By Greg Micek, CapRadio
Visit Sacramento hosted its annual State of Tourism event on Wednesday at the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center. The spotlight was on fall food plans, including changes to the Farm-to-Fork Festival and the announcement of this year’s Tower Bridge Dinner chefs.
The organization announced that the 2025 Farm-to-Fork Festival will merge with Terra Madre Americas, a food conference rooted in Italy and hosted by the Slow Food organization. The event is scheduled to take place downtown from September 26-28 and will span both indoor and outdoor venues.
“There’s comfort in the familiar,” said Visit Sacramento President and CEO Mike Testa. “Change comes with intention, and often risk.”
The Terra Madre conference, which draws hundreds of thousands of attendees to Torino during even-numbered years, will now alternate between Italy and Sacramento. Last year’s smaller version of the event made its debut at the Memorial Auditorium, but while Testa said it was “intriguing,” he admitted to it being “a bit underwhelming.”
Bringing the full-scale version to Sacramento, he said, could shine a broader spotlight on the city’s culinary identity. “To be able to host an event of this caliber in Sacramento is a big deal,” Testa said. “There’s not a city in the United States that wouldn’t love to host this size convention.”
Testa pointed to the region’s agricultural surroundings as one reason Sacramento is a natural fit. “There’s a million and a half acres of agricultural farmland that surround this region,” he said. “Sacramento grows so much of the food that feeds the rest of the country. When you’re here, you’re in the epicenter of food.”
The Tower Bridge Dinner, which traditionally kicks off the Farm-to-Fork Festival, will also see a shift this year. Instead of each chef preparing a single course, the full menu will be designed and executed as a group. The 2025 lead chefs include Devin Dedier of Vacanza Romana, Jeana Pecha of Omakase Por Favor, N’Gina Guyton of Jim Denny’s, and Bucky Bray of Nixtaco Folsom.
“That’s the difference between what they’ve done the years before,” Dedier said. “Normally everybody has a course. It’s collaborative, but this one is collaborative with no end, we just have a single menu.”
The dinner will serve more than 800 guests on Tower Bridge, requiring months of preparation. “We’re cooking for 800 plus people,” said Guyton. “It’s taking these recipes that might feed like one to two people and multiplying that and making sure that it still is an amazing dish at the end of the day.”
Planning for the dinner has already begun because it involves working closely with small farms to secure ingredients in advance. “There’s some small farms I want to use,” said Pecha. “We have to reach out to them now, because this quantity isn’t necessarily what they’re used to.”
Bray said that when the time comes to prepare the food, the challenge will go beyond feeding hundreds of mouths. “It’s a specialized menu for 850 people on the bridge with a semi-real kitchen that we have to transport all the way up,” he said.
While the dinner has its challenges, the chefs said it’s also a meaningful opportunity for everyone involved, including their teams and communities.
“My staff shows up every day and gives 110 percent not knowing if anyone’s going to recognize them,” Pecha said. “So the fact that we can put Lincoln on the map; I’m doing this just to showcase my team’s hard work because there’s no way I would be here if it wasn’t for them backing me.”
The chefs still have a few more months to prepare; scaling recipes, confirming ingredients with local farms and ironing out the logistics of one of the region’s most ambitious dinners. The Tower Bridge Dinner is set for Sunday, September 7.
The newly combined Farm-to-Fork Festival and Terra Madre Americas conference will bring chefs, food producers, and visitors together in downtown Sacramento from September 26 to 28. While the full schedule has not been released, more details are expected in the coming months.
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