Farm to Table

This year, the FleishmanHillard and SacFoodies team left the big city and headed out to the Capay Valley to celebrate the holiday season. Séka Hills welcomed us with open arms for an afternoon of food, drinks and good cheer!
We started our afternoon with a tour of the surrounding Yocha Dehe farm land. The tribe grows 16 crops on over 2,000 acres including almonds, sunflower, olives, and walnuts. Plus, Yocha Dehe has a herd of 700 cattle in the hills and surrounding valleys. The tour was beautiful and a perfect way to kick off the afternoon.

We then indulged in a little charcuterie and Séka Hills Voignier on the patio! The weather was perfect and it was a nice treat for the office.
After our time on the patio, we headed inside to our table in the milling room, where olives from the farm are milled and transformed into award winning olive oil. The table was beautiful and the decor was so festive.

Yes – that sign says “Deck The Halls with Cheese and Wine”… you can see where our priorities lie!!
The menu was full of delicious local produce from start to finish, plus they were so accommodating to our team members with dietary restrictions. We started with a Tuscan Kale Caesar Salad with Olio Nuovo Dressing, Shaved Local Duck Egg, Crispy Bread Crumbs & Aged Parmigiana. This was served with a Séka Hills Sauvignon Blanc.
Next we indulged in a family-style spread of Red Wine Filet Mignon with Tuluk’a & Pomegranate Demi, Roasted Root Vegetables, Sous Vide Mashed Potatoes, Roasted Chicken Breast with Herb Jus, and Wild Rice Pilaf with Leeks. All of the dishes on the menu were cooked with Séka Hills olive oil and balsamic vinegar products! This course was served with Séka Hills Tuluk’a.

Last but certainly not least, we enjoyed some truffles and fromage with Séka Hills Tribal Reserve.
Overall, our day at Séka Hills was perfect. We got to experience the beauty of the Yocha Dehe farmland and the amazing farm to table food and wine that they offer. But don’t take my word for it! Enjoy these words of praise from the FleishmanHillard and SacFoodies team.
“Séka Hills was everything that I love about California rolled into one, beautiful scenery, farm to table food and delicious wine! Not to mention learning a bit more about the tribe and their traditions was amazing. I can’t wait to go back for the sunflower tour and perhaps a bit more of the Tuluk’a ;).”
“Such a beautiful getaway. I will definitely be going back in spring for the bloom tour.”
“The food was incredible with so many amazing local fall flavors, each pairing perfectly with Séka Hills wines. I can’t wait to plan my next visit and tasting.”
For more information on Séka Hills, visit their website.

I had the opportunity to hang out with Jason Poole, the executive chef of Dawson’s last week, and learned that his restaurant is anything but an industry cliché. Located at 1209 L Street, Dawson’s is the Hyatt Regency’s in-house steakhouse. But don’t call it a “hotel restaurant.” Dawson’s stands on its own.

“We’re not a hotel restaurant. We’re better than that stigma,” Poole says. “Yes, we have rooms here, but we’re so much more.”
Unlike some hotel chains that implement uniform menus across all locations, Poole has free rein over 99 percent of everything that comes out of his kitchen. That translates into a delicious menu chock full of local items like SunFed Ranch grass fed beef from Sutter County and asparagus and other fresh veggies from the Delta.
With fresh local ingredients, Poole’s Chef de Cuisine Michael Grande has a wide variety of foods to work with, and he does so masterfully. The grass-fed beef bone marrow appetizer we sampled was luscious and buttery. We ordered the SunFed Ranch grass-fed flat iron steak and a California corn-fed flat iron from Brandt Beef for comparison. Both were delicious and cooked just to perfection, with sides of crisp asparagus as well as lobster mac-and-cheese. All these great flavors were delivered with incredible service (arguably the best I’ve had in Sacramento) courtesy of our awesome waiter, Ardy.

Beyond the great wait staff and cuisine, one particular source of pride to Poole is what used to be a cascading hotel fountain that’s now brimming with a variety of edibles like fragrant lemon thyme and ripening tomatoes. This is Poole’s vegetable garden, retrofitted by the hotel just for his use. Poole’s favorite plant is a hardy pepper plant that he likes to call, the “Charlie Brown pepper tree.”
“It’s the lone survivor of the garden’s first iteration,” Poole admits with a smile, touching the leaves of the plant. “It took some tweaks to get it right.”

To get the ingredients needed for Dawson’s beyond what his garden and the Charlie Brown tree provide, Poole says the best local foods are always just a phone call away.
“In Sacramento, it’s so easy, you just have to put in a request for whatever it is you want and it’s here,” Poole says.
Easy sourcing makes it even more fun for Poole to participate in the abundance of Sacramento Farm-to-Fork celebrations he enjoys, like BLT Week in July, Offal Day in August, Farm-to-Fork Festival in September and Baconfest in January. Poole says the events are great opportunities for him to showcase what Dawson’s has to offer Sacramento foodies.
“We’re out in the community,” Poole says. “We’re letting people know we’re way beyond just a hotel restaurant.”
Dawson’s
BAR: 4:00pm – 10:00pm Monday – Friday
5:00pm – 10:00pm Saturday & Sunday
Happy Hour: Monday – Friday, 4:00pm – 6:00pm
DINING ROOM: 5:30pm – 10:00pm Daily

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