The Abridged version:
- Carmichael restaurant and store Chili Smith Family Foods sells rare heirloom beans sourced from within a two-hour drive.
- It’s run by owner Steve Smith and his protégé Dom Lobato, who previously cooked in downtown Sacramento restaurants.
- Chili Smith beans are also available online or at grocery stores in Auburn, Newcastle and Truckee.
Steve Smith just wanted to update his grandmother’s chili recipe. Now he owns the Sacramento region’s only store dedicated to heirloom beans — all of which come from within a two-hour drive.
Steve is the Smith behind Chili Smith Family Foods, open since 2017 along Fair Oaks Boulevard in Carmichael. Run by Smith’s protégé Dom Lobato, it’s the best place around to find colorful, toothsome beans with names such as Jacob’s Cattle, Black Calypso and Painted Pony.
The beans that make up most of the U.S. stock are typically hardy, drought-resistant legumes that can be grown at a mass scale. But they don’t necessarily pop with color or flavor in the manner of heirloom beans ($9/pound at Chili Smith), long-standing varietals that have been openly pollinated and remain unchanged by human innovation.
“I’m not picking on Taco Bell, because I happen to like them and eat their food,” Smith said. “But they have to season their beans because they don’t have any flavor. Our Black Turtle or our organic Black Valentine will have to carry its own flavor.”
Smith first came across heirloom beans in an effort to update his grandmother’s chili recipe, which his family once sold at their Mandy’s Pancake House restaurants throughout the Sacramento Valley. Among the tweaks: less salt, beef instead of pork and heirloom beans, which he bought from Rancho Gordo, the center of the U.S. bean universe in Napa.
Smith became an heirloom bean devotee
Rancho Gordo founder Steve Sando pitched Smith the heirloom bean gospel, and he bought in completely. Smith purchased beans from Mohr-Fry Ranches in Lodi, as Rancho Gordo once did, and sold them online and at in-person expositions before launching Chili Smith in 2017. After Mohr-Fry moved out of the bean business, Smith built a network of other farms from Sutter County on south.
Business took off thanks to in-person customers as well as East Coast restaurant clients, and Chili Smith moved two doors down into a larger space in September 2024. Its beans are also available online or at The Farmers Marketplace in Auburn, Newcastle Produce in Newcastle and New Moon Natural Foods in Truckee.
Napa-based Rancho Gordo remains the nation’s heirloom bean flag bearer but now sources its legumes from Southwestern and Mexican farms. Its vaunted bean club has at least a nine-month wait list, though customers can source individual bags on the website and in some area stores.
Chili Smith has shelves full of exclusively locally sourced beans, rice, honey, hot sauce and jam, along with Montana lentils and farro. There are firm-skinned Tarbais used for cassoulet or beans on toast, pale green Flageolet that digest easily with rice or game, Hidatsa Red that Native Americans shared with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their westward voyage.
Menu items include chili, carrot dogs in ‘slather sauce’
Smith and Lobato now make the family’s chili with tender Speckled Bayo and creamy Peruano beans, served as-is ($10/cup, $20/quart or $30/half-gallon) or over buckwheat-sourdough waffles ($8/$12). Other menu highlights include house-baked sourdough toast ($12) with spinach, tomato and avocado, and carrot dogs ($12) in North Carolina-style “Slather Sauce” that a customer divulged to Smith years ago.
Bean lessons and fresh tortillas every Saturday
Lobato cooked in Downtown and Midtown Sacramento restaurants such as Kodaiko Ramen & Bar, Ten Ten Room and Tank House BBQ & Bar before burning out on the grind of the line. At Chili Smith, he makes tortillas (two for $4) out front each Saturday morning using his grandmother’s recipe and teaches families about heirloom beans face-to-face.
“Even right now — we’re going to hand him some chili and his kid some chili, and then we talk about the food,” Lobato said, gesturing toward a customer and his young son. “When you’re in the back-of-house, you don’t get to have that moment.”
Next up for Chili Smith: housemade sausage, which Smith and Lobato are still trying to perfect. They’ll eventually sell it on Bella Bru Baking Co. buns and out of a freezer.
Recapturing Americana through heirloom beans
Many of Chili Smith’s products are meant for home, from the freezer’s clam chowder ($20/quart) and Mexican rice to the shelf of pot-ready bean soup mixes ($12). But Chili Smith itself is a charmingly old-fashioned farm store. It’s decorated with cast-iron skillets and anchored by a 19th century wood-burning stove.
Smith grew up knowing he had to be home by a set dinner time, when his whole family would gather around the table. That rule still applied when he visited a grandmotherlike figure in Butte County, who always had beans soaking, in a pot or in a dish, he said. Chili Smith is his way to recapture some of that lost Americana.
“Your home is where your story begins. You learn who you are, what you are and how you’re going to be without knowing it around a table with food on it, talking to other people,” said Smith, who also works as a hospice chaplain. “… It doesn’t matter how pissed off you are at the world. All of that just falls away when you eat some good food together with somebody, enjoy some laughter, enjoy some stories.”
Chili Smith Family Foods
Address: 5901 Fair Oaks Blvd., Carmichael
Phone: 916-524-7071
Hours: 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday.
Website: chilismith.com
Vegetarian/vegan options: Carrot dogs, vegetarian chili and sourdough toasts.
Drinks: Coffee, tea and cans of soda.
Reservations: No
Benjy Egel is the senior food editor at Abridged. Born and raised in the Sacramento region, he has covered its local restaurants and bars since 2018. He also writes and edits Abridged’s weekly food and drink newsletter, City of Treats.