Photography by Carmen Troesser
Maybe it’s the first sweet bite of a tree-ripened summer peach, the juicy burst of an heirloom tomato, or the dreamy “Mmmm” that inevitably escapes your lips after you come home from the farmers’ market with the season’s first strawberries and finally, after a long year’s wait, pop one in your mouth (if you can even wait until you get home). Chances are, if you love to eat, you know what we’re talking about: the incomparable deliciousness of fresh, seasonal, locally grown food.
There are many reasons chefs maintain that local food so often tastes better—not least of which is that when food doesn’t have to be shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, it can be harvested at the peak of its flavor. The story of American agriculture over much of the past century may have been the steady march toward industrial scale, but today it’s all about the “farm-to-table” (or if you prefer, the more alliterative “farm-to-fork”) movement, which has chefs working in tandem with local, typically small-scale growers and digging in—often quite literally—to reestablish a connection with the land and put us in closer proximity to what we eat. The results? As shown by these five St. Louis chefs who are passionate about bringing locally grown ingredients to the plate, it pays to play in the dirt.
Carl McConnell, Stone Soup Cottage
For 20 years, Carl McConnell more or less lived out of a suitcase, first as a chef for several deluxe cruise lines, then as one for a super-deluxe air-travel service for which passengers would plunk down more than $100,000 to hopscotch around the globe
in a tricked-out, all-first-class Boeing 757. At first, this might seem to be the very antithesis of “local” and an odd kind of culinary training for McConnell, who has become known for the intimate, eminently local prix fixe dinners he and his wife, Nancy, have been serving at Stone Soup Cottage in Cottleville for the past five years.
Yet as happy as he is to have finally put down roots (“Now I live my life in a five-mile radius,” he says), McConnell says his two decades of globe-trotting taught him the incomparable goodness of fresh, locally sourced ingredients. Sure, he admits, “There are those times you find there really is nothing in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in the middle of January except some yak milk and throwaway lamb’s meat.” But the raspberries plucked in Bordeaux, the just-caught lobsters picked up from lobstermen in Ireland, the wild scallops bought off the boat in Canada, or the exotic produce trawled from the markets in Phnom Penh, Cambodia—it was, indeed, “local” cuisine that those well-heeled travelers were dining on at 35,000 feet. They just might not have known it.
Today, the McConnells have taken the farm-to-fork ethos to new heights, or at least new proximity. Last year, they relocated their restaurant from old-town Cottleville to smack-dab in the middle of the farm where they had long sourced much of their produce. A friendship struck up at the farm stand of Norman Wiese, whose family has been farming the area for generations, led to McConnell purchasing 6 ½ acres of Wiese land. From the hilltop, the new restaurant (constructed, in part, from the salvageable remnants of the old barn) looks out on the fields, orchards, and greenhouses where McConnell harvests micro greens, melons, asparagus, corn, tomatoes, and even black walnuts.
“The whole experience has helped me become a better cook,” McConnell says. “The care Norman takes with his crops and growing, that makes me want to take that much more care in how I use what he grows.”
CLICK HERE FOR McCONNELL'S RECIPE: PISTOU SOUP WITH TOMATO-AND-BLACK WALNUT RELISH.
Lou Rook, Annie Gunn’s
When Annie Gunn’s chef Lou Rook III returned to St. Louis in the late 1980s after attending the Culinary Institute of America, in New York’s fabled Hudson River Valley, he was keen to find fresh, locally grown ingredients to feature on his menu.There was just one problem. “When I moved back, one of the first things I did was drive up and down the river looking for farms,” he says. “I quickly got discouraged.” It was farm country, no doubt—just not the right kind of farms. Acre upon acre of soybeans and corn had long squeezed out the type of family farms that might supply a chef like Rook with the produce and sustainably raised meat he was looking for. So he set about changing that.
To be sure, Rook did discover a few Missouri farmers growing what he needed, but they often were not equipped to meet the demands of a restaurant. He took the novel approach of working up contracts with a handful of promising growers, providing scheduled payments upfront to boost the farms’ cash flow. To goose up demand, he’d invite area chefs to Annie Gunn’s on Monday nights, when he would showcase locally grown products and allow his peers to taste for themselves the quality ingredients that were being harvested here—if not in their own back yards, then at least not as far afield as California.
Thanks to Rook’s efforts, coupled with a burgeoning farm-to-fork movement, he now has no trouble finding enough locally grown food to fill his menu. He works with more than two dozen local producers and growers each year—and even a few foragers. “I’ve got an incredible mushroom guy who forages around here,” he says. “I trade him steaks for his mushrooms.” Why does he have such an enduring commitment to local? “Hands down, it’s the best food money can buy,” Rook says. “It’s not manufactured; it’s not processed. It’s what food is supposed to be.”
CLICK HERE FOR ROOK'S RECIPE: ROASTED RACK OF LAMB WITH YOGURT-DRESSED SALAD.
David Kirkland, Café Osage
True, David Kirkland began his culinary career in St. Louis, working in the 1990s at such local legends as Frazer’s Restaurant & Lounge (then Frazer’s Traveling Brown Bag) and Venice Café. But his master class in cooking came in San Francisco—though he wasn’t a chef then. “I’d wanted to go to cooking school, but it was too expensive,” he says. Instead, Kirkland worked as a retail manager and a DJ. But the Bay Area was in the middle of a full-on culinary revolution focused on local, sustainably grown food, led in large part by Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse restaurant is to the farm-to-fork movement what New York’s Cedar Tavern was to the Beat Generation.
Kirkland frequented Chez Panisse and read Waters’ books; he became a regular at places like The Slanted Door and Zuni Café, too. “I didn’t pay attention to it being ‘farm-to-table,’” Kirkland says. “In San Francisco, that’s all there was, and that’s what I got used to eating.”
Two years after moving back to St. Louis in 2006, Kirkland connected with John McPheeters, who was looking for a chef who could take the produce, bison, and other food he was growing at Bowood Farms in Clarksville and serve it at what would become Café Osage, the breakfast-and-lunch restaurant attached to Bowood’s Central West End outpost. Kirkland auditioned for the job by searing up a rib-eye bison steak for McPheeters.
So it was almost by happenstance that Kirkland found himself among the vanguard of chefs in St. Louis emphasizing locally grown ingredients. Every fall, Kirkland pairs up with his grower, David Rickard, and they pore over seed catalogs to decide what to plant the coming season. “It’s like a kid going through the Christmas catalog,” Kirkland says. “We’ll see something like zebra tomatoes and go, ‘Let’s do those!’”
Seeds are planted in the Clarksville greenhouses starting in February, and the seedlings are transported to the hoop houses across Olive Street from the restaurant to finish growing. The harvest starts with radishes, beets, and several varieties of onions and continues through a rotating bounty that includes the likes of fresh greens and arugula, pole beans, zucchini, and (of course) plenty of tomatoes. “I’m always looking forward to tomato season,” Kirkland says.
CLICK HERE FOR KIRKLAND'S RECIPE: FLANK-STEAK SANDWICH WITH BLUE-CHEESE MAYONNAISE AND FRIED ONIONS.
Wil Fernandez-Cruz, Winslow’s Home
For Wil Fernandez-Cruz, growing up on his grandparents’ 12-acre farm on a lush tropical plain in the Dominican Republic meant there wasn’t much distinction between “farm” and “table”—the food was as local as local gets. “I never saw my grandparents buy anything from the grocery store, except maybe tomato sauce because we couldn’t grow tomatoes,” he says.
“We grew our own coffee, roasted it, grew our own cocoa.” The chickens were free-range, of course. And organic? “We put the seeds in and—,” Fernandez-Cruz makes a flourishing gesture. “I don’t remember my grandfather ever putting any chemicals in the soil.” Every weekend the family would slaughter one of its many pigs and either slow-roast it in a makeshift caja china overnight or have one of Fernandez-Cruz’s uncles tend to it all day on a spit in the yard, after which a gaggle of relatives would gather for Sunday supper.
It’s no surprise, then, that Fernandez-Cruz describes farm-to-table cooking as his “passion.” He came to Winslow’s Home in University City by way of New York, where he worked under the tutelage of chef Marc Meyer, known for his commitment to seasonal, sustainable cooking. And he has once again found himself involved in the intricate workings of a farm—this one in Missouri wine country, near Augusta. Owned by Ann Sheehan Lipton and her husband, Randy Lipton (who also own Winslow’s Home), the 5-acre organic farm provides the restaurant with bushels of produce, including spring onions, herbs, butter lettuce, carrots, beets, blackberries, plums, and apples. Fernandez-Cruz sources the rest locally as well, and eating local is more than just a trend to him.
“Coming from a family where farming was the only source of income, I understand that,” he says. “If we don’t support the farmers in our community, who will?”
Jimmy Voss, Overlook Farm & Nathalie’s
“I’ve worked with a lot of farmers over the years, but this is my first experience being on the farm,” says Jimmy Voss. “To see the seed go in the ground and then hold the product in your hand is incredible.” It’s something of a late-career renaissance for Voss, who for 30 years cooked at Duff’s in the Central West End (interspersed with stints as a road cook for the Grateful Dead). “The ideas, they just keep coming; I can only deal with so many at once. I went through the seed catalog and picked out 400 seeds that I wanted to grow.”
Voss’ new playground of sorts is Nathalie Pettus’ 327-acre Overlook Farm in Clarksville, which Pettus began transforming into an organic farm a decade ago. It now grows blueberries, kale, heritage Red Wattle pigs, free-range chickens, and even tilapia (raised in five greenhouse tanks). Pettus hired Voss as the chef first for her Napa-like Clarksville Station Restaurant, then for her most recent endeavor, Nathalie’s, in the Central West End. Although a fire consumed the Clarksville restaurant in March, both Pettus and Voss appear eager as ever for the spring planting season. (A seemingly indefatigable dynamo prone to rapid-fire speech, Pettus has vowed to rebuild the restaurant bigger and better than ever.)
Voss had an epiphany about just how dramatically his cooking life had changed early on in Clarksville, after he began grilling a steak for a customer, only to realize he didn’t have enough broccoli on hand to serve with it. So he darted out back and gathered some. “I don’t think I’ve ever had broccoli on the plate four minutes after it was picked,” he says. “It’s the sweetest broccoli I’ve ever had in my life.”
