[Music] Building a Table for Seven is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

I'm Amber Lynn.

I am a mother.

I'm a wife.

I'm a chef.

I opened my restaurant business during the 2020 pandemic.

I'm also a farmer.

[Music] I do remember my earliest hopes and dreams for a restaurant.

I can actually even remember 2001 looking at my first restaurants and actually then I wasn't even growing food so I had, I guess already had a a little bit of an affinity for something that was growing inside of me that I didn't really know yet but could feel and actually it was a restaurant that I looked at in partnership with someone else and it was here in Bemidji but when I did look at the restaurant I knew then that I didn't know what I was doing and that I wasn't ready to own a restaurant and then began my journey and I didn't know, I think until maybe 10 years into my journey exactly what my hopes and dreams were for it and how it would operate so I knew that I wanted farm to table and I knew that, you know, I wanted it to be unique and different but yet still feel very, very much like, you know, a home kitchen where you're very welcome, where, you know, the food is home cooked from scratch and I guess those are my earliest hopes and dreams.

Farm to table is where you're trying to give your money, your resources to farmers within a hundred mile radius actually, is the definition.

So, you're giving your money directly to that farmer to get their beef or to get their vegetables and bring it into the restaurant and then sharing it with other people and cooking from scratch.

So, in my farm to table restaurant, the menu is really dictated by what we have available, the seasons, who's farming, who's farming what, you know, when we run out of something, we we have to move on and that's what makes our menu really different than a lot of other places and we just really like pride ourselves on, you know, zero waste, using what we have and we really want to make sure that we're not being wasteful, we're being responsible with whatever we have foraged or whatever farmers have grown because it's a lot of work and nature does a lot of work and we should be really thankful for what we what we have available.

I brought farm to table to Bemidji because I am a Bemidji native.

I grew up here and when I moved back to Bemidji after having my first child, I did invest in a farm that was in my family.

It was owned by my great aunts.

It was a place that I grew up being at so there's a lot of nostalgia throughout the years of having kids and jobs and other things.

There's just.

there's no way that I could move.

I love where I live.

I love my farm.

Uprooting five kids just for, you know, a restaurant dream would be hard for them and I respect that.

This farm was owned by my great aunt who was actually my grandma's sister on my mom's side.

Actually, my grandma was one of my big influencers she was a baker and she spent very little on groceries and they grew their own corn and tomatoes and cucumbers and potatoes, you know, and onions, you know, like the things that are pretty common but she would always make something delicious out of nothing.

I felt like her food was always really, really good.

So, she's one of my inspirations.

But here on my great-aunt's farm, I grew up here as a little girl.

We would butcher chickens.

They ran beef cattle for a number of years and then had another farmer running beef cattle here and then the garden.

So, when I first moved here there was an original garden that had been here throughout my childhood and I thought about turning it into yard because I wasn't a gardener at that point in time.

I thought, the more I thought about it and like tried to psych myself into turning it into just yard I couldn't do it.

So, I started gardening and that's where it began.

Let's see I got interested in farming because well first of all I have a degree in Food Service and Nutrition.

So, I was kind of interested in the nutrition part of food.

Just it kind of grew from there.

It was really exciting to grow your own food and to have the difference of taste, food grown locally tastes so much better and it's so much more nutritious for you.

You know, I worked in the restaurant industry so I already liked food, I like to eat food and then it became such a labor of love that I couldn't, you know, I wanted to feed people with it and I wanted to, you know, it just it just kept growing and growing and growing.

Actually, I think farming is kind of a disease.

Once you start and if you really do enjoy it, it's kind of the people who enjoy it can't stop.

Some of us will weed for all day and it's okay and we enjoy it it's kind of a it's kind of Zen and then there are others that, you know, don't don't like it but if you have the farming disease then you find yourself here.

This is kind of, was my day today it's just the potatoes so I actually have to go to my real job after this.

What's your day job?

Actually a chef, Chef D Cuisine at Concordia Language Villages running the Spanish and French programming there.

I've been there for three years.

Their structure had changed just three years ago so they offered full-time positions and it's kind of cool.

It's been nice to learn ethnic cuisine.

It's a kind of a gem in northern Minnesota that it's pretty cool.

Our potatoes, are we put everything in by hand.

The farm that we get them from is organic so we know that they've been, they're free of pesticides and herbicides and things that are not healthy for you and we also have several different varieties.

So, we have some Adirondack Reds, some Adirondack Blues that are blue and red on the inside and contain some, you know, colorful antioxidants and they're tasty.

I have five children ranging from 16 to 2.

So, that's kind of a wide range of kids.

I remember doing a lot of daydreaming around the table with my kids so that was one thing that, you know, we'd sit around at night sometimes and daydream about what the menu might look like.

So, like you know a farm BLT with a fried egg on it and, you know, just some of the things that I would cook up at home and then writing those recipes down.

I have a number of books that have a lot of written recipes in them.

So, I knew that I wasn't going to have a menu that was one set thing and that was probably the most unsure thing and I was unsure that Bemidji would be okay with that because most menus are set or at least set for, you know, a season or, you know, a certain number of months but I knew that my menu really had to revolve around what we had available because that would be what was best and that's what I wanted.

It's exciting to me.

The way the Earth likes to give you rocks every year.

There are many rock piles on this farm.

Old farms always have rock piles along all of the wood's edges and things like that.

And, I think being a farmer, I think it helps me as a chef connect with farmers more and it kind of, you know, happened backwards.

I was a farmer before before a chef but the farmers trust me.

They think of me as one of their own, not just a chef.

So, we have that camaraderie and it took about 10 years to build that camaraderie or those relationships and get them to trust me so that, you know, they come to me and say, hey I have, you know, 20 pounds of this and 30 pounds of tomatoes and what do you, what do you thinking this week?

They're really, a lot of them are really great about that and making sure that I get in first when the Bison steaks come in.

So, that is huge for me to be able to have that network.

I think the biggest thing is that people kind of wonder about your history and who are you and you know what are you, you know, do you really know anything about food and so I've had a lot of questions about who I am and what I've done and do you know farmers in the area and whatnot.

So, farming, I've been farming since 2003 but only doing it as a job or side job since 2012, so, for about seven years, so I've known farmers in the area for quite a while, you know, eight years, probably a little bit longer.

So, I have good relationships with a lot of them and I hope that they're excited too.

Well, it's not a restaurant that Bemidji has had so that makes me a little bit different and I do think it's great that I can introduce Bemidji to something different, you know, I know we have some ethnic cuisine.

We have a few different restaurants but we have a lot of bar and grills and a lot of fast food and there's nothing wrong with that but it's nice introducing people to different things, so to fresher food, you know, introducing people to farmers, introducing people to vegetables cooked in ways that they have not had before, introducing people to vegetables that they haven't heard of.

It's fun for me in that aspect because I think that one of my challenges, my personal challenges is to get people to like vegetables and food that they wouldn't otherwise think that they would like so just kind of you know reinventing what your palate is or what you like or don't, it just maybe you just didn't have it prepared the right way.

So, I have five children and as we all know it's hard to get children to eat their vegetables.

Over the years, I have learned that fresh vegetables that are home grown, close to your house that aren't shipped from very far away are much more palatable for children.

They're much sweeter.

They're much tastier.

They're much more nutritious and actually for everyone.

My kids have a hard time eating vegetables out of the store just because like that tomato in the store does not taste as yummy and sweet as that tomato out of your farmer's, you know, garden or your own garden.

Here we've got potatoes that have cut, you know, so that their eyes are separated, you know, each little potato portion has an eye on it that will become the plant.

Actually, this is a really good potato year.

So, growing potatoes and just about any vegetable, for example, it should have been a great year for squash but for me it wasn't.

I don't know what happened.

Sometimes you plant those seeds whether they're potatoes or squash or corn and nature takes over.

So, you have high hopes that you're going to have a great yield and that you're going to have healthy plants and you're going to have a good germination and, you know, you just kind of leave it to nature after that and do what you can with watering but you especially, organically try to pick the bugs off of the potato plants every day but you're, kind of, you're at the mercy of nature at that point.

There were a lot of tasks that needed to be completed to open a restaurant and those were basically learning everything that I would be doing in my restaurant so whether it was managing a kitchen, baking, serving, cooking line cooking, batch cooking like there was just a lot to learn and I wanted to make sure that I knew how to do numbers, write a business plan, do payroll, programming, right, we program our POS and our website and do all that fun stuff so there was a lot, but I needed to learn all those things in order to be successful.

The tasks were pretty endless but I think I made it all the way around and my husband asked me why do you have to know how to do everything because when you don't, you know, you have to wash dishes and you do this, you know, what I mean like he's like why would you learn everything because then you end up doing it and I say well that's, then I know what it is and I know how to fill in that gap and I know what it entails and I can show my people that I know their job and I know how they feel in their job, you know it brings me to their level and I want to be on the same level with them as a chef.

I don't want to be way up here.

We got third course in waiting.

I don't remember what the courses are.

The menu is up on the board over there.

First course is the cheese plate, second course is the salad, third course is the soup, fourth course is the flank steak and the last course I'm working on right now.

Is it 5:30 yet?

How long until 5:30?

You've got 20 minutes.

Okay, doing the pop-up restaurant I learned some of my limits because we would need to get in there at three o'clock, sometimes 2:30 and we need to have the first of five courses out the door by 6:30 and, you know, with that comes unpacking right?

It's not that we're coming there, we've got a fully stocked kitchen and we've got, you know, everything we need.

We had to unpack everything, get everything, you know, situated Mison plus and then begin cooking.

So, there was a little bit of figuring out, like what our limits were or my limits were actually.

I exceeded my limit I think.

Because they're from cows that aren't all fed the same.

That's real life right there.

the flank steak for tonight's, all the flanks are different sizes, you know, commercially, generally the the flanks are similar sizes and and look about the same, Whereas you have more variety when it's coming off of, you know, perhaps a couple of different farms but certainly, you know, they're not fed the same as commercial cows.

This is where the kitchen breaks out and dance?

The pop-ups also were a challenge for myself like was my food good enough?

Not only for me but for others.

I don't want to go and open a mediocre restaurant and which is really like it's a challenge to keep your staff trained, to introduce new dishes and I mean we're doing that every week sometimes and it's a lot of work to keep that quality up, make sure customers are happy, make sure they they like your food.

I mean that was essentially like, am I gonna be good enough to open and make it?

No, no blend first, quick blend don't finely puree it a little bit of big and, you know, it can be it can be a little chunky right?

We don't because otherwise it's gonna be too hard for you to strain right and then heat it up and then we'll strain it.

So, the pop-up restaurant was not necessarily my idea I'm going to give my credit to Tate McAllen whom I have done a dinner with and he's a Bemidji local, does not live here right now, but he did a pop-up right before I did mine.

He did it at Minnesota Nice Cafe and I thought, wow that is a really cool idea.

I knew that they were doing it in bigger cities like Minneapolis or you know in California wherever other bigger cities but I had never thought about doing one here in Bemidji or it never had crossed my mind that there might be a venue available for that.

So, that was kind of the big deal.

It's like where where do you ask when they know that you're a budding chef, maybe wanting your own business.

How do you just approach a restaurant, go in and be like hey can I borrow your restaurant for a day so you don't make any money?

I can cook my food and introduce this to the community and luckily my husband he said well what about the Sanford Center and I was like Sanford Center hmm, yeah okay, okay that I mean, there's not a real, they do catering.

They do their own things but not a real restaurant competition and I cold called the Sanford Center and they told me that I was a little crazy at first, you know, like that's a really crazy idea and so I obliged that and I said I understand, you know, you gotta really, I'm sure you got a really nice kitchen, really expensive, you have no idea who I am and that's cool, thank you, you know, thanks for at least entertaining my idea and they actually, they called me back a few days later and they wanted to know more and they wanted me to come see their kitchen.

So, yeah it was the director at the time and then the chef that was in that kitchen, they were interested in it and willing to I don't know just willing to entertain the idea and eventually they said yes and we had a contract and I did one a month during the summer of 2019.

And I found that Bemidji was really okay and happy with being served a menu that wasn't solidified until the day of the dinner and they were okay with eating what they were served rather than choosing off of a menu.

Some of them said that they really enjoyed just kind of being able to relax and not make any decisions and just kind of like waiting for the food to come out and just the excitement of it so then I knew that the kind of menu that I wanted to make and changing frequently was going to work out.

So, the pop-up restaurant nights what we called them, they were pre-pandemic.

So, that was 2019 and actually I had a lot of support from my family, support from people that I knew in the community, you know, just kind of sharing the idea, a lot of support from my fellow colleagues who helped me without pay.

Honestly, like we broke even.

We were able to pay our bill with Sanford.

It was exciting.

It was a learning opportunity, it was them helping me with you know the front tier of what I wanted to do.

My family served at them, one of my friends was like the head front house, she would decorate all the tables but we did five of those in 2019 and I remember the last one, I had people in the audience saying can't we do another one next month and I said no no no no, this is it for the year.

We're gonna get dinner started.

We've got the first course coming out.

My name is Amber Lynn and welcome.

Thank you.

This is amazing.

I'm going to get all teary.

I'm actually going to borrow this.

We have an incredible meal for you tonight.

Everybody's worked hard and thank you.

So, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the meal and just kind of go through everything and then we're just gonna let you have a good time and eat and enjoy yourselves.

First of all our first course coming out is jam with strawberry and jalapeno.

The jam has a little bit of a kick so know that going into it.

You have blue cheese from the caves of Faribault, Minnesota and you have a turkey wheat sourdough with a little bit of bran in it.

Our second course, they were excited and that was exciting to me and I had been looking for a place for quite some time and it really made me look harder to find something that I could settle into.

So, Bemidji really solidified the fact that I needed a brick and mortar restaurant and I began to look harder.

So, looking for a brick and mortar place in Bemidji to have a restaurant was a big challenge.

I think I started in 2017 and it's do I buy?

Do I build?

Do I rent?

What does that cost, you know, where location, you know, all those things go into play and it is really a challenge for sure.

You're looking at buying and is this existing, you know, restaurant that it's for sale and are you gonna, you know, overcome the chance same challenges that they might have had.

Is it location, you know?

There's just a lot with choosing a spot.

That, I think that's the hardest thing that's been for me in owning a restaurant is location.

So, when I walked into the place that we're currently in, what's saying to me was the kitchen.

It was like oh the kitchen is big enough to handle raw produce, you know, the kind of meat things that we do, baking where a lot of line kitchens are really small and sometimes, you know, really skinny, with a small prep area but we are heavy prep.

We spend a whole, actually two whole days on prep every week besides the prep in between but to turn a brand new dish up and running or deal with you know carrots with full on tops and we use those tops, you know, dealing with lettuce that we have to wash or whatever it might be.

We just, we're prep heavy.

So, these guys, like I said we're working on rendering lard because David needs to use lard for his Cuban bread because he we're going to do the Cuban sandwich that he wants to do.

So, he's working on that and then we're going to do our own fruit syrups for soda instead of having, actually that cooler over there needs to get picked up and that'll be really exciting to use local fruit for that.

Well, we actually worked on there was a piece of the bar that was dropped down so we actually took that off and moved it up and now we need to take some some, I don't know what it's called bar epoxy and then kind of flood the rest so it's it's all even so we have a nice bar.

We've switched out some lighting.

We got some wallpaper down.

We're going to have local art in here.

So, eventually when people can come in have some local art.

It was a shock.

The pandemic was happening.

I'm not a very good news watcher number one, so when it came out you know that suddenly it was this scary thing right and the country is shutting down and actually I just quit my long-term care job and I think we touched on it at one of our one of our meetings just briefly before I left and I was like what what is that, you know what I mean but not being a big newsy person, I didn't really know what was going on.

So, when that hit, it was a shock and it really had me back on my heels, reconsidering opening.

Like I said, we're considering maybe setting up as a market instead of a restaurant, you know, if we can do carryout and we can have people come in and buy things that are, you know, when there's just I don't 10 people in here or less then that's kind of a consideration.

We might move out all the tables and chairs and whatnot.

So, we'll have to see how that goes and it really made me kind of sad like I had a really heavy heart and I didn't know what the right choice was at that time.

So, I went with my gut and my gut just said push forward, push forward.

You're gonna figure it out just like every other challenge that you've had to figure out in your life and I've had a few of them because that's how we, that's what we do with challenges right?

We don't, when challenges come or hard times come we just, we have to work through it and so that's what I did and I pushed forward and opened in not a way that I had expected with a different menu that I had not expected either and just tried to navigate my way through it.

Well, at first I felt a little bit uneasy and not sure.

But as time has gone on I just realized that, you know, we just we need to get through this and we need to be innovative and positive and just do what we can.

It's been my dream forever so to quit now would be really really hard.

An entrepreneur pivots.

That's the key word pivot and you have to do what you have to do to make it, because if you don't you're not going to make it.

So, I pivoted.

I did some things that were a little bit fancier that would make it in a box to your house if you took take out and then I did a lot of sandwich and fry things which I wasn't very happy about the fries.

We do cut our own cut fries when we can but yeah that's what got me through is just doing takeout and just tweaking my menus.

So, it was more takeout friendly and it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do but I felt like if I didn't do that then I wouldn't survive.

So, we were in the pandemic.

We, indoor dining wasn't open so I'm a little bit like rustic fine dining and so how was I going to put that in a box?

I'm working on, we foraged some ramps and I'm working on making ramp pesto and then we're going to turn that some of that into ramp pesto butter and freeze for later for use with steak so yeah that's what we're working on and Casey is seasoning a mortar and pestle.

You have to season them before you use them initially because you have to.

They need rice and garlic and spices and whatnot to kind of create a barrier in there for that mortar and pestle.

So like I said we had foraged some ramps here so I'm going to be turning these into ramp pesto.

We cut off the bottom part of the leak to be able to roast it for pizza.

So we did that yesterday.

So these are just the leaves and the leaves work really nicely for making pesto.

They have a lot of good flavor so and when we are done it looks like this very bright green and very tasty.

So, some of what we and we'll use that for pasta.

We use that for pizza sauce, really good pizza sauce and making ramp pesto butter for steak.

Having a menu with foraged items during the pandemic, it was nice to introduce people to things.

I just had to be really careful what I introduced.

I think that was really key during the pandemic to begin with because if it was too out there then they probably weren't going to order it, you know I mean, I hadn't had enough of a reputation where they would be more adventurous.

So, you know, when we did charcuterie boards we put up pickled Fiddlehead, you know, in the charcuterie board.

So, you weren't necessarily ordering the pickled Fiddlehead but it came with your charcuterie board which sounds way more palatable, you know, introducing ramp pesto which is absolutely delicious.

Things like that.

Things that we, you know, we can identify as familiar that people would want to order.

This is attack right there in front of you.

I think that's pretty much it yeah and I'm not seeing any any Fiddleheads at all, that are they're all gone, oh such pretty, really oh yeah, here's one.

I did find some.

So, this is really tightly curled and you can kind of see yeah this would be the last edible Fiddlehead.

You can see the the fronds are starting to come out, so it's loosening up before it comes out and so I wouldn't pickle this one but I would fry it and eat it for sure.

It's a very cool thing and it's like I said it brings me really close to the Earth and it makes me just feel, I feel really blessed to have that food available and I feel fortunate and and I feel close close to the Earth and it's a special feeling for sure.

Well, it kind of seems like this is the spot.

So, what I do is I look for the biggest leaves and then I also I kind of go down the stock and see how thick the stock is.

So, like here's some good ones over here.

Right, so there's just three on this one coming out right now, so I would just pick one and that would be it.

So, when we're harvesting, we take a look at the plant and we want to leave at least two of the Fiddleheads on there so that the plant can live and can reproduce and still be there for us next year.

So, that's really important so we leave two to three per per plant.

there's plenty out here.

Oh, here yeah here's some that's this one's still in its crown.

I'm just going to tie these guys on here because I don't want them to get dirty because we don't want any dirt on them so I'm just going to tie it.

It'll be okay.

Yeah, so foraging for wild ramps and Fiddleheads is a really special thing so I actually think any foraging is really special and those of us who do forage or the good majority of us who do forage, we want to make sure we do so responsibly and we want to make sure that we leave the foraging areas that we use in good health is the biggest thing.

So, yeah it's harder to clean the fiddleheads dirt from inside there.

So, we just want to make sure we brush the paper off of them and they're mostly clean and we don't want anybody eating a gritty Fiddlehead.

Oh, it smells so good out here.

It does, it smells like garlic.

It's so great.

It makes you hungry but yeah he's got some nice oh those are nice sized ones.

Yeah that's awesome!

So, those are nice sized bulbs on there.

So, that would be something good for pickling, would pickle that bottom part.

So, you can see where they're, where you have to cut them off if they're still attached.

I get way down there.

Normally, we try to take some out of a patch like there's a couple ways, like he's going to dig down.

It's actually like I said, stuck to like a rhizome and you have to actually cut it off.

It's a little bit like a green onion but it's still stuck down there.

So, we don't want to take the whole plant but we take some and as long as you're not going to throw away the bottom parts and you're going to use the leaves and the white parts, I would take it but if you're just going to want to make pesto or something you just take the tops.

Such a beautiful coexistence.

Yeah, this is pretty amazing that someone shared with me this spot.

Yeah this was just as thick last year.

It's just as thick only I didn't make it here for the Fiddleheads because I came on the 17th of May and the Fiddleheads were already out and what today is the 18th of May?

We came on the 11th and it was perfect timing so that tracks even though the weather seems different last year, I'm sure the spring was different.

There it's spot on exactly.

It's kind of crazy.

So, the value that comes from this foraging is that I don't have to necessarily pay for this product and it probably would cost us about four hundred dollars to buy this product from somebody else so and it's no different than, you know, if I'm buying direct from a farmer, then I'm cutting out the middleman.

It's my time and actually it's my health.

I'm out in Mother Nature, so that's really important.

It's a different thing.

It's a neat thing and it makes me feel more connected to, you know, our surroundings here in northern Minnesota.

It's important plus it, I mean it's just kind of it's what we do it's something that is grown.

I mean it's not farmed except by Mother Nature and it's something we can add to our menu that's special.

So, when did you decide that you wanted the forage?

Well, I actually kicked around something in my yard for about five years before I decided to take a mushroom class and it was a mushroom but it was a big.

I thought it was a big ugly mushroom and I thought why is this thing growing in my yard every year and I would kick it around and when I started getting interested in foraging, I decided to take a mushroom class and I learned that was a Hen of the Woods mushroom that was growing in my yard and that I was kicking around for the last five years and just kind of foraging goes along with farming, you know, you're out in the woods.

We have a large property.

I go on walks back there.

We do as a family, you know, you find certain things.

There's just a lot that nature has to offer us so it just kind of went hand in hand with with farming I guess and owning a piece of property that contained things that were able to be foraged.

So, we're going to take these leaves and we're gonna clean them up and then we are going to make pesto out of them makes a nice garlicky, bright green sauce.

Actually, the sauce is brighter green than even these leaves and then we're gonna spread that onto our sourdough pizza crust and top it with cheese and some some of the ramps roasted from the bottom and have a ramp pesto pizza.

So, we've got our very own sourdough starter that we are going to be using to make pizza dough with.

So, we take the discard, so normally you feed your sourdough you discard that we're going to take the discard and make pizza dough with it which is actually really tasty so and all this has lovely wild yeast in it, no conventional yeast and kind of a fun yeast.

This one hasn't been out and working for very long.

We just fed it yesterday.

So, it'll raise up to almost the top so and then we'll probably make it bigger as we get going.

It'll need a bigger container and that takes a while to get going so now that's going and that's really, really fun.

So, we can do lots of things with that.

When we harvest mushrooms, I make sure I always take the remnants after we process them and clean them and whatever take them out in a basket and spread them back in the woods.

For sure.

Actually, I hope I get more mushrooms this year just for doing that, a little white part there I'm going to pull that off.

I don't want to shove this whole the whole leaf and the food processor.

It'll probably get gummed up in there.

So, we want to make sure we chop them up a little bit anyway.

Like I said, that we chose this kitchen because it was bigger.

I had, I wouldn't have rented it if it didn't have this big of a kitchen because when you're dealing with whole ingredients all the time, you need a lot of space.

Put all these beautiful things in here and then we're gonna put some cheese in there, some good Parmesan, good ingredients is important.

I'm gonna break it up a little bit.

All right that's actually plenty.

We're gonna add about a quarter cup of pine nuts and we need some olive oil.

So, these have a garlic flavor to them.

You could add extra garlic but I like it just the way it is.

So, we don't need to doctor it at all.

Salt is the only other thing that we need for this.

It's pretty simple, pretty amazing.

[Music] [Music] Actually, going to add a little bit more of the leaves.

All right, a little bit of salt and more oil.

There we go, now it's coming together.

Good food.

It can be really simple and delicious and we have a lot of things to choose from around the area from different farms.

So, and also wild crafting.

I mean that is a big thing.

So, a lot of people are foraging mushrooms or ramps or Fiddleheads.

It's become a big thing.

So, I think you could eat cattails.

I never have from top to bottom so that's something else but it's always fun to try new things but we just we have a lot more diversity here than people think so and I hope we can showcase that throughout the next year.

Maybe give it one more.

All right and whatever we don't use up right away, we're going to go ahead and put in little cups and freeze so that we can use it.

I actually last year used the stuff that I made all through the winter.

So, we're wondering how much freezer space we're going to need because because it will be canning and freezing and things like that but yeah it'll be interesting to see how much space we need.

You know whether we can retail it or whether it's going to go in up in the food those are decisions we'll have to make, you know, just as we go.

So, well we have to bring our processing stuff.

We have processing equipment but this is kind of a big production kitchen, you know, there's a lot going on.

We need a lot of equipment for processing and canning for freezing, just taking on whole things so yeah we'll have to see and when you're trying to cook and process stuff at the same time, it can be really busy.

I just talked to a farmer this morning who thinks she can get me some early peas.

I was excited about that and actually she was going to take a look at squash too because a lot of farmers will hold over their squash in a cold area for the winter and she said she may have some that's still good so.

I had a much bigger team.

I have a much bigger team but I can I can only take on so many of them right now until we figure out how many, how many people we actually need and how busy we're gonna be so.

We've got David and Casey in here and I've been working with David for I think four years, almost four years now and Casey just a year so and then I have another guy, Andrew who is kind of my main guy who I've been working with for five years but he is actually, he might be helping us this summer if we're busier but he was going to be moving to Minneapolis.

So, we'll see.

I have a feeling he may come back up here and camp in my backyard and help us out so.

Put some oil on there right away.

[Music] I'm just going to take a look over here - rendering fat over here.

It's all ground up.

So, it's very cool to have a restaurant in downtown Bemidji.

I think now that I've been in downtown Bemidji, it's kind of, I got I have a little bit of a thing for being downtown.

When we were trying out some of our things, you know, new items or we actually would run across the street to Wasabi and share with them.

Right, walking across to Wasabi, go give them some ramp pizza or we'd run down the street to another business and we would share you know our pesto pizza ramp, pesto pizza or I think we also shared some steak with ramp pesto butter.

So, it's really fun to have other food places that we can share with and I don't know, I just I love being downtown.

It's really awesome and I think there should be more food places downtown honestly.

So, I quit my full-time job which was in long-term care but I also, I do things crazy sometimes.

I think it was the fall before, so summer of 2019 in the end I think it was August, I was driving by the the School District bus garage and I saw their sign out looking for school bus drivers.

Are you sure you don't want to go play in your sandbox?

No, he says he doesn't want to go play in his sandbox.

He'd rather come and gather with me.

He does it right until the end.

Are you gonna pick tomatoes?

I said to my kids, you know, I think I'm gonna learn how to be a school bus driver.

I mean, why not?

I can drive a truck and trailer.

I can haul a cow or a horse and so bus driving can't be that much worse.

So, the kids were like you're crazy mom!

Why are you doing this?

They were a little bit embarrassed that mom was going to learn how to be a school bus driver but I did it and I actually in my brain it was a little bit like well, you know, I could drive in the morning, you know, in between like quitting my full-time job and driving the evening or afternoon and in between I could set up my restaurant.

So, you know and then I could make it through the school year and then be done.

So, that's what I did.

I learned how to be a school bus driver and then when the pandemic hit and even when my restaurant opened I continued to drive bus the next year so in 20 the fall of 2020 and 2021 I continued to drive bus in order to pay my own bills.

I don't know what it is.

I've learned through life and like listening to like the whispers and maybe people don't feel the same way as I do about it but you know there's red flags right we all know what red, we know what red flags are but there's also whispers and you, I've learned to pay attention to them.

So, that was like a whisper like "hey you should do this" and it was really strange to me but I've learned to go with it.

So, it's like I almost knew that I was gonna need that.

You're gonna need us.

I was gonna need, no I was gonna need another job to make for some reason right?

I didn't need it.

I was planning on opening quickly enough where it wasn't a big deal and I didn't know pandemic was going to hit but thank goodness I listened and I had that job that carried me through the pandemic because if I didn't have something that would have worked with the hours, I don't think I wouldn't, I mean personally I wouldn't have made it so.

So, because of the pop-ups events that people can sign up for are kind of sure things.

Also, we love doing events because events are we know exactly what we're doing.

We are creating food for that one event.

We know exactly how much food we're creating.

We're not wasting anything and people come and they just they have a great time and it's actually really great for us.

We love that and it gives us the opportunity to do something outside of the box.

So when we have an event, we have people sign up ahead of time, one of the events we did was Tapas this summer and yeah people sign up ahead we know exactly what we're creating.

We put a menu out ahead of time and you can choose to be there and relax and have a have a great time So Tapas are small plates that are Spanish dishes.

So it's a thing in Spain.

It's just a small plate generally shared amongst people.

I like Spanish food.

I like Spanish cooking.

So, every once in a while we'll do an event, sometimes I'll do a guest chef.

Chef Tate McAllen was actually one of them.

I mentioned him earlier and we did a collaboration dinner.

I'm hoping to have another guest chef this fall, working on it.

I'm really excited about it and then we do things like Women and Wine and we've done things with BSO but I wanted kind of a different kind of ethnic standalone and so we tried out Tapas for one night, did a dinner two seatings.

People loved it and so actually then we did it for a whole week and it went so well that week.

I was actually expecting it to not be busy at all.

I was expecting it to be pretty dead, people, you know, wondering what in the world are we doing or you know what is this?

It went so well, we did it for two weeks.

So, I was really excited about that.

That's kind of fun about owning my own restaurant and not being able to do what I want, that I can do stuff like that and it's fun for the community.

The restaurant industry changed a lot during the pandemic.

I think people felt that it wasn't a very stable job because, you know, we weren't doing indoor dining, a lot of people got laid off.

You know restaurant people are known for being worked long hours, so going from you know working a lot, having a steady income to not being able to work at all or very little or maybe not having a job that was kind of a shock.

So, a lot of people then used it as their opportunity to get out of the restaurant industry.

So, I feel like the pool of people, like I know people who have left because of the pandemic and not because of but as a product of I guess, you know, they just saw as an opportunity to go to online school or you know go for that other job and a lot of jobs have gone online so that's been a big change.

Also, you know, the ones that reopened, I suppose in the pandemic some of them were worked many, many hours too and everybody just started to value their lives in a different way where they had time to evaluate, you know, their life and their work life.

Now people need to be paid better.

I mean it's not easy.

It's not easy work.

People need to also live their lives.

So, like my staff, I've never denied a person a day off since the day I employed someone, never.

So, we all rally around each other.

We all work it out, you know, we want, I want people to have the time that they need to take or the hours, you know, I have set schedules.

My servers have a little bit of a hard time getting used to that because they're used to people saying, oh your schedule's not out till, you know, whenever and you just kind of they fill you in but my people are put in set hours and I do try to employ people that I can employ for the hours they want.

I think staffing really changed during the pandemic also in that people are looking for a job that is really gonna feed them, you know, education feed them, you know, feed their soul.

I think that's kind of a big topic right now like you just don't want that job that you go to that grinds you and you know neither do I as a business owner.

So, we all get two days off a week and I treat my staff like family.

So, we call it our kitchen family and that is actually a thing but we do outings together, adventures together, tubing, cookouts.

They can come out to the farm anytime they want.

They have other farms that they can come out to anytime that they want.

We really do value them a lot and just try to treat them really well and make it a really good work environment.

So, I think that's another thing in kitchens that sometimes they're known for their negative environments and our kitchen environment is really positive and we really support each other.

Nope because we want them to see that.

So, you're going to give them, got it, see where my mark is.

It's a different environment to get to get used to.

I know a couple of cooks where they're used to like getting yelled at by the chef or the business owner and I'm like you have to be pretty bad for me to yell at you.

I said you have to do something pretty awful.

I think we just really need to value each other more and, you know, they're human beings too.

I don't know that I feel a change in customer service other than we're serving a couple of different groups of customers so, you know, we still have the people who are don't want to go out to eat right or they come out to eat, when that people aren't so much in the restaurant or you know we still have people coming in with masks which is totally fine.

We have people who only want to take out and we're still doing online ordering and take out and that's actually something I would have never started if it hadn't been for the pandemic.

I would have never started with take out, a website, online ordering all that stuff.

I wouldn't have done it for a while we did delivery and people really did enjoy that but I think it's taken people a while to like come back out, to do their thing, to get in the habit of going out again.

It's just kind of, it's just taking a long time.

There's still no rhyme or rhythm or reason or it's still different for sure.

Well, I rolled around a lot of names in naming my restaurant, you know, The Red Rooster, the Red Barn, you know what I mean.

There's just a lot of around the farm things and then I kind of decided that I wanted to, the field that I wanted to bring to my restaurant was more like, hey you're coming to my house to have a meal and then I thought, okay you're coming to my house.

So, my house is, okay my family, my seven people who have been great supporters right my kids have worked at the pop-up dinners.

My husband has, you know, he's very much an introvert and you know still was the ticket taker but he, they've all been great supporters and my oldest son said to me, mom you're never going to open that restaurant before I graduate and he graduated in May of 2020 and I opened in May of 2020.

So, I settled on the name Table for Seven to just pay tribute to my family and just let people know that is a big part of my success.

So I have seven people in my family and it's Table for Seven.

You can bring a table for two or table for ten whatever you want but I just wanted people to know that my family is important because I think chefs get lost a lot of times in the restaurant and it is a challenge for any work, you know, busy work life balance but my family is important.

I really do try to keep that work life balance and so far I've been successful.

Now I'm having growing pains.

I need more seating.

Some nights we turn away people.

So, I think that I'm really fortunate.

It almost feels like it was it was hard but it was easier to come into it pandemic, really small and slowly grow my way up.

I actually wonder sometimes if it was a part of my success because sometimes when we open, you know, the way that we want to open it might not work out the way that we think.

You know if I had opened full blown and put Bison Tartar on the menu right out, right out the get-go, I don't know that I had a good enough reputation for that right away.

Whereas, the pandemic put me, you know, it knocked me down a few notches and it made me start out different and smaller and more approachable and then I slowly, realized or I realized that I needed to slowly grow into what I actually wanted and I think the pandemic actually helped me do that and and slowly grow to where I wanted to be and I'm still not quite there.

I'm really close but I actually think it could have been part of my success.

We also during the pandemic, another thing that we started was like a little market inside and that's kind of where bread baking came in.

I wasn't necessarily planning on baking a lot of bread but that market thing has become kind of its own thing and we try to carry other Minnesota products, you know other local products.

So, I would like to see that expanded a little bit as well.

It's kind of become a symbiotic relationship there and we have just barely enough room for both and I am on a, I think I've got another 13 to 15 years left in the restaurant business and then I have another plan.

I just would like to see it expand.

I love teaching people.

That's one thing that I do for my staff.

I want to provide them learning opportunities.

We have a lot of those in the kitchen just working with different ingredients or different ways of preparing things.

We also go to farms but I just want to see growth.

I want to see people happy, eating food.

I mean that's just that's my goal really, just to bring really good food to people and have them be happy when they leave.

Maybe somebody will take it over someday.

I mean, I wouldn't mind that whether it's one of my children or you know somebody's really, really interested in, you know, owning their own restaurant and they want to take it over, I'm not opposed to that.

Building a Table for Seven was made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.