Sneak Peek: River Valley Kitchens

By Melissa Wiley in Food on Oct 25, 2013 4:20PM

Everything must evolve or die, including the mushroom farmer. Set to open mid-November in the former City Provisions space, River Valley Kitchens is making good on Darwin’s theory, spurring the oldest mushroom farm in the Midwest on to its latest evolutionary leap.

“In 1984, there were 380 mushroom farms in the U.S, but now there are only about 100. The café and storefront seem like a natural and necessary evolution for us,” mused Jordan Rose, third-generation heir to the farm, when we visited the Ravenswood construction zone last week. “My grandfather was a big believer in evolution and high quality, which is why we’re still here.”

Bill Rose founded River Valley Ranch in 1976 after searching in vain for a quality mushroom for his French restaurant, the height of fine dining in Chicagoland at the time. “In the early ’70s, you could only get button mushrooms in cans,” Jordan reminded us. “Then he met a gentleman in Lincolnshire who owned a mushroom farm and decided to sell the restaurant and go into farming—because farming is so profitable,” he noted wryly.

“Eminent domain then forced him to sell his land for a reason I have yet to discover, when he relocated to Burlington, where we are today. It started out as a wholesale business. Fifteen years ago, we started pickling and now make 60 different value-added products while still selling five types of mushrooms: cremini, white button, portabella, shitake, and oyster. Our value-added products and the farmers’ markets—we do 10 a week—are what keep us afloat. The farm itself has been a losing proposition since 1980.”

Jordan’s father, Eric, inherited the farm as well as its mounting debt at age 30 when tragedy struck the family as a semi-trailer breached a highway median, killing Bill and his hired hand. Battling grief and market forces, Eric expanded the farm’s output to the pickled and value-added products that will stock River Valley Kitchens’ shelves come November. He also began frequenting the Chicago farmers’ markets where his face has long been a familiar one.

Now 30 himself, Jordan is bringing years of experience in some of Chicago’s finest kitchens to bear on this brave new venture, cooking what the farm ferments while hoping to succeed where Cleetus Friedman and City Provisions failed.

“The main preconception we’re trying to overcome is that local means expensive. We’re setting out to prove that isn’t the case.”

As he sees it, there are bottom lines and then there are bottom lines. Keeping the books in the black pivots on return customers, whom he’d rather feed a memorable mushroom bagel than reap a large profit from.

“We’re not getting rich doing this, but that’s not the point. I’d take half a million in profits for 10 new customers in a month who loved our food and walked out happier because of it,” he insists. “We live by the philosophy that it’s better to do five things really, really well rather than 10 things just well. At the same time, we’re able to overcome a lot of supply chain costs because our farm produces so much of what we sell. We also procure eggs and things we don’t produce ourselves through relationships we have with other small producers.”

Relationships, as we all know, are integral to how good food happens. We first became acquainted with River Valley Ranch when we developed a Wednesday tamale habit at Green City Market, where we met Brad Knaub, River Valley Kitchens food service manager and Jordan’s all-round culinary partner in crime.

Echoing Jordan’s commitment to a fair price point, he said, “I just feel so bad for people coming to the market with $6 and they can’t buy anything for lunch. I watch them counting their dollars and then walk away from so many stalls. But at our tent, they can buy two tamales for $5, two with chili on top for $6. We want people to eat incredibly delicious food, food that’s going to make their whole day better and everyone else’s they meet better because of it. You can’t do that if you’re overcharging.”

For those who’ve never made the journey up to Burlington, River Valley Kitchens will also act as something of a big reveal.

“We can’t sell a lot of our jarred stuff at the farmers’ markets—our granola, for instance—because we didn’t grow all the ingredients ourselves, even if we did most of them,” Jordan observed. “So with the store we now have a place to sell products you could only get at the farm before.”

Another bonus? Brad now has the prerogative to make requests. First on his list, he confessed, is okra. “You can do so much with pickled okra, it’s absolutely incredible.”

“When we worked together before, Jordan and I used to compete to see who could make the biggest sandwich,” he continued. “But here it’s not all about the sandwich. It’s about every possible ingredient. I can’t stand this shameful, tasteless coleslaw some people will serve you. You should be excited—ecstatic—about coleslaw all by itself without a fried chicken thigh and heap of mashed potatoes alongside it. Each one of the components to something should be so good that you want eat that all by itself until you’re full. Once you taste our coleslaw, you should want to eat nothing else all day.”

That said, there will be no shortage of variety in this dream delicatessen. The main menu at River Valley Kitchens will feature five rotating sandwiches, a meat case selling primarily center cuts, a smorgasbord of farm-fresh sundries, three or four beers on tap, and 20 bottles of wine on a rolling basis. The café, meanwhile, will seat 30 people, and Cleetus’ old butchering room will host cooking classes and private events. Bagel sandwiches will sell for between $5 and $6 and regular sandwiches for $8.

“Good bagels and good bagel sandwiches are increasingly hard to find in this town,” Jordan groused. “So we’ll always have what I hope are the best bagels in town, always a smoked flour version and always a mushroom version.”

Smoking, we quickly learned, is high art here.

“We smoke everything we can. Flour, butter, meat. Especially flour. As far as ingredients, it all comes down to mushrooms, garlic, and fermented chili. If you don’t like those three things, you’re not going to like our food,” he said flatly while we reminded him of our obsession with chili-topped tamales.

A self-described recovering vegetarian, Jordan avers he and Brad make only food they want to eat themselves. Much of their menu is vegetarian and gluten-free, but they’ll entertain no meat substitutes—why be vegetarian if you’re just hankering after ersatz sirloin? —or meatless fare that isn’t every bit the rival of a juicy porterhouse.

“Brad and I both worked at a lot of restaurants that didn’t put any thought or care into their vegetarian dishes. I mean, pasta primavera, come on. The fact is that vegans and vegetarians are a low-percentage market, so most restaurants don’t invest in them. But I want them to leave as happy as everyone else. For me, it all comes down to customer service. Customer service isn’t about money but a culture, what should be a culture of caring how people feel. I think customer service is a noble pursuit. There’s real honor in it.”

In addition to entering the mushroom farm into perhaps the noblest profession, Jordan also plans to open the patio once warm weather returns and serve Sunday brunch. The farm grows nearly 30,000 heirloom tomatoes annually, so expect a killer bloody Mary mix. And expect passion, enough to power a growing staff and loyal customer base.

“The restaurant will create 15 new jobs. We’ll be able to keep some of our seasonal help, some of the people who share our passion, year round. Brad and I have enough enthusiasm for everyone to live on, but this is really a collaborative process, so we like to work with people on board with our mission, to make people leave happier than when they came in. If we don’t fly by that, we’ve failed.”

River Valley Kitchens is located at 1816 W. Wilson.