III · On the Region · Archived October 2025
What 850 strangers at a long table taught me about hospitality in El Dorado Hills.
The first time you stand on the Sacramento Tower Bridge with a chef's coat on and 850 chairs lined up between the truss towers, the air smells like river water and somebody's wood smoke and the diesel of the catering trucks staged on the Capitol Mall side. The sun's still up when you start prepping. By the time the first course goes out, the bridge is gold.
I had the honor of being one of the four chefs leading the Tower Bridge Dinner, Sacramento's annual Farm-to-Fork finale, alongside Bucky Bray of Nixtaco in Folsom, Jeana Marie of Omakase Por Favor, and N'Gina Guyton of Jim Denny's Diner. For the first time in the dinner's history, the four of us didn't cook our own separate courses. We sat down months in advance, looked at what the farms in our region were going to be ready to harvest, and wrote one menu together, as a team. Four restaurants. One table. One meal.
If you've never cooked for 850 people on a working bridge in a single night, I'll tell you what it's actually like. It's not romantic. It's logistics. It's rain plans and refrigeration plans and walking 200 yards from a hot line to a guest's plate. It's the dishwasher you brought from your own kitchen because nobody else's hands know how to keep up.
But somewhere around the second course, when you walk down that long table and see the woman in the linen dress who drove down from Auburn, the family of farmers from Yolo County, the couple who'd just moved to Folsom and didn't know anyone yet, all eating the same dish, pouring the same wine, leaning into each other to talk, somewhere around there, you remember why anybody does this in the first place.
Hospitality is a local sport
There's a reason the Tower Bridge Dinner is held where it's held.
Sacramento, and the foothill communities around it: Folsom, El Dorado Hills, Cameron Park, Granite Bay, Roseville, Rescue, Shingle Springs, sits in one of the most agriculturally rich corridors in the country. We are surrounded by farms. We are 90 minutes from oysters. We're 45 minutes from olive groves. We are an hour from one of the best wine regions in California, El Dorado County, and another hour from the next one over.
If you cook in this region and you don't take that seriously, you're not cooking. You're just heating things up.
Hospitality, in a region like ours, is a local sport. The cheese on your cheese course was made at a dairy you can drive to. The farmer who grew your tomatoes might be sitting at table 12. The winemaker poured you a glass himself two weeks ago in his tasting room off Pleasant Valley Road. When you cook here, you cook for your neighbors. And when you cook for your neighbors, it changes the whole way you think about a Tuesday night service.
That's what Farm-to-Fork is supposed to be, when it's done right. It's not a marketing slogan. It's a way of life that's been here longer than any of us.
What the bridge showed me about El Dorado Hills
I cook in El Dorado Hills. We opened Vacanza Romana in spring of 2023 with a single idea: build an authentic Italian restaurant, a real Roman osteria, that feels like home to the people who actually live up here. The whole project has been a love letter to this community.
What the Tower Bridge Dinner reminded me is that El Dorado Hills and Folsom aren't suburbs of Sacramento. They're their own thing. People up here drive into Sacramento for an event, the Kings game, the Crocker, the symphony, the Tower Bridge Dinner itself, sure. But the dinners that matter most happen up the hill. They happen on a Friday after a long week. They happen when somebody's parents are in town. They happen when the school pickup line was hellish and you don't want to cook and you don't want a drive-thru, you just want to walk into a room where somebody knows your name.
The four of us cooking on that bridge came from four different corners of the region: Folsom, midtown Sacramento, El Dorado Hills, and an old diner in Del Paso Heights. And the conversation we kept having, in the planning meetings and in the parking lot at 2 a.m. after a tasting, was always the same: we don't get enough chances to cook for each other's people.
That sentence has stayed with me.
What I want for Folsom and El Dorado Hills
I'd like for Folsom and El Dorado Hills to become a real food destination. The way Healdsburg did. The way Yountville did. The way Truckee is becoming. I think we have all the ingredients, literally and figuratively. We have the farms. We have the wineries. We have an audience that's hungry for something that isn't a chain.
But we're not going to get there as one restaurant. We're going to get there as a community of restaurants.
That's the part the Tower Bridge Dinner makes me believe. Four restaurants from four different parts of the region can sit in a room and write a menu together and serve it to 850 people on a bridge over the Sacramento River, and the meal can still feel like one voice. That's not a fluke. That's the future of how this region eats.
I want to see more of it. I want chefs from Folsom and El Dorado Hills cooking together more often. I want winemakers from El Dorado County pouring at restaurants in Granite Bay. I want farmers from Apple Hill pulling up at our back door with a pickup full of stone fruit in August. I want our diners to know the names of those people, not just the names of the dishes.
Hospitality, the way I was taught it,
is not a transaction.
It's a series of relationships
that show up on a plate.
Come see us
If you live in El Dorado Hills, Folsom, Cameron Park, Granite Bay, Rescue, Shingle Springs, Placerville, or you're driving through on a Saturday and you smell garlic, come find us. Vacanza Romana sits on Vine Street in El Dorado Hills. Lunch Wednesday through Sunday, dinner every night. Aperitivo hour at the bar is the best deal in town and most of you haven't been told about it yet.
Bring your neighbors. Sit for as long as you want. We'll cook for you the way we'd cook for ourselves.
That's the only way I know how to do this job.
Chef Devin Dedier