. His team created promotional material explaining the premise. “Once we got the knack of that, business was good.”
A food destination?
Sacramento isn’t a bucket-list destination with world-renowned landmarks, so food was turned into a feature. The city’s tourism bureau Visit Sacramento claimed the title of “America’s Farm-to-Fork Capital” in 2012, and the Farm-to-Fork Festival was launched a year later. Restauranter Josh Nelson pitched the campaign to promote the area’s restaurants by highlighting their direct access to fresh ingredients.
Years later, Visit Sacramento convinced the state tourism bureau to pay Michelin inspectors $600,000 to review restaurants statewide. The Kitchen, co-owned by Nelson, in 2019 became the first Sacramento restaurant to earn a Michelin star, followed by Localis in 2022. The reputation of Sacramento’s food scene continues to grow. The New York Times last year published an article titled “How Sacramento Turned into a Great Restaurant City,” and the website Eater included the city in its list of “Where to Eat in 2024” alongside places like Osaka, Japan and Cairo, Egypt. “The city has made an effort to make it a food destination,” Fortes says, “and I think that’s really paid off.”
Abhijeet Shirsat, an associate professor at Sacramento State University teaches a class on food tourism and says the concept grew in prominence around the late 1990s. The global trade group World Food Travel Association was established in 2003 and organized the first international culinary tourism trade conference a year later. Food tourism is an extension of “experience tourism”: Younger generations from late Millennials to Gen Z and onward want more from their vacations than just buying souvenirs and snapping photos.
“When experience became more popular, students and people started to look at different ideas of learning what tourism itself is,” Shirsat says. “So out of that started to grow a need for exploring cultures, a need for exploring food, a need for explanation to cultures. And I look at food tourism, or gastronomic tourism, as an opportunity to tell a story about a culture.”
Walking food tours started in Tier 1 cities like New York City and Los Angeles, then spread to smaller metropolitan areas. Sacramento isn’t late or early to this trend. “What is more important to understand is Sacramento has food tourism,” Shirsat says, “unlike many other Tier 2 cities who still don’t have it.” However, Sacramento doesn’t have must-visit food attractions like Portland’s Voodoo Doughnut or Leonard’s Bakery in Honolulu, nor regional dishes like Philadelphia cheesesteaks or Chicago-style pizza. What the city is leaning into is its proximity to abundant agriculture. The freshness of California cuisine is a unique selling point. It could help draw visitors to the Capital Region as the reputation of its restaurant scene grows.
“These food tours are going to be super popular for God knows how long a time,” Shirsat says, “but it’s going to become this big thing for, especially Sacramento, in the coming years.”
https://www.comstocksmag.com/article/food-tour-agencies-guide-customers-authentic-sacramento-experience
