- Located in the heart of one of the worlds richest agricultural regions, Sacramento has become a place where chefs, farmers and entrepreneurs are working together to redefine what regional food culture can be.

Helping shape that story is Brad Cecchi, the chef and owner of Canon, one of Sacramento's most celebrated restaurants.

Through his work in the kitchen and through his efforts to support food security and strengthen Sacramento's culinary identity.

Brad joins us today to talk about food not just his cuisine, but his culture, innovation and community.

Brad, welcome to Studio Sacramento.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- Brad, you're a local guy.

You went to El Camino High School, but your adventures have taken you far and wide.

Tell us what first got you in to food the way you have today.

Well, you know, being, an 18 year old graduating high school, I was done with school, right?

I wanted to get into the workforce, and I wanted to-to, you know, do something creative.

Um, and so I got into kitchens.

Not knowing, you know, my grandparents had owned restaurants and, you know, my parents worked in hospitality a little bit in their younger years, but-- but when I got in, I didn't really know.

And what I found there was camaraderie in the kitchen.

And that's the thing that I kind of-- I fell in love with.

I was always the-the youngest guy in the kitchen for the longest time.

And so, that camaraderie and, you know, older guys and cooks in the kitchen helping kind of stand me up was something that I felt like was-was, empowering.

Um... so, yeah.

- So, you know, you're known for the acclaim you've received, not only through your philanthropic efforts, but, of course, through your efforts a-as a chef.

You've been recognized by Michelin.

Your establishments have been as well.

But I am curious, when you first started out, uh, what's a-- what was the beginning?

What-what type of establishment were you working in?

- So my first ever kitchen job was, at the Embassy Suites in Old Sacramento.

Um, and it was part of-- I was going to culinary school, um, at American River College, uh, just to kind of learn the initial, you know, skills that I would need to take into a kitchen space.

And so, that hotel was opening.

It was during the-the King's Western Conference run.

And, and so, you know, we were delayed in the hotel and we were at the Arco arena, working at the arena and then waiting for this hotel open.

And finally it opened and it opened at a time in Sacramento where there wasn't a lot of really like, independently owned.

We had Paragarys and The Waterboy and Mulvaneys hadnt open yet and The Kitchen was way out and, you know, in the, in the burbs.

And-and so there wasn't a lot and so this was a, it was kind of a high profile opening.

And um... The chef there had recruited a few of us from the American River Culinary program to join the opening team there.

And then it was off to the races.

- And you ended up - you spent some time in Sacramento, but then you went pretty far afield of Sacramento.

Tell us about that part of the story.

- So while working at the Embassy Suites, um... and at American River College, there was an organization called the American Culinary Federation - still exists - that does a junior Olympic competition.

And we, the folks at American River and the local ACF chapter put together a competition team, um, for a youth culinary competition that had to be under, I think, 20 years old.

And I was 19 at the time.

And so we trained for a whole year for this competition in Las Vegas.

Um, and our coach was Don Dickinson, who was the opening chef at the, at the hotel.

While competing in that competition, I was offered an apprenticeship at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs.

Um, and so I left my job here and moved to Colorado.

Um, you know, it was my first time away from home, uh... spent some time working in the nation's oldest five star, five diamond resort and all the different parts of it, um... you know, getting that really fine dining restaurant experience.

But I worked in the bakery and the butcher shop and down in the employee cafeteria and-and got a lot of exposure.

And then I came back, uh... You know, I kind of missed home and-and needed to figure out what my next step was.

And so I came home, you know, met my w-- my wife and I had already met, but started dating my wife.

Um... We tragically broke up, uh... and I was in need of another journey.

And so, at that point, I moved to Bar Harbor, Maine, um, and worked there for a summer and then off to Europe.

- Wow.

- And then came back from Europe, reinvigorated, ready to be creative and ready to really take my career seriously.

And so I enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.

And, you know, I had already been cooking for quite a while.

I was think the 23 or 24 year old and, um... So for me, it wasn't going there to learn necessarily the skills that I needed, but it was the-the accreditation and the reputation and the connections and the network and all the things.

Um... and sometimes I think, was worth it?

Or was it, was it not?

But, um... but I think in the long term, like the things that happened later in my career would not have happened unless I had a degree from them.

- I'm curious about that, because the way that you make it sound, it almost sounds like the NBA or Major League Baseball's farm system, and that if you don't necessarily as-as gifted as somebody could be, if they don't go through the farm system, it's tougher.

And so is that kind of what you're describing?

- I think so, like, there-there's probably 50% of really successful chefs out there that didn't go to culinary school, right, that they went through apprenticeship programs or just came up through great restaurants.

And-and that is a necessity regardless of who you become, you have to work in great restaurants.

You have to start at the bottom.

But, you know, with going to the Culinary Institute of America, it was like a little bit of a cheat code.

It was like it was-- it's more like going to like the-the Manning Passing Academy, right?

Like that's how y-you get if you walk in as a CIA grad, some people are going to roll your eyes, roll their eyes at you, but some are also gonna be like, okay, well, at least we know where we're starting, right?

And-and so for me, I had already started.

Um, I made really good connections on my, um, externship, which is kind of like, you go work outside of the school for like, six months, um, at a restaurant.

I was able to work with Bradley Ogden and his team at the Lark Creek Inn in... in Corte Madera and, um, and their restaurant group.

And so they were a great well known restaurant group.

James Beard Awards, the whole deal.

And, uh, and so I made great connections in that and then excelled in my externship.

I was-- sometimes you get stuck peeling potatoes, and sometimes you get to work the line and become a real part of the team.

And so I was fortunate that I had that opportunity.

And then from there it was kind of, you know, off to the races again.

- Yeah.

So let's get-- let's kind of go fast forward a little bit, talk a bit about Canon, okay.

Majorly celebrated.

Um, uh... I-I've hung out there probably more times than my wallet should have let me.

Um, when you were conceiving that restaurant experience, what is it that you were hoping to achieve with Canon?

What were you trying to say?

- Well, I had spent so much time.

You know, I never really got out of hotels.

So, you know, once I came back from school and went to work at Grange, and then I went to Cleveland and I went to, you know.

So I'd worked in hotels, and I had formed this real identity of having a... being able to work in these independently marketed and independently kind of feeling restaurants that existed in boutique hotels.

And when I opened Canon, I was done with hotels.

I was-- I didn't-- I didn't want, you know, because that's 24/365 room service, banquets, the whole deal.

I didn't want to have a banana in the restaurant if I didn't need to have one.

Right.

And I-I wanted to be ultimately creative.

This was at a time - now Canons almost ten years old now - but at a time where share-- shareable small plate kind of things were not as popular as they are now.

Especially in Sacramento.

And then Sacramento had always had a really great food scene, but it was very Franco Mediterranean.

You know, we had this California cuisine identity, very farm to table.

But I wanted Canon to be different.

I wanted the Canon to use, excuse the pun, but like the Canon of global cuisine; these ideas of fermentation and the ideas of really powerful flavors from Southeast Asia, or really spice driven flavors of Latin America, like, I wanted to be able to use all of those things, combine them in a very unique way, but showcase the bounty of Northern California while doing it.

And at the time, I think that that was... it was a different restaurant in Sacramento that had existed previously.

And since, like, our identity has changed and food culture has changed and social media has created a lot of, um, ways to share ideas.

And so it's not as far of a departure as it once was, but for me, it was about coming home, opening a restaurant that didn't exist here, and taking my place in this community.

- It almost sounds like and this may be a fractured kind of metaphor, but it almost sounds like your description of its creation was almost storytelling, you know, in a way.

And when you're designing a dish, are you, you know, focused first on flavor?

Are you first focused on ingredients?

Are you focused on telling a story through the food?

Well, I think we have to let the bounty of the season speak to us.

So first, we know-- we want to know what's available.

And then... and then I always say flavor first, but we got to work with a base set of ingredients.

But then it is about flavor.

Ideally, you know, we're coming up throughout the year with different projects.

So different sauces or different condiments or different ideas that we're preserving, fermenting, doing whatever with.

And then we'll take those products, look at this wide swath of that, that paint palette, so to speak, and then start to put things together.

So it's not necessarily like coming up with things for a dish.

It's more like, how do we take these great ingredients, create something that tastes really good, and then what do we pair that with and what do we pair that with and what texture do we need to add to this?

And what sweetness or salty or fermentation or umami or you know, how do we put it all together to make the dish all work?

Sacramento... you know has named itself it the farm to fork capital.

And it must mean something because I was in San Francisco recently picking up one of the-the magazines in the hotel where San Francisco was calling itself the farm to fork Capital.

So it-it-it's, imitation, I guess, is the sincerest form of flattery.

How would you describe the Sacramento food scene as it stands today?

- Well, I think that a lot of chefs have really embraced this idea of like, different cultures being expressed through the bounty of what we offer here.

So today, you'll see across it's... A: farm-- being farm to fork is the price of admission.

I think Sacramentans generally want to know where their food comes from.

They want to know who grew it.

They might know that person.

There's a sense of pride to that.

So sourcing those ingredients has become great quality ingredients has become the price of admission into this restaurant scene, which is something that we should all be really proud of.

But then secondly, like we start to see all of these very cool, different flavor profiles, great Japanese flavors, and great Japanese restaurants, dumpling restaurants, Middle Eastern restaurants, Latin American restaurants, Mexican restaurants.

So you start to see all of these things pop up that maybe we only had 5 or 6 great restaurants 20 years ago, and now we have 20 or 25 great restaurants, um, in our region.

The thing that the dining scene probably is that we don't have that thriving foot traffic downtown life like, you know.

So these restaurants, you know, they're busy couple hours a day and then... So it's still a very difficult business, in Sacramento.

And that's where unfortunately, we see these ebbs and flows and opens and closures of, of a lot of places.

And, and we're all competing against each other.

- So... so would you say that Sacramento's sort of food culture and food scene is fully formed, or is it still emerging at this point?

- I think it's still emerging.

We have such a... we have such a bounty here that like, we have we have this opportunity to continue to grow it.

The limit is it's not even been seen yet.

Because we have such creativity, real belief in what this community from an agricultural standpoint is able to produce.

And, and now we'll start to see the generation of cooks and sous chefs that are spinning out of my restaurants, like I spun out of Patrick Mulvaney's, you know that-- What are they going to do with that opportunity?

Right.

And so it will continue to grow and grow in ways that aren't fine dining.

It might be a hot dog stand somewhere.

It might be, you know, it will continue to evolve.

And also as young people reengage and move to Midtown or, you know, or the suburban neighborhoods, you know, create, density.

Then all of a sudden there'll be new places that we didn't even foresee.

So Canon has been here for over a decade, right?

- It'll be nine years in October.

- Nine years.

- Yeah - Nine years.

You recently, opened another place.

Franquette.

- Franquette will be six in February.

- Six.

Okay.

All right.

And in addition to this growing sort of, um, empire of restaurants, you're known a lot for your philanthropy and for your involvement in local issues, particularly food innovation and looking at food security.

What got you interested in those things?

- I think we all had to take a look in the mirror during the pandemic.

Especially for restaurants.

We shut down.

Right.

Nobody was eating in the restaurants anymore.

So we had on that first day we had to look at, we got a walk-in full of food.

We have scared unsure employees.

We have a community that needs to eat.

So how can we figure out a way to tie all those things together and continue to march forward?

And so a group of us, um, Patrick Mulvaney, Kelsey Nederveld from, uh, the Sac City Unified School District, Santana Diaz, Deneb Williams... A lot of us got together that first kind of day after the shelter in place started, um, very spread out in Canon.

One bottle of whiskey.

And we sat there and said, well, how are we going to figure this out and where the opportunities.

And so we started down this path of what we called Sacramento Family Meal.

And then ultimately what we decided to do was you had this food insecure population where typically had been fed out of these giant commissaries.

Well now you couldn't have a giant commissary full of people making all of this food.

So we decided to mobilize restaurants into micro commissaries where you had a fewer amount of staff spread out.

Making meals for families.

So four meals per unit, um, that inevitably we started going to the elderly folks who were shel-- like sheltering in place and couldn't leave.

We figured out a delivery model.

We figured out the logistics of funding.

We figured out how to get the food.

We figured out all these things and put together a really tight set of SOPs, and then took that to the city.

The city stood up the first, um, iteration of Family Meal.

Uh, and then the governor got ahold of that and, uh, and took the family meal program, insert it into the Great Plates delivered program statewide.

- Oh wow.

- There were about 45 million meals.

- Really?

- Different-- not us, but like different municipalities and-and things took, um, took that program and our-our playbook and mobilized in their own communities.

And the funding model was really good and it helped what it helped us is we did not lay off a single employee during the pandemic.

So it helped us.

And then we did like everybody else.

We did the to go food and all of that.

But as I as we were standing up Family Meal, I was enrolled in the James Beard Foundation as kind of the preeminent - both on the award side but also on the chef advocacy side - enrolled into what they call the James Beard Boot Camp for Policy and Change.

And so that is a program that teaches chefs how to advocate, how to meet with elected officials, how to take on issues that are bigger than themselves and their restaurants.

And because what we've learned is that chefs are heard, right?

People want to know what we think and whether it's in our restaurants or anywhere.

If we walk anywhere with a white chef coat on, you know, generally people will pay attention.

And so, um... so I learned through that boot camp over those six weeks, how to do some of the more policy driven, advocacy driven talk to, you know, business leaders and elected officials and really, what it meant to-to focus on an issue.

Um, and so that continued to this day, we still do Family Meal.

- Is that right?

You also, um, have focused a lot on food innovation and, uh, the proximity of UC Davis to Sacramento sometimes we don't appreciate what's closest to us in our own backyard.

What is it that the work that you've been doing with UC Davis or, and sort of the whole concept of food innovation that Sacramento probably doesn't know enough about, but should.

- Yeah.

So, so through that advocacy, work that started during Family Meal, we would go to Washington, D.C.

on the Metro Chamber Cap-to-Cap trip, meet with elected officials here at home.

And then a lot of the feedback that we were getting as we were advocating, not just for food insecurity, but school meals and, and water rights and all this other stuff, was we have this incredible resources here in this region.

UC Davis being probably the shining jewel of them all.

But they're siloed, right?

So we'd go in and talk to somebody about funding for this or this or that, or we talk about policy change for this, that or the other thing.

And what we learned was that it was it wasn't working because we were talking about this project, and this project would get done and another one would pop up.

And so we learned that we need to develop a brand and an ecosystem around all things food and not- not necessarily what happened in the past or even at this point food po-- like, um, insecurity policy, more about like, what is the future of food and where is it born?

Well, what we know about UC Davis is it's the number one agriculture and food school in the world.

And so we started working alongside UC Davis at the institute, the Innovation Institute for Food and Health at UC Davis is spinning companies out like crazy.

They're the ones building what's called the-the periodic table of food initiative.

So as elements have been categorized in as like the molecular makeup of our food is being analyzed molecule by molecule at UC Davis to develop how we can all eat healthier, make healthier choices.

And what's in our food?

So those companies are spinning out of UC Davis at a record rate.

There's also the Integrative Center for Alternative Meats and Protein.

So, you know, synthetic, or not synthetic, but-but manufactured protein, not necessarily, um, you know, beef and cattle, but-but real protein that's grown from mycelium and precision fermented in these, you know, anywhere using a minimal amount of water, a minimal amount of input, whether it's dextrose or sugar or whatever... - How does it taste?

- Well, flavor first, right?

- Okay.

- So... so that's where I started to get involved.

And so as we built this ecosystem, my business partner Meghan Phillips and I stood up our company, Food Frontier.

And Food Frontier is kind of a culture and marketing firm, really engaged in developing Sacramento's ecosystem around food and food innovation.

We like to say that we're... we're already the Silicon Valley of food, but now how do we bring companies or get really the homegrown people at UC Davis to stay here and engage in our community and want to live here and-and allow for their ideas to flourish?

Has become something that like, you know... We know that by 2050, there will be about 10 billion people on the planet, according to the World Health Organization.

We don't have enough land in the planet under agricultural development right now to feed that many people.

- Really?

- So... so we have to especially protein.

We already live a protein deficient life, especially our aging population and our-- and our-- our youth.

Right?

So we have to be able to integrate these, these new food technologies, into our, our food system.

And, and frankly, like rethink how things are-- a-and who's going to work in the fields and, and how AI is going to integrate with all that.

But all that work is happening at UC Davis, which means it's happening in our region.

- What would you say is the most sort of exciting thing that you've seen come out of UC Davis that we all, uh, should pay more attention to because it's going to be a big deal?

- Well, you know, there so at IFH you know, they're working alongside, you know, different philanthropic organizations to stand up.

How does AI gonna-- gonna interchange with our food system?

Right.

What questions are we going to be able to ask, um, AI and what-what's it going to tell us?

Right.

If we want to know more about what food we're eating, how is it going to help us order at restaurants?

How's it going to create-- Maybe it-- maybe it's not take this out of your diet.

Maybe it's complement that with something else.

And here's how you should combine those things to get a well-balanced nutritional intake.

There are different supplements that are being taken that help you digest protein.

You know, we have a gluten, you know, a gluten intolerance issue that's happening now because of glyphosate and things that we've sprayed on our wheat.

Well, now we can develop supplements that might help us digest those proteins.

So making gluten once again, more digestible.

And these things will impact, you know, our climate, they'll impact our eating habits.

But for me, it has to taste good.

And so-- and I think anybody who's ever tried a new hot thing on the market, whether it's, you know, a synthetic meat or tofu or, or an alternative dairy product is like, yeah, it doesn't quite taste the same or it doesn't quite is as good.

Or I like regular sugar better.

Right.

But so we have to work with these companies as chefs to say, well, how do we apply what we know to making this taste better?

- Sounds like a great opportunity, and we're going to have to leave it there.

Brad, thank you so much.

Look forward to seeing you soon so I can drop a lot more cash at Canon.

But-but, uh, thank you for all you do for the community and, wishing you well.

- Thank you.

- All right.

And that's our show.

Thanks to our guest and thanks to you for watching Studio Sacramento.

I'm Scott Syphax.

See you next time, right here on KVIE.