Photo by Thomas Crone
It's obvious to folks who visit Kitchen House Coffee that a quartet of chickens live on-site in a charming run-and-coop system that’s visible (and often audible) through the shop’s back door. Not everyone, though, is aware that the coffeehouse is supplied by an affiliated urban farm, located less than two blocks away, on the state streets of Tower Grove East.
KHC proprietor Paul Whitsitt says that he and partner David Rodgers “bought our house five years ago, in 2012. From our upper balcony, we’d look down onto this lot with two collapsed houses, weeds, scrappy trees. These were condemned buildings that had caved in; they were dangerous to go into. I was new to St. Louis, but explored how to buy that lot. We bought our house in April, moved in during June, and the lot went up for tax auction in October.”
With no one else bidding on the lot and it’s abandoned buildings, they scored the property. After a demolition process that Whitsitt colorfully recalls as “a hot mess,” the front building was demolished, while the back structure, a 400-square foot honey from the 1880s, was spared and lovingly rehabbed into a guest house. A neighbor researched the space and determined its birth as a literal “kitchen house” to another nearby building, so Whitsitt and Rodgers began “calling it Kitchen House Farm, just casually.”
Photo by Thomas Crone
He says the farm was “going by the spring of 2013, and we had an actual growing season in ‘13. It was our first year on the sustainable backyard tour, even though it was pretty spartan at first.”
Though Whitsitt admits that he’d only lightly gardened prior, with a few vegetable beds at his former home in Chicago, he went full-bore into urban agriculture between the lot’s purchase and the coffeeshop’s opening in September of 2014. He “started taking workshops with Gateway Greening, attended a conference at the Missouri Botanical Garden, took another couple things with the University of Missouri’s extension campus.”
Because Kitchen House Coffee doesn’t have a kitchen hood, most of the on-site food prep is done in a compact area behind the barista station. To augment its breakfast-and-light-lunch offerings, KHC brings in pastries from Whisk: A Sustainable Bakeshop; quiches and casseroles (cooked with KHC’s own eggs) at nearby Grove East Provisions; and bagels from Companion. A variety of soups, spreads, and smoothies, though, feature the KHC Farm’s touch, often worked up by manager Samantha Lembeck, who brings a background in urban agriculture to the gig.
“She’s really as excited as I am about the pairing of the farm and the coffeeshop,” Whitsitt says. “Pulling them together was the plan from the beginning, and Sam’s been just the right person” for furthering that.
Photo by Thomas Crone
“I don’t want to pretend to have a full kitchen,” Whitsitt says. “But there are things we can do with convection burners, that we can cook in a pot, like syrups, soups, and chilis.”
Ticking down a list of farm items that are currently featured in KHC fare, or will be shortly, Whitsitt draws on a notebook’s long list: lettuces for salads, kale and collards for smoothies (“which have been surprisingly popular”), lavender, oregano, parsley, eggplant, potatoes, squash, corn, peppers. KHC’s chilled gazpacho, sweet potato soup and eggplant chili, all of which will appear at some point in the year, liberally pull ingredients from the KHC farm. In addition to chickens, the farm also features beehives; 60 pounds of honey were harvested last year, though honey from a resettled colony hasn’t been pulled yet in 2017.
The chickens and bees share the farm with a pair of non-production animals, as well: Rodgers and Whitsitt adopted a stray dog, now named Louisa, who roams the garden’s pathways, often in search of Shelly, a box turtle that appeared last year and emerged from hibernation this spring.
