Fairbanks restaurants: where to find Alaska Grown

Fairbanks farmers are growing vegetables like zucchini for restaurants.

By Nancy Tarnai
Ah, dining out in Fairbanks. Just a few years ago you could count on nearly everything you ordered having been delivered here via a large food service company.

While restaurants still rely on those entities (and likely always will to some degree) they are beginning to buy closer to home, delighting customers and benefiting Interior farmers.

One of the most consummate examples is Lavelle’s Bistro, a downtown eatery that entered an agreement with an Ester farm this spring. Just as individuals sign up for community supported agriculture (CSA), Lavelle’s joined Calypso Farm and Ecology Center’s CSA as a restaurant, paying a sizeable amount up front for a season’s worth of produce.

“It’s very uncommon,” said Susan Willsrud, farm manager at Calypso. Most likely it is the first such arrangement in Alaska. “We were very excited that Kathy Lavelle was willing to give it a try,” Willsrud said. “She was very bold to enter the agreement.”

Willsrud hopes to see more restaurants and farms cooperating but there is a caveat. “It’s not really simple,” Willsrud admitted. “We’ve been working out the issues. We want to make it smooth and help other CSAs work with restaurants, creating that direct market.”

Volume and delivery are two challenges. “We try to get close to what Lavelle’s wants,” Willsrud said. “Right now we grow it for them and they take it.” Calypso is a small but diversified farm, delivering to Lavelle’s twice a week, some days dropping off as many as 25 different crops.

Kathy Lavelle is willing to go the extra mile to buy locally because it has proven successful for her business. It all started in the 1990s when a home gardener visited Café de Paris, a catering business owned by Lavelle and her husband Frank Eagle. The gardener had been at the farmers’ market all day and sold $10 worth of crops. Lavelle bought every last vegetable the woman had in her car. This arrangement continues to this day, with Lavelle still in partnership with that grower.

She also buys from Chena Hot Springs Resort and several individual growers who raise heirloom tomatoes and oyster mushrooms; she also purchases Alaska scallops, king crab, oysters and clams. She fell in with Calypso last summer when the farm was selling vegetables downtown and brought what didn’t sell each week to the restaurant’s back door. Last January, Willsrud called Lavelle and asked for a more formal agreement. Lavelle made a wish list of vegetables, allowing Calypso to plant what was desired come spring.

“It’s working really well,” Lavelle said. At first the chefs complained that they didn’t know what was coming and they didn’t know how to cook all those greens that arrived in early June. “We’re not a Southern restaurant,” Lavelle said. She worked with Willsrud, who learned to schedule what would be delivered, giving the chefs better opportunities to plan and seek out recipes.

During the summer, Lavelle buys about half of her produce from local sources. “Yes it costs more but not that much more,” she said. “And there is the taste.” She declares that customers care where their food comes from and many express appreciation to her for using local food.

Does Lavelle plan to continue buying locally? “Absolutely,” she said. “It’s been an interesting journey.”

She is not alone. A sizeable number of restaurants (see adjoining list) are buying from local farmers. At Julia’s Solstice Café, owner Julia Quist shops several times a week at farmers’ markets and posts photos of her finds on Facebook so customers ill know what she is serving. “I buy as much as I can find,” she said. Eggs come from Arctic Roots Farm and her honey from Toklat Apiaries.

“It might be a little more expensive to us and the customer but let’s talk about the cost to the environment” (to ship food in), Quist said. “If the restaurants bought local it would encourage other people to do it. It’s a great thing.”

She knows that customers appreciate local food in restaurants. “People come here because of it,” she said. She dreams of a Fairbanks populated with greenhouses, making fresh food available for more than a few months in the summer.

One restaurant with its own growing facility is Pike’s Landing where Executive Chef Jeffrey Brooks just opens the back door each morning for deliveries from the property’s nearby greenhouse. FFA students work in the greenhouse each summer, in conjunction with the UAF School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences, yielding tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, zucchini, peas and more for Brooks. “We’re using all kinds of things,” he said. “The level of freshness is amazing.

“We get fresh products and get to prepare them for our guests; it’s a chef’s dream.”

Gretchen Kerndt, owner of Basically Basil, is the closest thing Fairbanks has to a veggie broker, selling her own produce to over 10 restaurants and connecting farmers to restaurants just to help out. “Over the years I’ve worked with people who really want to use fresh products,” Kerndt said. The Princess is one of her biggest customers and Fairbanks Memorial Hospital helped out this year by purchasing all her excess broccoli.

“We can’t compete with California grown but the quality is higher,” Kerndt said. “Our farmers would like to see one distribution point where restaurants could place an order and get everything they need from various sources.”

During the past few years when locally grown food started gaining popularity and people became concerned about their ecological footprint, customers have been asking for locally grown food in restaurants, Kerndt said. “It’s a good selling point. It’s higher quality and there’s a feel good point.”

Other restaurants do what they can. The owner of the Base Camp Eatery drives to Delta Junction to get veggies from the you-pick farm. She also picks berries and uses crops and herbs from her mom’s garden. Chena’s Alaskan Grill buys local honey and Alaska seafood. The Loose Moose Café serves Alaska grown meat from Indian Valley Meats. The chef at the Finish Line has his own window garden of kitchen herbs.

A gourmet restaurant in Cantwell, of all places, buys vegetables from local growers. 229 Parks Restaurant & Tavern changes its menu frequently to take advantage of what is being harvested. “We have a strong commitment to locally grown, freshly harvested, sustainable cuisine…It is our hope to nourish and nurture all those who come to our table,” 229’s website professes.

Another out-of-the-way business that goes to the trouble of using local food is Camp Denali and North Face Lodge at Kantishna in Denali National Park. Rosie Creek Farm supplies the lodge, delivering produce via a courier service.

Even the University of Alaska Fairbanks is along for the ride, buying produce from Chena Hot Springs Resort and growing vegetables on campus as much as possible. “The more we get locally the less impact due to transportation and the higher quality of food we have,” said Robert Holden, director of UAF Dining Services. Holden pledges to serve some local foods in the student meal plans and through the catering service provided by the university through NANA.

One of the largest local suppliers to restaurants is Chena Hot Springs Resort. Project Manager Phil Cole said the resort is growing produce 12 months a year and what they can’t use in their own restaurant they sell to others.

Cole personally calls on the restaurants and can see that business is booming. “If you look at the front end it costs more,” he said. “But look at the cost savings on the other end. If you buy 25 pounds of tomatoes and have to throw out the non-usable product from long shipping distances and pay someone to trim off the bad lettuce leaves what does it really cost?”

The company he works for is building a one-acre greenhouse that will operate on waste heat at 9-mile Richardson Highway. Cole is looking forward to expanding his sales potential even more and doing so year-round.

To prove he is not just moving lettuce and tomatoes, Cole said he sold 2,000 pounds of Japanese cucumbers in seven weeks this summer. “There’s always something we’re having fun with.”

The restaurants’ efforts are not going unnoticed. Kristi Krueger, Alaska Grown program assistant with the state Division of Agriculture, is hoping to create a recognition system similar to the state of Kentucky’s in which restaurants receive points for using Alaska Grown food. They would be able to promote their businesses for receiving certain designations and might even eventually get refunds for a portion of the local products they buy.

“I really do hope that I can get this program lifted off the ground next spring when the greens start rolling out,” Krueger said.

Restaurants using local food

229 Parks Restaurant & Tavern
Alaska Coffee Roasting Company
Alaska Salmon Bake
Bamboo Panda
Base Camp Eatery
The Blue Loon
Brewster’s
Bun on the Run
Chena Hot Springs Resort Restaurant
Chena's Alaskan Grill (at River’s Edge)
Collegetown Pizza
Fairbanks Princess Riverside Lodge
The Finish Line (Alpine Lodge)
Gold Hill Express
Hot Licks Homemade Ice Cream
Ivory Jack’s
Julia's Solstice Cafe
L’assiette de Pomegranate
Lavelle’s Bistro
Lemon Grass Thai Cuisine
Loose Moose Café
Lulu’s Bagels
Mia’s Cafe
The Model Café (Fairbanks Memorial Hospital)
Pike’s Landing
Pita Place
Thai House
The Pump House
Two Rivers Lodge
Zach’s (Sophie Station)

(If your restaurant buys and serves local foods and you’d like to be added to this list, contact ntarnai@alaska.edu.)