(rambling guitar music)
- [Narrator] Epiphany Farms started in 2009
when Chef Ken Myszka left his cooking job
in high-end restaurants in Las Vegas
and returned to his hometown determined to make a difference
and change the way people eat.
He convinced two chef colleagues to join him
and begin farming on the property of his childhood home.
Located 20 minutes from the restaurant, the farm sits
on a dusty two-lane country road, a polyculture stronghold
surrounded by big corporate monocrop farms
growing corn, soybeans, and wheat.
In place of those monocrops, Epiphany Farms
allows the land and Mother Nature to dictate what is grown,
from kale to okra and walnuts to morel mushrooms.
- There isn't any culinary talent in this town,
so it's, like, we had to train people,
we had to hire, we had to completely turn over the staff.
And it was one day at a time.
Like okay, here's how you hold three plates in your hand,
here's where the flame is underneath the sauttee pan
when you're holdin' the handle,
here's how you use your spoon.
So finding the right people that belong
is really challenging.
(moves into upbeat hopeful guitar music)
- I think to understand just the uphill battle
that Epiphany Farms has been fighting,
you have to understand the context
of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois.
It's a college town.
It's surrounded by a lot of wheat fields
and a lot of corn fields.
It's the birthplace of Steak 'n Shake,
and so there's a lot of chain restaurants around there.
And so one of the uphill battles
that Epiphany Farms had to fight
is the perception that people think
that their food is pretentious, because that type of food
is rarely seen in Central Illinois.
But if you look at it, the food
is really not that pretentious at all.
It's very much classic American cooking
with refined fine dining techniques.
But the fact that they've been around
for so many years, comin' up on a decade now,
I think really speaks the success
that perhaps they are winning that battle.
They were in the infancy of farming
and the restaurant hadn't been opened yet,
and the way that they were making money
is they were hosting these pop-up dinners in people's homes.
And they were bringin' their ingredients,
and they had these grand plans
about how they could save fine dining and how it
could operate on a much more sustainable model,
farming all these produce.
And they were raising the chickens and hogs on this farm.
And it was really amazing, because it was just four people,
and they were doin' all this themselves,
and they were learning about farming
from YouTube videos, and from books, and from textbooks.
And I was really struck by
they were literally learning how to do this
from the ground on up.
(moves into pleasant music)
- [Narrator] Four years after starting
the farm, in the summer of 2014,
the team opened Epiphany Farms Restaurant.
Today the farm and restaurant employ over 150 people.
- This is per capita the thickest chain restaurant city,
I think, in the United States.
Starting out, and even up until this very day,
people will still think our food's pretentious,
and we've been tryin' to wipe
that slate clean since day one.
Workin' in high-end restaurants, the amount of waste
really jaded me and my business partners.
And instead of takin' the center section of a carrot
and throwin' the other 60% of it in the trash
because it's not the right spec or the right size,
we really felt that there was a better way.
The stakes, the level of expectations
are so high when people come into our restaurants,
we get one shot at it.
If the food isn't perfect, if it's not the best piece
of chicken they've ever had, they're gonna tend
to turn their backs and not support us.
When you get people in the dining room,
that's your opportunity to capture them
and educate 'em on why it's important
to dine here and spend your food dollars here,
but the food has to spot on.
I like to present food the best that I can.
And it doesn't have to be fine dining,
it has to be everyday nutrition.
This is how people eat.
(mellow guitar music)
From the beginning, expansion was always
very important to us, to be able to steward this land
in a regenerative sense and to prove
that in the belly of the beast, with all the monocrops,
the corn and soybeans, around us,
we are able to have regenerative agriculture
that can be a viable business model.
So we took on this monster,
and the farm wasn't really sized to that.
So it was kind of a little bit
of a scramble tryin' to figure out
how to put these systems together,
and then sized up rapidly to be able
to supply the restaurants with enough
of this nutritionally dense farm-fresh food.
- And I tell people all the time on tours
that we're not doin' anything new here.
Like, we've been doing this for hundreds of years,
so we're just gettin' back to it
and findin' those outlets that give us
a little bit of a shortcut, you know.
(moves into pleasant guitar music)
- We're out to create the business model.
That's why we're completely open door,
transparent about our farming systems.
We welcome the community, and we require
a mandatory paid shift to all of our team once a year,
once a season, to come out and spend time on the farm.
And whenever they're harvesting radishes or kale,
and they drop the kale salad on the table
and they can explain to the guests that
"I harvested this kale this morning,"
that connection, people...
As humans, we need that.
Harvesting crops, and growing,
and farming, it's real rewarding.
But if there's not that connection,
if the cooks don't have that experience,
then it's lost and it's the same product to them.
And we're tryin' our very best to convey
how important it is to grow locally,
and have more farmers, and educate more farmers
on how to care for themselves and steward the land,
to cultivate crops, as well as cultivate human beings.