Harvesting the Local Essence
by nate on 01/21/10 at 8:15 pm
As featured in the April 2005 Issue of Madison Originals Magazine:
In all of Madison, no single area bespeaks the personality of the city the way Capitol Square does. The primary emblem of Madison’s cosmopolitan feel, the Capitol is a ready symbol of stately form and thoroughly considered style. Like the city itself, the building is a place where ideas and culture are shared in an open forum. But perhaps best of all, Wisconsin’s Capitol is neither set in a vacuum nor in an unrealistically idyllic set¬ting. Appropriately ensconced along the adjacent streets, a variety of top-quality restaurants and independent businesses reflect a sophistication and refined taste that’s enjoyed by many Madison residents. Walking around Capitol Square is a pleasure not only because it is simultaneously colorful, vibrant, and impressive; it is also a pleasure because each time around the Square is a fresh experience.
For Harvest Restaurant owners Tami Lax and Jeff Orr, the word fresh is one that’s taken very seriously. Insisting on offering only the best in local flavors, they change their menu frequently in order to optimize the use of seasonally available ingredients. To provide “a cuisine that’s reflective of the local environment,” Tami proudly states, “we purchase all of our products from local purveyors. Most of what we serve comes from within a 60-mile radius, so we have farmers knocking on our back door every day of the week, making deliveries.” According to Tami, these local producers are the “stars” of Harvest Restaurant; the cooking serves only to enhance the excellence of the ingredients used. “Jeff is a master at preparing food that’s true to its flavor. It makes our job easier when the food is already so good, and the organic food raising practices result in superior, outstanding flavor.”
Contributing to the deliciousness of the food is the pleasure of knowing its source—a knowledge we infrequently have as end-users in a consumer culture. Unlike some restaurateurs, Tami says, “we know who’s raised our chickens, who’s raised our lambs, who’s raised our beef. Some people have absolutely no idea where their food comes from.” Most of us are accustomed to going to the grocery store and making our purchases based on the usual wholesale, commercialized supply that we expect to find there. To Tami, this habit hampers consumers’ exposure to local markets and the expanded choices those markets bring. It’s her belief that people “would make more educated decisions based on products if they had the selection available to them.” Furthermore, as a restaurant owner, she observes, “it’s an important thing for our economy to keep local farmers in business.”
The philosophy Tami elucidates with regard to the Harvest menu also carries over into a larger sphere of experience for her. As the founder of Wisconsin’s first chapter of Slow Food, an international organization that promotes healthy eating and an awareness of consumerism, Tami pursues a broad interest in food and its sources. As Tami describes it, Slow Food is “an organization based on education. I was interested in it especially because it promotes more than it protests. It’s not an organization that says, ‘This is bad for you, this is what you shouldn’t do.’ They have programs that promote school gardens and improving school menus, for example.” Tami’s enthusiasm for the organization’s goals earned her a position serving on the ARK committee. The committee is “a section of Slow Foods that takes foods that are rare or special or almost extinct, and brings them back,” she explains. “We choose species that are in danger and encourage farmers to raise or grow them in order to sell them to restaurants. These are small farmers, not a factory farm setting. One focus was on a heritage breed of turkeys. We went to San Francisco and asked them to start raising these birds, explaining what the advantages were to them and the market. It worked—that breed has since been taken off the endangered species list.”
This same remarkable level of attention to origin and detail are reflected in the tale of Harvest’s founding. Tami and Jeff first met when they were both working at L’Etoile, another Madison restaurant. Tami, who worked in music retail for 12 years before reassessing her long-term aspirations, landed at L’Etoile in her quest to discover whether she had the makings of a culinary school student. Meanwhile, Jeff and his wife had recently moved back to Madison from New York City, where Jeff spent six years as an attorney. As chefs de cuisine at L’Etoile, both Tami and Jeff shared aspirations of opening an independent restaurant. Tami explains, “Restaurant work is a tough thing to do, and we both figured if we’re going to be working this hard, we might as well be working for ourselves.” They decided to leap headlong into the project as partners. They developed a business plan together, and when 21 N. Pinckney became available, Tami says, “we jumped at the chance. There was a lot of history in the building, and we wanted that.”
The space was desirable, but it also presented significant design challenges. Previously used as a retail clothing store, the building size couldn’t provide adequate accommodation for both kitchen facilities and a dining room. So they improvised. “We broke through the wall of the building to the left of us in order to make more room. We wanted to make it so that the dining room was the original size of the building,” says Tami. An extensive remodel was underway: in addition to the enlargement of the restaurant space and the addition of an entirely new, state-of-the-art kitchen, the building’s interior was stripped and remade. “We removed the acoustic ceiling tiles and got to the original plaster molding. The plaster guy we hired came out of retirement just to help us with it.”
The scope of the project was intimidating. Though they’d expected to make an investment in shaping their restaurant to fit their conception of it, both Tami and Jeff spent a great deal more money in start-up costs than either of them had originally anticipated. In fact, Tami reveals, the total cost of the remodel came out to around half a million dollars. “It scared me to death,” she says, her sense of relief at the restaurant’s success still evident. “Up till then, the largest investment I’d ever made was buying a house, and this was five times that investment. I really didn’t sleep it off for the first couple of years.”
The effort put into the restaurant has paid off for Tami and Jeff, who are satisfied that they’ve created, in Tami’s estimation, “something simple and elegant.” From the dedicated inclusion of local organic produce in their dishes to the attentive furnishings of their interior décor, the Harvest staff is committed to providing customers with an enriching and subtle dining experience. In the midst of a growing reliance on convenience, Harvest Restaurant challenges convention by encouraging its clientele to slow down, relax, and enjoy themselves while being served with some of the best food to be found in the state—or for that matter, the country. Reflecting all that’s good about Madison’s small businesses and bringing together all the elements of a working community, being situated on Capitol Square couldn’t suit it more.
