Planning Sacramento's Farm-To-Fork Dinner Menu A Challenge For Top Chefs

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — Tickets for Sacramento's Farm-to-Fork Gala dinner on the Tower Bridge went on sale and sold out in just 15 seconds on Monday.

All 700 seats for the locally grown organic dinner were swallowed up fast.

Inside Sacramento's The Kitchen Restaurant, they've been putting farm-to-fork meals together long before Sacramento branded itself as the farm-to-fork capital. The goal has always been to produce all locally grown food on dinner plates, although that's not always possible.

Ravin Patel is one of the premier chefs in Sacramento and one of the chosen few to put together the Tower Bridge dinner. The menu is still a secret.

"We're gonna probably mess around probably with some type of poultry," he said.

It's the signature celebration of Sacramento's official brand.

"We grow a lot of stuff for the whole world," he said. "We're just lucky we're in a region it's already a part of us."

But the farm-to-fork movement, even in Sacramento, has its limits. We may grow lots of vegetables, animals and rice, but we don't produce sugars or spice. Our climate isn't tropical enough.

"Like black pepper; you're not going to get, cardamon, vanilla, things like that that you can't grow here," he said. "Salt, you can get salt a couple hundred miles from here, sea salt."

There is a little gray area.

"Obviously chocolate we can't service locally, but maybe they'll take chocolate and use a bunch of fruit with it that's local, that's where we get into the gray area," he said. "Like do you go 100 percent? It's hard because you still want to give these people the value for their money."

Tickets for the gala at the end of September sold for $175 each.