Photo: Special To The Chronicle 2013

When Dane Blom first heard the world’s most famous restaurant guide would finally include his hometown of Sacramento in its rankings, he was full of emotion.

“It was a little justification for us guys who left and came back and believed in Sacramento,” the executive chef at Grange said.

Michelin Guide releases its first-ever California guide June 3, expanding beyond the Bay Area to evaluate restaurants in Los Angeles, San Diego, Monterey, Orange County, Santa Barbara and, yes, Sacramento. Visit California paid Michelin $600,000 to make the statewide guide — a conversation that actually began with Sacramento’s tourism board several years ago. Michelin inspectors have already visited restaurants across the state, and its red books will give coveted stars to those it deems worthy.

The editors of the guide already released their selection of Bib restaurants, or those that represent a good value but haven’t received a star. In Sacramento that included Canon, a relative newcomer from a former chef at Solbar in Calistoga; Frank Fat’s, a Chinese restaurant that has also won a James Beard Foundation America’s Classic award, and Mother, a casual vegetarian restaurant.

The possibility of a Michelin star is something many of Sacramento’s leading chefs have been wanting for years for but never thought would actually happen. The city’s restaurant scene has grown tremendously over the past decade, with chefs embracing Sacramento’s marketing campaign as “America’s Farm-to-Fork Capital. ” Still, the city tends to favor casual over fine dining, and a sense of complacency has overtaken certain popular restaurants, according to some chefs. Michelin’s mere presence could change that.

“Why try to get a Michelin star when you know they’re never going to come? Now that we know they’re here, everyone is going to get better,” said Bill Ngo, chef-owner of Kru Contemporary Japanese Cuisine.

Now, Michelin — and guesses at which restaurants have a shot at earning a star — is dominating conversations among Sacramento’s leading chefs. The same names tend to emerge: Localis, a cozy, hyper-seasonal spot with a $115 tasting menu; Kru, which offers a $125 omakase experience that rivals pricier versions in San Francisco; Grange, a splashy hotel restaurant highlighting the region’s agricultural bounty; and Ella Dining Room & Bar, the politico favorite that hosted Michelin for its California launch event.

Photo: Peter DaSilva / Special To The Chronicle 2017

More than any of those restaurants, though, chefs point to one in particular that surely deserves Michelin’s attention: the Kitchen. The 28-year-old restaurant from Randall Selland, whose family also owns Ella and a few other Sacramento spots, is the city’s toughest reservation and its most unusual dining experience. It’s part dinner party, part theater — one highlight of the four-hour meal is the intermission, where guests rove around to find bites scattered across the entire restaurant.

Its current executive chef, Kelly McCown, has an extensive, Michelin star-studded resume with top positions at Martini House and Goose & Gander, both in St. Helena, and a stint at La Folie. Throughout his career, he said, he hasn’t let Michelin stress get to him. But the arrival of Michelin inspectors in Sacramento adds a new kind of pressure, as chefs and diners look at the Kitchen as their best shot at Michelin glory.

“I don’t want to let down people’s expectations,” McCown said.

If the Kitchen does get a star, McCown said it’d be an honor to win it for Sacramento at large. The city’s chefs said there’s an unusual camaraderie among them — something you don’t see in more competitive cities like San Francisco. In McCown’s words, “It’d be like, ‘Hey Sacramento, we got one together.’”

Several of Sacramento’s top restaurants are run by chefs who are from Sacramento or cooked in Sacramento and left to pursue bigger things: the Culinary Institute of America in New York, internships at Michelin-starred restaurants in Napa Valley, stops through San Francisco’s fine dining world. Then, they came back.

For McCown, it happened right after the 2008 recession, when he got a job at Ella and promptly entered an identity crisis.

“I identified myself with being a chef in Napa Valley and being at these Michelin-star restaurants,” he said. “I didn’t realize what a good position I was in.”

But like many fellow Sacramento chefs, he soon discovered that working at those big-name restaurants wasn’t all that fulfilling. He left Ella to open Goose & Gander back in Wine Country, but he wasn’t happy. Sacramento provided a better work-life balance.

Chefs like McCown don’t plan to leave Sacramento again, and in that sense, it doesn’t really matter if Michelin is in town or not. But it could make a difference for the next generation.

“As a young chef, Sacramento wasn’t S.F. or Chicago or wherever. It was just Sacramento,” said Brad Cecchi of Canon, formerly executive chef of Michelin-starred Solbar. “Now it’s a place I can professionally call home.”

Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker