- hello and welcome to our november hawkeye lunch and learn lecture. today, nate kaeding is goingto present food and community with his partners, douggoettsch and benjamin smart. nate kaeding attendedthe university of iowa as a student athlete, andgraduated with a bachelors in history and a secondary education, social studies teaching certificate from the college of education.
as placekicker for the iowa hawkeyes, nate set school recordsand earned academic and athletic all-american honors. after graduating, he wenton to play for the nfl and was recently votedinto the university of iowa athletics hall of fame in 2014. after his career in the nfl,nate moved back to iowa city and enrolled in the university of iowa tippie executive mba program,
and he recently graduated this may. nate has played a part in opening several downtown businesses in iowa city, including short's burger & shine, tailgate and pullman bar & diner. he also currently serves theiowa city downtown district as the retail development director. doug goettsch comes to iowacity from a position of director of corporate relationsat the culinary institute
of america in napa valley. he's corporate chef athawkeye food service. he's also a managingpartner at big grove brewery in solon, iowa , and ofcourse a partner in pullman bar & diner as well. benjamin smart was an executive sous chef at herbfarm restaurant, whichis one of only 42 restaurants in the country to earn the mobile 5-diamond restaurant award.
he's also the executivechef at big grove brewery, and a chef and partnerat pullman bar & diner. so please welcome orplease join me in welcoming nate, doug and ben. (applause) - awesome, thank you, jade. thank you everybody for coming. i know there's nothing more subjective, yeah, you got to standup, sit down either way.
we're going to kind of passthe baton around a little bit for the talk, but i knowthere's nothing more subjective or personal than food. everybody has an opinion. go online to yelp, there'sno shortage of opinions, and people are not hesitantabout sharing them either. but i get asked often, especially when i was playing football and now when i'm done, why in the hell
would you get involved with restaurants? everybody sees those asinvestments, you know, that's like throwing money out the window. i get asked that on occasion, but really, starting with short's,and then now most recently with pullman, it's really beena true labor of love for me, an investment that's reallybeen sort of a double, triple bottom line investment for me. it's been, first and foremost, obviously,
it's a business, so youhave to work to get a return on your investment, but it's also, for me, been a great way to providesomething for the community and help build a vibrantdynamic community, and that's really beenthe driving factor for me to get involved with investingand trying to give guys like ben and doug a placeto do their thing here in the community, andthat's really what our focus today is going to be on, isjust food and our community,
and just touching on avariety of different things, but really looking at therestaurant as a vessel and a conduit as a connection, the restaurant as a connector. not only do restaurantsconnect us to our community, they also connect us to eachother while we're dining, and they also serve as aconnection to our food, whether it be local food, or at pullman, we have an open kitchen, youcan see that the food prepared
in front of you. so all those things, bothcommunity connecting us with each other and thenconnecting us with our food, are three ways that restaurantsplay an important part as a connector in our daily lives. i think it's important tostart, first and foremost, with defining what a community is. a community, at least in mymind, is something that both tangible and intangible.
it's a geographic boundary. we have an iowa citycommunity, we have a downtown iowa city community. us here in iowa thinkof ourselves as iowans, we have an iowan community, but it's also this sort of feeling. it's something that's intangible as well. being an iowan is not only a boundary. we associate that to bepeople who are hard-working
and honest and humble. there's feelings that goinvolved with being part of a community as well. so when you startthinking about restaurants and what their role is in the community, we have to think, if we want to look at it through to the lens of downtowns,we start thinking about, well, then why are downtownsimportant when we start building community?
and as we take a stepback, we start at the top, and what are downtowns orurban environment in general? they're dense and they're diverse. we bring people in from alldifferent walks of life. it's a very different city. you walk around downtown iowacity, you're going to see a very diverse make up. we have a certain density, we got people, we've got a thousandpeople that live downtown,
we've got 18,000 people thatwork downtown on a daily basis. and if you go to bigger cities, obviously, that's on a whole different scale. so that density and diversitydrives collaboration. and really, tony hsieh,the owner of zappos, calls the collision. so as you walk in andyou go into java house, you might run into somebodythat you wouldn't normally see, a friend, that you wouldn'tget the sort of collision
and interaction in adifferent sort of setting. so that sort of densitydrives that collaboration, and through that comesinnovation and ideas, and that's really thecapital of the 21st century, and that's what we're trying to create in downtown iowa city,and that's what you see across the united statesand across the world is, the history of downtowns usedto be manufacturing centers, they're all connectedthrough waterways and rivers
and they made things and theyshipped them back and forth to each other, but today,in the internet age and the technology age, by allthese people being together, they're able to collaborateon a daily basis. that's what creates thisinnovation and all these new ideas. so that's why downtowns are important. now why are restaurants important for our urban environments? that's when you really getinto how you attract people
from different walks of life,what makes the street-level culture vibrant. and i'm a big believer in,having lived in san diego for nine years and traveled around the us and around the world, i'm afood guy and think of those that aren't really superpassionate about food too, everybody has their favorite restaurant or their coffee shop orthere's these amenities that people have becomeaccustomed to in different
urban environments, whetherit's the yoga studio or the grocery store ormore practical things like the corner gasstation that sells tampons and busch light, whateveryou need on a daily basis. now that's s what we have in the downtown and our urban environments. so for me, in our store withpullman, we started back, doug, ben and i and acouple other partners, matt swift, who ownsseveral restaurants in town,
big grove brewery that dougand ben are involved with, red's alehouse in northliberty, blackstone, 30hop. we got together and we triedto figure out, you know, what's missing in the downtownscene here in iowa city? figure out where thatwhitespace is, look at trends across the us, figure outwhat sort of restaurant can we provide, what sortof experience was missing? and we kind of identifiedthe diner experience as something that we thoughtfelt a little bit of a void
here in downtown iowa city. and when i say experience,we kind of wanted to, it was more about just the food, it was about creating an atmosphere. we went through a lot oflengths with the design. we spent several monthsand a lot of money on creating this diner feelwhere you look inside there and the kitchen's open,it house that long feel, like a pullman dining car.
the diners trace theirroots back to dining cars, that's where the name came from. so just kind of enactingthat, but then also in a fun environment andatmosphere that people came in and just trying to createthat great experience. so like anything, thechallenge was finding the right location that fit that. we needed a tight, kind of narrow space, and luckily, there was anorange leaf frozen yogurt
that put a sign up at the end of the fall, saying, "be back in thespring," and come about may, the sign was still up there and the lights hadn't turn back on, so we kindof sniffed out that location and approached the building owner, and we are off and running. for us, the creation of thisrestaurant and that experience was a way for us to add tothe street-level culture of our downtown environmentand try to create a place
that we felt our communitywould embrace and we felt that it would also besomething that people would celebrate when theycome in from out of town and be a point of pride fornot only us, but everybody. and one thing that's really at the core of our business model as we move forward, and just a part of our ethosaltogether is what we call kind of the power of the partnership. we set out and we wanted tonot only think about how,
why people would come inand dine in our restaurant. we wanted to figure out how us at pullman could serve our communityand the people around us. we really felt like it was important. we talked to a bunch of people, the arts and culture communityneed a place to congregate, we host an arts breakfastonce a month where we provide scones and coffee for everybody, little village, theunesco writers workshop,
iowa city public library. we get 20, 25 people that come in and just meet and congregate. we try to use our restaurantas a place for them to gather and get together and chat. we had andre perry, who'sthe executive director of the englert theatre, andcreated our music playlist and went through andcreated 1600 different songs that we could play.
if this is a sunday brunchand it's raining outside, these are the 50 songs you need to play. if it's a happening in saturday night and the hawkeyes justwon, play this playlist. we've just been able toprovide people with a place where they can come in andput their own footprint on it and collaborate. we've done a reallycool, ben and chef sepehr at the restaurant did a greatpartnership with filmscene,
which is our localindependent movie theater, where they went and watched the movie, the chef with filmscene, andthen came back and we converted pullman into kind of like a food truck. i don't know if peoplehave seen that movie, but a restaurateur quitshis job at a fancy place and goes and starts afood truck where he serves cuban sandwiches. so they came back and thensepehr and ben cooked up
all these great food items from the movie and used that as sort of acollaborative environment too. so that's really at thebackbone and the core of our business, is waysthat we can help serve our community, helppartner with other entities around the community and just be a good, good partner overall. i'm going to hand it off todoug now in a little bit, and they're going to chata little bit more about
just how the restaurantworks on a day-to-day basis. doug's going to talk a littlebit about the front house, and how he helps create that atmosphere, and then, of course, ben'sgoing to talk a little bit about the food. - thanks, nate. thanks for everybody coming out today. nate came to us, ben and i with this, actually, i probably don't even need this,
except for the camera (mumbles). so we want to talkabout the social aspect, the social function ofa modern restaurant. and to kind of frame why iwanted to talk about this, is my job as the directorof corporate relations for the culinary instituteof america in napa valley was basically i flew around the country, took people out to eatand ask them for money. and it's a pretty goodjob, i'm not going to lie.
i had no intention of moving back to iowa, so i was exposed to a lot of different types of service, types of restaurants, some extremely high end,some of the best restaurants in the united states, and somefood trucks that we went to. but the idea of the socialfunction of the modern restaurant and what the role it plays in, first, i'd like to say,a lot of the times, the restaurants are the first ones to move
into marginal restaurantsthat need to be revitalized. a good friend of mine,(mumbles) owns a restaurant in downtown manhattan. he was the first place there, it was the old meatpacking industry. he was next to a biker bar. we went down there and sawhim about two years ago, and it's like mardi gras down there now with all the young, hip happening,
kids that are running around, and he's getting priced outof his own neighborhood. he opened up a restaurant in brooklyn, right on the end of where gentrification is kind of rolling through brooklyn. what does he open there? affordable rent. the other reason? that's where all the kids canlive, so these millennials
that are moving to newyork for the big experience and the big chance at tryingto grab the brass ring. they're there, and they're serving him. it was so much so that whenhe told me when i call him, i said, "hey, i'm leaving the restaurant," and he goes, "don'tturn left, turn right." he's like, "you'll find a cab right, "you won't find a cab left." so that's a real core elementthat restaurants serve,
because we're always lookingfor the least expensive land, especially in major metro areas. it's the gathering spotof the millennials. like i said, it's usuallywhere these kids are. downtown iowa city rightnow is really trying hard to bring people back in. i think there's been a lot of development. they're trying to kind ofreverse the brain drain that's leaving, keeping these people here.
to keep them here, you haveto give them entertainment and fun things to do. it's also the firstgeneration that doesn't cook. about 15 years ago, moneyspent outside the home surpassed money spent in grocery stores. it's what i call themac & cheese generation. that was kind of their versionof what they could cook. and also, we have like thedecline of the country clubs and social fraternities, sothey're looking for a place
to gather, and restaurantsserve that purpose. it's over good food and good alcohol. the common area is kindof the modern club, and it's the idea behindthe fact that now, they have a common social area,somewhere to dine and eat, and it's also that idea thatthey found something first and they want to bringtheir friends to it. i love that when i hear that from, whether it's when i'm atpullman or whether i'm at
big grove and people are like,"oh, i brought my friends in "from out of town and theythought they were still "in chicago or san francisco." so that's what we strive forkind of at our restaurants. the shared experience of communal dining. that's a bigger play inthe major metro markets because they don't have thesquare footage that we have the luxury of in our restaurants,but it's still growing. i have a friend of minethat owns three restaurants
in chicago, bill kim. he opened up his firstrestaurant, had two tables in it. there were 18 tops and youcould only sit 36 people. but you force interaction this way too, and he sold 350 bowls oframen the first day he opened. it was him, his wife and one dishwasher, and he quickly knew thathe was onto something, but he quickly knew that hecouldn't sustain this too. but it's that shared space thatpeople are comfortable with.
you can see that at the front of pullman. the tables are closer together. there's 17 counter seatsthere, it's the old kind of diner feel of sitting at thecounter and rubbing elbows with whoever is next to you. it's that notion that a greatmeal is a shared experience, so i really like that part. you want to bump to thenext one there, nate? the biggest thing isthe approach to service
and what we take, it's brokeninto two parts in our staff and our guests. the approach to servicethat i like to take is you have to be willingto subjugate yourself to serve people, and i love it. i love it. i tell people all the time,i throw a party every day. i open the door, i serve thebest food, the best beer, the best drinks, weplay really cool music,
you get to hang out withcool guys like this. i'm 15 years older than theseguys, so it's the only thing that keeps me young. but it's the idea that we look for people that want to do that. we want to deliver an experience. we set an expectation anddeliver an experience. so we hire for attitude, train for skill. i want people to havepersonality, that are outgoing,
that are like me that wantto go up to a table and say, "gosh, we've got thisawesome special that ben "created tonight, this cool desert, "so make sure you save room." so as long as they have that attitude and they're willing toserve, and they're outgoing and personable, i can trainthem the skill set that i want and give them theinformation that they need. and that is the key toit all, is the knowledge.
we intentionally kindof put words on our menu that help facilitate education. i don't want to shove fooddown people's throats, literally or figuratively. i want them to come into big grove, and i always say, the centerof the menu is approachable. you can get a burger andfries and a busch light if you want, i don't care, as long as you're buying that from me,
i don't care what you'redrinking, you know? i'm a brewery but it's stillabout opening that door as wide as possible to asmany people as possible. and i don't ever want tocome off as a snob and saying you have to know this,but if somebody says, "what's mostardo," i wantmy server to be able to say, "oh, it's this, it's really cool, "it's served on our charcuterieand it helps balance "the fat of the cheese andthe meats that are on there
"and it's made in-house." you know, almost everythingon our menus is made in-house, so they have to deliver thatknowledge to the guests, otherwise the guest just goes,"wow, this is really good," but they don't know why. they don't know why ourprosciutto is phenomenal, it's sourced here in iowa. so that then gives, theamount of time and effort that goes into our foodhas to be communicated,
and it's also about thesourcing, which ben will speak to a little bit more in depth. then it goes to the guests,and what you try to do is create a family memberout of those guests. you want those people to, i always tell people when they say, "well, i had a problem tonight." "well, awesome, i got bigshoulders and thick skin, "tell me what's wrong,"because all that i worry about
is when they walk outthat door, they're happy. even if something badhappened at the restaurant, i'll fix it, i'll buy their dinner, i'll buy them a gift certificate. i'll fall on a swordbecause at a certain age, you're like, "i'mconfident in what we do." sometimes we screw up. we did sunday, i got anemail from a gentleman that got up and left the restaurant.
i emailed him back. i want to make connectionswith these people and make sure that theyknow that the owner, managing partner is thereevery night, every day, making sure that their experienceis what i want delivered. so the buy-in then becomes, when you we get those guestsin there and they become your advocates, they'reyour best advertisement. they go out and tell their friends.
last night, i had somebody say, "what you've done forsolon here is amazing." because i always said i wanted big grove to be the economic anchorfor the redevelopment of downtown solon. since we've opened, two otherrestaurants have moved in. another restaurant relocated downtown, and they built a new cityhall right across from us. it looks totally differentthan it did two years ago.
so you also want customersto feel like they work there. we do a lot of charity events. a lot of times, we auctionthem off at golf tournaments and things and one of theguys, his name is mike, he buys every one that we do. so we roll this big,cool, custom-made table into the brewery, we clean the brewery up, and him and his eight buddiessit down and ben makes all kinds of cool food forthem and they get to sit there
and talk to the brewer and they drink, and this is that sense ofcommunity that you get, and he came in with a biggrove brewery shirt on. he goes, "i tell everybody i work here." that's when you knowyou have people, like, buying into what you're doing, and it's all about thefact that i was there, the brewer was there, theassistant brewer was there, ben was in the kitchen,all he had to do is look
through the window, benis bringing them food, and so you're gettingthat customer to buy in and they're going to be the advocates. some of you are probably familiar with my friend'srestaurant, the wig & pen. my niece told me a long time ago, "when we walk in therewith you, it's like walking "into norm, or walkinginto cheers with norm," and that's what we try to create
for all these customers too. the other part of it thatweights heavily into it is creating the atmosphere and culture. will you skip back to that one, of the outside shot of pullman, nate? because i think this is... the one big thing thatmost people don't realize is that out of this partnership, faye swift, her brother, george,
is a nationally renowned architect. he's designed all of therestaurants in their portfolio, all six of the restaurants. youngest man, youngestarchitect ever to be inducted into their national hall of fame. so we have a steep familydiscount, thank goodness, because... so what you get is theaesthetic like this. so when you're setting thetone at the front door,
i always said, "humans arevisual animals, they see this." pullman, i think, doesthis better than probably any of our other places. i like the barn wood door onbig grove, but this right here, you're in a restaurantbefore you ever step in physically to the restaurant. it pulls you in and you can see all the way to the backdoor, all the kitchen, and if the kitchen door isopen, you can see all the way
to the alley, and it'sa warm, welcoming decor. it's things that you want to touch. people will walk up and touch the bar here or touch the bar at big grove. and immediately, when they get in there, they get a sense of, "this is cool." the signature elementslike the entry glass or the glass entryway, our massive bar; 30hops, you know, massive stonefeatures, all these things,
you don't always notice,you just like them. and we pay a lot of attention to lighting. you can see the lighting, the fixtures. also, every lightswitchin all the restaurants is on a dimmer. and the further into the evening you go, the lower the lights go, themusic changes a little bit, and it's what... a good friend of mine said,"what's your subliminal
"take away from your restaurant?" people leave there and theygo, "the place was awesome." they might not know why, butit's all of those little things that add up to one big experience. i was in napa, and michael chiarello spoketo our group one time and he was talking about designinghis flagship restaurant, bottega, which i just tookben to, two weeks ago. and he was interviewing allof these design companies,
and he had a woman thatcame to him and he said, "what are you going to do tomake my restaurant stand out?" she said, "i'm going to make every woman "that walks in this door look beautiful." and that was the designerthat he went with. and so ben and i walkedthrough the restaurant, and all of the tables, theroom was exceedingly dark, but spots were buried up inprobably about a 15-foot ceiling that shone down on the table.
there was no harsh lighting,everything felt warm and fuzzy, it was like youwere looking into a movie set. so that's what we tried... we tried to give the total experience. it's all about creatingthe atmosphere and culture, the service and then the food. and the food is where this guy excels. and i say this over and over,probably to his embarrassment, but honest to god, i'vetraveled all over the country,
i've eaten in the best restaurants, he's one of the best youngchefs in the country, and we got him back here. so ben smart. - wow. so yeah, i didn't know what iwanted to be when i grew up. i didn't know i wanted to be a chef. i always liked food. i was always kind of drawn to it,
and i've cooked a lot ofyears before i finally made it to this place, it's calledthe herbfarm restaurant, and it's just outside ofseattle, about 15 minutes. and before i got there, i really feel like i didn't know anything,because this place is so unique and so life-changingthat it just hooked me, and that's kind of where ideveloped my entire ethos about food. but backing up, when i was young,
i did not have like much ofa food culture to speak of. my mom was a vegetarian, andshe had a very distinct taste and she often was eatingsomething entirely different than the rest of the family. my dad would always comein and he would just look in the cupboards and i would say, "there's nothing to eat,"and he would just start pulling stuff out and whipping up dinner and 30 minutes later, wehad a pretty good meal.
so that always fascinated me. and for some reason, when i was young, like elementary school, i would come home and instead of watchingcartoons, i would watch great chefs great cities on pbs. i don't know why, i was drawn to the bright, clean kitchensand the chef whites and the tall hats, and it wasjust this really bizarre world that i was just fascinated by.
but i was always really goodin school, good at math, good at science. graduated high school and,just like a lot of people, decided to go to the university of iowa. i loved being outsideso i ultimately ended up in geo science, whichis where i met my wife. but after i graduated witha bachelor of science, i got a real job andrealized pretty quickly that eight hours of staringat a computer screen
was not something that i wanted to do. it wasn't all just like standingoutside on the mountains like walking around,field mapping all day. so i thought real hardabout what my next step was, and i remember having alate night conversation with my wife. we may or may not have beenout at the bars all night, (audience chuckling) but i remember looking at her and saying,
"i think that i want to cook. "i think i want to go back toschool and learn how to cook," and she kind of just lookedback at me like it was the most obvious thing ever, andshe said, "you can." and i don't know why i neverthought about it that way. i mean, it's so simple, but ithink i invested so much time and money into getting my degree, that i felt like i just neededto keep going that path. but after she said that tome, it kind of stirred in me
and the next day i woke up,shook it off a little bit, got myself together and startedlooking in culinary schools. ultimately, i decided not to go to the cia or any of these other reallyfancy, le cordon bleu, and i just went to kirkwood. i mean, the price made sense. (chuckles) i mean, you can beat it, we have one of the bestculinary schools in the country,
and it's one of only acouple that have their own fully functioning hotel. it's a four-diamond hotel, and that four-diamonddistinction is actually, like... that's on a strict set of standards, so it's not because it'srun by culinary students, it's actually a really,really well-run hotel. so after that, i endedup working in takanami. a lot of people know takanami.
and before, it was kind ofa teppanyaki restaurant. it was actually ran by a chef who came, a local guy who worked inchicago for charlie trotter for a handful of years, and charlie trotter is one of these chefs that's like iconic americanchefs that really changed the entire landscape of american cuisine. he passed away a few yearsago, but eric was the first one that kind of taught mehow to cook from scratch
and make sauces and make stocks from like, the raw ingredients,and that was something i had never seen before. it was always just open acan of this, and i mean, we weren't even seasoning anything. i remember actually, i wish matt was here because he loves hearingme say this story. i was working at sluggers,it was my first job and i remember gettingin an argument with him
because we were taking beefbase, like minor's beef base, and painting it on steaks to grill it. and i was like, why are we doing this? like, why don't we just seasonit with salt and pepper? it's already steak, i don'tunderstand what we're doing. and he's like, "well, not everyone goes "to culinary school, ben,and not everyone knows "how to season food," and i was like, "why don't we teach them,like, why don't we do this?"
he's come a long way too in the past. we were both very youngwhen this happened. but ultimately, i moved tokansas city with my wife, she got a job, and ibasically spent a lot of time just researching the bestrestaurants that i could, and i kind of pinnedit down to one of two, and i went and did what's called a stage, which is basically you work for free, it's like an indentured servant,
they make you peel shallots all day just for the chance to get a job. and the chef at the time, soit's the american restaurant, the chef at the time,her name was celina tio, she had literally just won, like, the month before i started,a james beard award for best chef midwest,which is a huge deal. i mean, one the most prestigiousawards a chef can get is a james beard award.
so i was working for her andeverything i thought i knew at takanami, i was relearning everything. and i think every point in my career, i left one job thinking i knew like a ton, and then started the next andrealized that i had no idea what i was doing. so on the tail end ofher winning that award, she decided to open her own restaurant. but before she did, we were doing
a share our strength event. it's a culinary eventto end childhood hunger, to raise money tosupport childhood hunger, and all the chefs would gofrom one another's restaurants and cook and have a charityevent to raise all this money, and i remember meetingthe chef of the herbfarm, and his name was keith luce, at the time. and he had worked for pierre gagnaire in europe, who's a threemichelin star chef,
and he had worked allover in the united states. he'd won james beard awards. he was the executive souschef at the white house under the clintonadministration for, like, when he was 23 or 24. i mean, he was just a chef's chef. he was the most technically sound, had the most finesse, it was just... i could see that he was head and shoulders
above these other chefs,and i knew that i wanted to work for him. and so he's out in seattle and i told my wife i wanted togo out there and do a stage. and she looks at me and just says, "well, if you go, you knowwe're going to live in seattle." i'm like, "well, maybe, maybe not." she's like, "no, we'regoing to live in seattle." and i think that i knew that we would,
but going out there, it wasjust such a different place and i got to the herbfarm,they have their own five and a half-acre farm where they grew vegetables, obviously, for the restaurant. they raise pigs, and we actually performed field slaughters on themand made charcuterie. i mean, it was a full experience. it was life-changing in somany ways to be able to see from the beginning tothe end, the entire...
these things that the processorskind of keep away from us, i think it's important in some way to know what truly goes on ifyou're going to eat meat to know that, that's where it comes from. so that was a very learning moment. we made cheeses, we madewild yeasted breads, but the biggest thing was the farm. and ultimately, when iwas the sous chef there, a huge part of my job wasweekly walking the farm,
spending a day on it and justkind of seeing what's growing, seeing what's coming up,seeing what's going to be next, and we were writing menusevery two to three weeks. we would do an entirely new menu. so, like, by the time wewere dialing in one menu, we were already writingthe menu for the next week. it was just this really intense process. but when you start dealingwith food on that level and you're constantly watching it grow
and seeing it from likelittle seedlings to shoots and then ultimately theplant and then it'll bolt after it's produced a fruit, which means it just shootsup and becomes a flower and then ultimately, seeds? you kind of start tosee the whole lifecycle and you start to think about, well, what could i do with the shoots? what can i do with the stems?
i mean, we're not justthrowing them all away. it doesn't all come in a box ready to go, like from pfg or cisco. i mean, there's so muchmore to the plant than just the fruit or vegetable that it produces. and so we would startjust doing weird things, like take green strawberriesand brine them like olives or pickle them, or takethe little shoots off elderberry flowers andpickle those in red wine.
we didn't use lemon. like, it was a really, likesuper locavore restaurant, and we want to kind ofdifferentiate our food so we basically shirked all citrus. and to provide acid, we weremaking (mumbles) out of, like, unripened green grapes. so we do 100-mile dinner every year, which is we literally limitourselves to every molecule coming from within 100 miles of the center
of the restaurant. and we wanted to make a yeasted bread, and i remember, ron, the owner, figured out that the oldtribes would take deer antler and grind them down. i guess deer antler, there'sso much calcium carbonate that when it mixed in withthe flour and the water, it would actually leaven with biscuits. so we were making deer antler biscuits.
just strange things and some of it worked, and some of it didn't,but the number one thing that this place taught me was just not to be afraidof doing things yourself. it doesn't intrinsicallymean that what we do is better than what someone else does, because there's lots ofgood artisan purveyors that you can buy great food from, but what it does is itgives us our own unique
culinary voice. and i've been cookingthis way for so long that i don't really even thinkabout what we do is different until i see it through thelens of a new staff member who is just shocked that wemake everything in-house. we make our aioli for our sandwiches. goodbye mayonnaise, butit's a big difference. you start adding allthese building blocks up and ultimately, no one canmake the food that we do.
and i think there's somethingreally cool about that when there's so manyrestaurants that try to be like one another, that it'sfun to try to shirk that and kind of go my ownpath and do our own thing. i remember, i knew that big grove, when we where opening that,was 180 seats plus a patio. it ended up being, like, 240 seats. i went from cooking 60 covers a night, to like, on a friday or saturday, we'll do
800 or 900 covers, which is crazy. and if i would've knownthat when i first started, i would've probably never taken the job. like that's the honest truth. and we were looking into the buns. i mean, we're doing hamburgers and we know that's going to be our number one seller, so where do we get the buns? the bun that i wanted to buy
was just really, really price... it was just really pricey,so we couldn't afford it, and the one that wecould afford was just not where i wanted it to be,and, like, i remember i was drinking bourbon one night and just thinking about therestaurant and i'm just like, "...we'll do it ourselves." i'm sorry, forgive me.(audience laughing) we'll do it ourselves, and iremember there was that moment,
it was maybe very naive,but it's also very true to kind of my personal beliefs, and yeah, it's a huge pain. sometimes i worry that my baker is just going to lose it one day, but we do all our own buns at big grove and we do our rye bread and our biscuits and our pizza dough andour pretzels and flat bread and semolina dough.
i mean, there's so manythings that we do in-house that i don't thinkenough people know about, but it's not really the pointto tell people how cool we are and how much stuff we do in-house. it's just, it's good forthe craft of cooking. and when i have new cookscome in and work for me, that's what keeps them there. that's what keeps them flipping burgers and selling chicken wingsand all that stuff that we do
to pay the bills, becausethey want to learn how to make the bread. they want to learn how tomake the chicken ballantines that we're doing on our entres. they want to learn all the coolstuff that there is to learn because cooking is kind of a lost art. if we want to go to the next slide. like doug kind of mentioned, in years past, everyonekind of knew how to cook.
if you were eating meat,it's probably because you raised animals orbecause you knew someone who raised animals. and i think that as time wenton, that was kind of lost. post-world war ii, there wasa lot of industrialization, a lot of jobs, everyonewas going back to work, and there was a huge changein the way that people produced food and it started becoming incredibly processed.
there was lots of canning going on, and it was kind of thought ofas, like, the new revolution and everybody was really excited. and i think that we'vekind of realized now that we were wrong a little bit. i mean, there's a lot of health benefits to eating the natural foods. and a lot of those vitaminsand the healthful ingredients are kind of strippedof what they once were
when you process them to that level. so i think it's reallyimportant that restaurants, as we kind of... everything starts in the coast. the coast have been doingfood from scratch for so long, and we've kind of beenstaying here in the middle, in the midwest with meat and potatoes, and there's nothing wrong with that. well-prepared food is well-prepared food.
i always tell doug that just because i have a fancy word likegnocchi on the menu, it's just a potato dumpling,and it's the way you present it to somebody that makes all the difference. but one thing, and he told me... no, doug, go back for a second. so doug was telling methat he was at a conference with naturipe, is that right? naturipe and mcdonald's,if you even ever question
the amount of reach orinfluence and buying power that a corporate restaurant can have, mcdonald's decided to putblueberries on their menu, on like a granola cup. and when they made thatdecision, they bought the entire north american crop of blueberries. i mean, i was shocked to hear that. and honestly, like, kind of angry. i mean, it doesn't seem likeone business or corporation
should have so much controlover what's available to us. i mean, obviously, blueberriesare still available from farmer's markets and other sources, but just the fact thatthey could eat it all up in one purchase was shocking to me. there's obvious healthbenefits from eating from scratch foods. when you have r&d chefsfor big corporations, they're paid to figure out how to make
sub-quality ingredients taste good. and they're doing thatby adding lots of sodium, where it doesn't need tobe, sugar, preservatives, additives, all thesethings that they're putting into the food so that it's shelf stable and you can sit on it for months and they're not losing costand they're not losing profits because stuff is going bad on the shelves. so from my part, it's nice to be able to,
having learned thiscraft, kind of help teach people who are interested,how to cook again. and i think it's really important too, if you want to go to the next slide, one of our huge underlyingethos at big grove and pullman, is local as much as possible, as much as is financially responsible. and there's a lot of reasons for that. i mean, the obvious one is
if it's cooked here or if it's grown here, it's obviously fresherbecause it doesn't have to travel very far, soyou don't have very much of a carbon input,imprint, yeah, footprint. but also, it's good to kindof build those relationships locally with these peoplewho like, kroul farms and tiny but mighty popcorn. i mean, it takes time tobuild all these relationships to get the highest-qualityingredients into our restaurants.
it's the better part of twoand a half years later, almost, since big grove started,and we're now on the verge of sourcing all of our chicken and pork from a local guy south of donnellson from heartland family fresh, which supplies 100% ofthe chicken for pullman and all the pork belliesfor all of our bacon. and it's a good quality ingredients. it's local, it feels good,
it also connects us tothat community, you know, and we can put that onour menu and probably say, like, these guys arelocal iowa farmers who are making great products. we don't need to buy tomatoes from mexico in the middle of summer, you know? so there's a lot of reasonswhy i think local is great. there's also, you know, i'll be honest, there's a lot of pitfalls andchallenges to working local.
you know, if i couldcall one person and order everything i need for myrestaurant, it's really easy, i don't have to worry about it. but if i have to call 10 different people for 10 different thingsand i have to remember this guy only likes to dodeliveries on tuesday and you know, and then you got farmers coming in, inthe middle of service, 7:30 on a friday night...
but it happens, but it's worth it. it's all worth it. (laughs) you think it doesn't happen,it absolutely happens. (doug muttering) yeah. but at the end of the day, it's something we truly believe in, and i think, just like those interconnectednetworks that we have
with filmscene and englert theater and andre perry, i mean,it's the same reason why we like to work with localfarmers like matt kroul and anything but green farms. we get all our mushrooms locally, so i think that you can all see how, like, a seemingly simpleconcept like a restaurant is obviously a lot more multifaceted than you would ever think interms of community and culture,
both just in terms of whatwe put into as restaurateurs into the lighting and theambiance and the decor, and also the food that we choose to serve and the menus that we write. but then obviously, there'sthe socioeconomical standpoint and the fact they we'rehelping kind of set trends, change the way peoplemight think about food, that restaurants have ahuge impact in our community and it's an industrythat i'm extremely proud
to be a part of. yeah, that's all i got. - thanks, ben. we're going to open itup for some questions. i think we have about 10 more minutes. yes? - [voiceover] for the chef, i was heartened to hear your comments regarding the contents of packaged food,
particularly the sodium and the sugar. - mm-hmm. (audience member muttering) - right. - [voiceover] what do youdo when you are cooking your own food to makesure those kind of things are under control? and then i say that as a consumer because it would be nice to be ableto walk into a restaurant
and not worry about whetheryou're committing suicide. - right, no, that's a... you know, it's interesting. it's actually something thati kinda wanted to hit on a little bit. it's the processed foodsthat really get you because they hide so much in there and it comes in lots of forms. it doesn't always, like, taste salty,
so you can have chips that taste seasoned, but you'd be amazed howmuch sodium is in them. our taste buds, over time,like during evolution, were forms that we canhave receptors for sodium. it's actually a huge partof cellular respiration. so our body needs acertain amount of sodium, and our tongues kind of know that level. each person kind of knows that level. so when i'm cooking, and ibelieve that when you're cooking
from scratch and you'renot adding a lot of preprocessed things, ifyou're seasoning lightly to bring out flavor andit's not salty but you're seasoning lightly, i don'tthink you're overdoing it. now if you are already predisposed to having issues with sodium, perhaps that your doctorsrecommended that you limit your intake, oftentimes, at restaurants, we're trying to make the foodtaste as good as possible,
so there's not a lot of,like, low-sodium options, but the fact that we'renot adding all of these processed, highly seasoned things, i think that it's going to, same with fat, i think that there's, like, alevel that's healthy you know? so i just try to be real conscious about not over-seasoning anythingand then just using raw ingredients and buildingblocks so that you know when you come in, you're notgetting a bunch of canned stuff
that i opened and justdumped more salt into. but you know, salt is one of those things, it's a very personal preference. what i think tasteperfect, you might think is under seasoned, oryou might think is salty. so everybody kind of has their own range. as a chef, i kind of learnedto develop a thick skin too because it's one of the fewthings that someone will come into your place ofwork and then tell you
how bad of a job you did, or you know, or how great of a job. but they're very open with their opinions, and food is something that we all have to eat on a daily basis, and people have very strongly-held opinions and so i don't try to tellanyone that their opinion is wrong or less valid than mine, but i'm also entitled to my own opinion
and as a chef, all i can do is cook food that i think is delicious and hopefully, hopefully, other people agree. any other questions? - [voiceover] yeah, mike carberry, a johnson county supervisor, we just saw hired a full-timelocal foods coordinator. - is that shanti?- [voiceover] yes. - oh, i know shanti.
- [voiceover] oh, yes. can you talk a little bitmore about how local foods, the use of local foodsor local restaurants is good for the localeconomy to maybe make... - well, yeah. i mean, i mean, i couldpass it to nate too, but i think that in general, we vote with our dollars. and when someone like shanti,
who also owns muddy miss farms, is growing vegetables, she'sgrowing on a smaller scale than a lot of these otherplaces that have huge farms. and so she will often, hercosts incurred are higher per amount of vegetablesthat she's able to produce. and so we as the consumer are going to have tovote with our dollars. her tomatoes might be alittle bit more per pound than the organic tomatoes or the tomatoes
from mexico or california, but if we're putting ourmoney back into the community, obviously that keeps her farm from going under, and thatkeeps other farmers in business. but we have to realize that eating local is a commitment, not just to do it but alsolike there's value in that and you have to be ableto stomach the fact that you might have topay a little bit extra,
and that's the fact of the matter. - just in addition tothat, you guys heard all the different processesthat ben has to go through and his staff to get local food prepared, and i think, mike, icommend the county for taking steps to make localfood more accessible, but i think a big thing that we don't have is affordable local foodthat's non-processed. down at our farmers market in iowa city,
you can't bring food stampsinto the farmers market and use that to buy local produce there, and that's not the case inevery town and every place. that's something we want to work towards is making this localfood, the healthy food, accessible for people ofall different incomes, find out ways to do it. so i commend you guys fortaking those first steps and all of us in the foodcommittee want to continue
to make steps towards makingthat stuff more accessible for everybody in our community. so it's certainly a touch point, but i mean, the benefits are obvious. i think it's the economic benefit, keeping those dollars here, and then the ripple effectof people seeing folks like shanti and kroul farms,these food entrepreneurs, all of our brewers, all of our distillers,
cedar ridge is doing amazing things there. they just underwent amillion-dollar expansion up in swisher. they're looking to buildmore because their demand is even higher. they're talking about using... they just switched toall-local, non-gmo corn to do their bourbon, sowe have amazing people, amazing entrepreneursworking in the food space.
so the more that do it, themore that it's successful, it's going to continue togrow and who's better to build a food economy than iowa, really, right? so we've got a lot of peopledoing some great things, so it's good to kind of be a part of it. yeah? - [voiceover] so i don'twant you to give up any trade secrets. you've got like quite a few new projects
going in restaurants whichstrengthens the (mumbles) in iowa city. i wonder if you guys as a team sort of see some other needs on the horizon or other, like, niches thathaven't been filled yet, that you're like, "that'sthe new idea that's cooking "for the near future or distant future." - yeah, there's plenty of stuff. i mean, the restaurantenvironment is always evolving,
and that's the cool thingabout being in downtown. whenever i go to a bigger city, i mean, the options are just unbelievable. i was out in portland andseattle a few months ago, and it's like your head is spinning. i mean, there's so many good... you can't do it all in a week, right? i think our focus downtown right now is to get more chef-driven, focused,
ethnic food downtown. i think we've got good ethnic food, but it's stuff that hasa very precise focus. i think we'd love to see more of that, whether it's thai or indian or mexican or those different thingsthat you go to new york city, you get an amazing, go toan amazing asian restaurant or fusion or something along those lines. so continue to move that forward that way.
and we talked a lot about, you know, i don't want to call ben's food fancy, but stuff that has a littlebit of a different... he always gets mad at mewhen i use that word about the dishes that come out andthey look pretty, some of them. but i mean, the greatthing about being (mumbles) community too is i can gowith my buddies and i can go to george's and have a hamand sterzing's potato chips made in iowa and a steamed cheeseburger,
and i'll be pretty damn happywith that too, you know? not all of it has to be someof the bells and whistles that go into it. i think what makes a community cool, especially our downtown, isthat i can go to george's, get a steamed burger orpoly eyes or hamburger and i can also go to a cooldinner at baroncini, you know, where they've got amazingchefs and talent there, or atlus or some of these other places.
so it is that variety andit's that differentiation, but we hope that, you know, personally, that people see that youcan be successful in it, that there's benefits beyond just doing the restaurant and thatcan attract other people. i mean, our goal downtownis to be this really cool culinary hub of the midwest, and i think we have, wekeep getting people like ben to move back here, thathave done amazing things
around the country, people can see that, and they have theability where a community supports them to continueto do more and more of it. so yeah, i think just beingable to support those people and having kirkwood hereis a tremendous asset. we can have those folks and yeah, just keep on building. yeah, i think from a diversity standpoint and differentiation, i thinkthat focused, ethnic food
would be some great additions. - i think too the... we just came back. ben and i presented at theculinary institute of america's crafting food and beer conference. and through my previous job,i made quite a few connections in the food, literary community. and the one constantthing, after ben and i did two presentations, is people are like,
"we never really had areason to come to iowa, "but now we kind of want to." because our whole goal, whenben and i first got together and collaborated on the menu, is we really pushed matt andfaye in a different direction from how they cooked at their restaurants. not that there was anything wrong with it, it's just we had ourdifferent styles and chefs. we wanted to do things differently.
and i think the one thing that, the impact that we made was, i talked to chandra ram, who'sthe editor of plate magazine, it's a large trade publication that we read every month, she lives in chicago andi told her, i was like, "you need to come to iowa city. "you need to see what we're doing, "what's happening downtown,"
because they're always on thelookout for the next austin about a year ago, and now it's nashville. nashville is the hot place togo, and it's south carolina, asheville. and i said, "come to iowa city. "come and see what we're doing in a town "of 70,000 people and see what, "go to boston, have pizza. "come to pullman."
i mean, all the different places. i don't just eat at my restaurants. too much, i do, becausewe're there all of the time, we're masochists, we work too much. so yeah, there are projectson the line because we don't know when to stop but i think what's happeningin downtown iowa city, and why it's so key thatnate's a part of it too, is we're really changing the face of it.
when i moved here the first time in '92, i was the f&b director atthe holiday inn downtown. and it was kind of right, as it was descending tobe a downtown bar scene, just insane. and that didn't work. i wasn't, i don't think,economically viable to sustain that model andyou're seeing the face of it change, we're giving peoplereasons to come downtown
that are 35 years old, 45years old, 55 years old, and not feel like they'regoing to get surrounded by a mob of kids that areon their way to a pub crawl. so i think those are thethings that we're all trying to be a part of in the community, is that we're all trying to push this, because nothing makesme feel better than when i hear somebody say,"oh, i came to pullman, "it's like we were just sitting
" in a restaurant in new york city." good, we need thoseamenities, we need to attract people here, and that'swhat the restaurants... the social aspect of life is kind of key to happiness,and we try to do it. (audience laughing) i think we need a little more history on our food scene yet. the writers' workshop adds acertain panache to this town,
and that's attractive too. i've talked to some of the people, my friends, she retired,but she was the publisher and editor of food arts magazine. and when you take thetime to explain to people about iowa city and what we're doing, they're like, "oh, oh?" but it's just so far offthe radar for most people but we're getting there.
- yeah, and i think our numberone, or at least personally, number one driving decisionin our real estate selection process of where we wanted to get pullman, was because it was next to prairie lights. i mean, that's an iconiciowa city institution and i mean, to be shoulderto shoulder with them was kind of a no-brainerfrom a clustering standpoint. so that was an easy, easydecision on that end, but i think doug says thenew york city thing a lot,
and i think that's great. we certainly kind of wantto cultivate that feel inside of our restaurant,but we also want to make sure that we put like thatuniquely iowan twist on it. you know, what does it meanto be an iowan restaurant? and i think a lot of times, when we travel to different cities, you go to san diego and you want to seek out,like a great fish taco or a mexican place or seafood or boston's,
the clam chowder, you know, the food is almost likefirst thing people encounter and want to see about a place, and i think we have peoplecoming in and out of iowa city, very often with theuniversity and other things, that when they're here,they want to drink iowa beer and chase it with iowawhiskey and eat some iowa pork and beef and fried,whatever else you know? and if these guys canput this elevated spin
on iowa food, what doesit mean to have the iowa midwest food and continueto kind of wrestle with that question, and thatdoesn't mean that it has to be grandma's potluck casserole,it can be different things with fresh ingredientsthat these guys on the edge of innovating in that world, so it's kind of havingthat question internally as like, what does itmean to be an iowa diner or an iowa brewery thatserves midwest fare,
those sort of things. so that's constantlypart of our conversation with the restaurants. mm-hmm? all right, there you go, doug. - it's sideways, i'm goingto disagree with you. - time for one more, yeah. - [doug] thank you. - thank you.
no offense to the college students. we love you guys too.(audience laughing) but i mean, we go through alot of strategy and visioning with downtown. i work professionallyfull-time with downtown, an economic development role, but really, that's what our visionis, we want to be the best college town we can be toour students, to our faculty. we are that, we can constantlyget better at everything.
we also want to be thisdowntown that can be, for people in their 30s or theyjust retired, in their 60s, and i think that's where wehave probably the most room for growth. but how can we live inboth of those worlds at the same time? i mean, our downtown, like every downtown, is this complex with multiple layers, living, breathing organism, right?
and that's what makesit fun and great is that it's not just let's put a stamp on it, this is what downtown iowa city is, or this is what our regionis, or our community. it's a lot of things to alot of different people, and that's why it's anexciting place to be. so i think that wraps it up. thank you guys forcoming, i appreciate it. - [voiceover] thank you for coming today.
nate, ben and doug aregoing to stick around for a few minutes here inthe front if you have any additional questions. but other than that, havea great rest of your day.