8/23/2023 0 Comments Wisconsin foodie show![]() They’d never been here, but didn’t want to go back to Madison or Chicago. Mary and her husband, Eric, decided to skip the gridlock traffic jams which were slowly chipping away at their sanity, and drive themselves to Viroqua. As she said this, it dawned on me that I couldn’t remember the last time I really had to wait impatiently in traffic… a peace of mind I’d taken for granted. She’d attended college in Madison and worked at a high end restaurant in Boston but needed a change. ![]() Mary Kastman, a Chicago native, moved to the Driftless for a slower pace, a different quality of life, and a more sustainable work culture. These are the ties of resilience in the Driftless food community. They intend to share these narratives with folks who experience our produce in their entrees. We walked through gardens and greenhouses with cooks and waitresses and told our story. She stressed the importance of their team knowing where the ingredients come from, appreciating the hard work that goes into them, and understanding the story of the people and places they bring into their kitchen. Summer of 2020, when we were all going stir crazy from staying home, Mary organized a socially distanced farm field trip for her staff. The extra income helped us get through a hard winter. In the fall of 2019, when the farm was in one of it’s leanest seasons, the cafe hired my husband, Rufus, as a bartender and server. The cafe has been sourcing produce from us since they opened and I’ve personally hucked hundreds of boxes to their backdoor. The ties between the Driftless Café and our farm, Keewaydin, have woven us tightly together. This is the food community I know and love, entangled and thus supportive and resilient. She told me a story of a farmer comping their entire greens order one week because he knew the restaurant was struggling through the shutdown. In a year that devastated the restaurant industry, Mary says she’s learned about relying on the kindness of strangers. As the world closed the grim chapter that was 2020, Executive chef, Mary Kastman and the team at the Driftless Café prepared an eight course New Year’s Eve dinner themed, “Resilience”. In his free time, Kyle can be found geeking out over food history books, cooking time-honored recipes for his wife and children, and googling the pronunciation of awkward French culinary terms.Viroqua, Wisconsin. He and his wife own Amuse Bouche Entertainment Productions and together create unique food media and culinary events, which include keynote presentations, cooking demonstrations, and wildly popular storytelling dinner events. In 2016, he gave a TEDx Talk examining the powerful science and emotion of food memories. He has been featured on The Cooking Channel, The Travel Channel and Eater. Kyle is a regular expert media contributor on NPR and has been awarded the Wisconsin Broadcast Association Award twice for his compelling essays on food culture. His signature wit and keen observations have made him a sough-after keynote speaker, media contributor and culinary storyteller. For over a decade, he has chronicled regional food stories, exploring where our food comes from and how it shapes who we are. Kyle Cherek is a culinary historian, food essayist, and former host of the Emmy Award-winning television show Wisconsin Foodie on PBS.
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