There are few people in the restaurant business who have kept farm to table real better — or longer — than Chicago’s Helen and Mike Cameron. They opened Uncommon Ground in 1991 and ever since have been blazing trails in providing diners with locally and sustainable produced food. Read about their ahead-of-the-curve experiences and their 25th anniversary events in the latest installment of our “Farm to Table: Keeping It Real” series.
Paul Kahan, a winner of a James Beard Foundation Outstanding Chef of the Year award, has built his career around his dedication to sourcing sustainably produced ingredients, as locally as possible, for his restaurants’ kitchens. Family Farmed and Good Food on Every Table are pleased to present this profile and q-and-a with Kahan to kick off our new “Farm to Table: Keeping It Real” series.
FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Financing & Innovation Conference is coming up Thursday at Chicago’s UIC Forum, and it is a must-do for anyone with an interest in the business of the fast-growing Good Food movement. The event — which makes up the first day of the three-day, 12th annual Good Food Festival & Conference — has an amazing lineup of farm and food entrepreneurs, industry leaders, thought leaders and policy makers.
Rob Levitt of The Butcher & Larder at Local Foods, one of Chicago’s leading butcher shops, is conducting a ham-curing workshop at FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Festival on March 26. Read here about Levitt’s love of ham, his dedication to providing the highest quality products, and his devotion to consumer education about meat.
Chicago chef Paul Kahan has long been known for the culinary excellence of the successful and high-profile restaurants in the One Off Hospitality Group, currently at eight locations and growing. His kitchen mastery earned him the James Beard Foundation (JBF) Outstanding Chef Award in 2013. He was inducted into JBF’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage Read more about Chicago’s Paul Kahan, FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Chef of the Year: His Culinary Career[…]
Farm Aid publishes a series of profiles on its website of “Farmer Heroes.” Their most recent profile is of Darius Jones, a young Chicagoan and friend of FamilyFarmed, for whom the “hero” title is apt. A troubled youth that resulted in him being incarcerated also set him on the path to the cutting edge of urban agriculture in his hometown.
Can a rich dessert be considered Good Food? It can when it is Eli’s Cheesecake and its owner, Marc Schulman, is a strong supporter of the Good Food movement and makes the effort to source from local producers when it is possible to do so.
[The original version of this article was published May 1 on the Huffington Post website.] As FamilyFarmed prepared for the James Beard Foundation Awards in Chicago on May 4, we decided to welcome out-of-town attendees with an article providing “10 delicious facts” about the blossoming Good Food scene in our hometown. We found we had created a pretty sweeping guide to Chicagoland Good Food, so we’re making it a standing feature. And we’d love to hear about the Good Food scene where you live — let civic pride rule!
Chicago on Monday hosted the annual James Beard Foundation culinary awards ceremony, and Rick Bayless was one of the event’s co-chairmen. Famed for popularizing regional Mexican cuisine in the city, he is a celebrity chef with a long-running TV show, and he has just added to his long list of cookbooks. But to many in the Good Food movement, it is his history of helping building the region’s local food system that is his biggest starring role.
by Jim Slama and Bob Benenson, Family Farmed [Note: This article was first published on the Huffington Post news website.] As advocates of the Good Food movement in Chicago, we are honored that the James Beard Foundation Awards are coming to town. The Foundation was created to honor the legacy of chef James Beard. After Read more about Welcome to Chicago, James Beard Foundation: 10 Delicious Facts About the Windy City[…]
The rapid growth of the Good Food movement was reflected at FamilyFarmed’s annual Good Food Festival & Conference, which took place last Thursday through Saturday — not only in the big attendance turnout, but in the intensity of interest among the general public in eating better foods and, in many cases, making those better food themselves at home.
Rob Levitt, who co-owns Chicago’s popular The Butcher & Larder meat shop with his wife Allie, was very generous with his time prior to his charcuterie workshop at FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Festival Saturday. It turns out that Rob is also very generous with recipes.
There are plenty of business success stories that emerge in the food world. To be a Good Food success story — like the four featured at FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Financing & Innovation Conference in Chicago Thursday — has a special requirement: a commitment to the values of local, sustainable, natural, and healthy food that is the foundation of the fast-growing Good Food movement.
The new Local Foods store being built in Chicago may turn out to be something of village square for the local Good Food movement, bringing together and helping to boost the kinds of small food businesses people used to frequent. And it could, just possibly, serve as a template for the supermarket of the future.
Rob Levitt established himself as a major figure on Chicago’s food scene when he and his wife Allie opened The Butcher & Larder meat shop four years ago. Here Rob Levitt discusses his somewhat unexpected career as a butcher and his hopes for bigger things with his upcoming move, expected this spring, into a larger space in the new Local Foods retail store.
The Good Food Financing & Innovation Conference that kicks off FamilyFarmed’s annual three-day Good Food Festival & Conference is well established, as a dynamic event that connects food and farm entrepreneurs with investors and lenders. Businesses participating in the event have raised $11 million over the past three years.
Promising businesses in the Midwest’s local and sustainable food sector have raised $11 million from investors over the past three years by participating in FamilyFarmed’s annual Good Food Financing & Innovation Conference. Not surprisingly, this year’s event — coming up on Thursday, March 19 — has another lineup of outstanding entrepreneurs.
Rob Levitt of The Butcher & Larder began his culinary career with the aim of becoming a top chef. But he developed an expertise in charcuterie that ultimately piqued his interest in the art of butchery, and four years ago, he and wife Allie opened the Butcher & Larder and quickly developed it into one of Chicago’s favored spots among meat lovers. Now they are preparing for a big step up.
Eli’s Cheesecake has been serving up its sweet treats in Chicago for decades. As a local artisan producer that uses as many locally produced ingredients as possible, Eli’s has a prominent place at the Good Food movement’s dessert table. But the company’s commitment to expanding economic opportunity and social welfare through food is much broader than that.
by Roberta Laughlin, FamilyFarmed This is what happens when you invite top chefs who seek out local and sustainable food for their menus, match them up with farmers who produce the region’s best ingredients, and bring them all together in one place for one great night. You get Localicious, Chicago’s unique, one-of-a-kind party on March 20 that gives Read more about Localicious: One of the Year’s Most Delicious — and Virtuous — Tasting Events[…]