Colorado’s Front Range has long been fertile ground for farm-to-table restaurants, with chefs building menus around ingredients that are often grown just a few miles away. But some of these restaurants have taken that philosophy a step further with on-site gardens, greenhouses and urban plots that allow chefs to harvest herbs, flowers and vegetables just steps from the kitchen.
“I know farm-to-table is a lost trend, but it was never really a trend to me. Itap just the way we grew up,” said Paul Warthen, executive chef and co-owner of Potager, which translates to “kitchen garden.”
Here are five examples.
Potager
Warthen grew up on a 500-acre farm in Frederick County, Md., where most of the food eaten by the family and farm workers was grown on the property. He and his wife, Eileen, purchased , at 1109 Ogden St., from the original owner, Teri Rippeto, in 2019, with the intent of upholding the restaurantap long-standing commitment to locally grown ingredients.
“The garden had been there for probably at least twenty years when we bought it,” Warthen said.
Today, Potager maintains both indoor and outdoor garden spaces. Patrons might notice tomato vines climbing around the patio and herbs tucked among flowers that serve far more than an aesthetic purpose.
“We grow multiple varieties of tomatoes, usually about six or seven varieties including heirlooms, beefsteaks, plums,” he shared. “We kind of go crazy and plant whatever works.”
Some of what they grow fills specific gaps in the supply chain, including unusual varieties that aren’t commonly available from local farms like chocolate habaneros, Jimmy Nardellos and shishitos, along with herbs, greens and crops like Bloody Butcher corn – a deep red heirloom variety.
The harvest shows up in dishes like tomato schnitzel with housemade burrata and charred shishito. Most recently, Warthen worked on transforming the garden’s sorrel into a pistou to serve with scallops.
The garden serves several purposes: providing small amounts of produce for the kitchen, creating a lush atmosphere and, importantly, educating staff about where food comes from. According to Warthen, the garden helps young cooks understand the realities that farmers face.
“One year in late March, we had beautiful spinach, probably 35 heads of spinach and lettuces and arugulas and the garden was thriving,” Warthen recalled. “Then, one day, hail wiped everything out. The cooks were completely distraught, and I said, ‘Yeah, but how do you think the farmer feels?’ For us, losing a few beds doesn’t make or break us. But when a farmer loses a thousand heads of something, thatap devastating.”
Potager works closely with a long list of local farms, including longtime partners like Cure Organic Farm, Red Wagon Farm and Monroe Farm, one of the oldest organic farms on the Front Range. Warthen more recently partnered with Aspen Moon Farm and Esoterra Culinary Garden, which supplies many of the city’s award-winning restaurants.
“When you work with organic farmers and (products) that fresh, to where they never actually see a refrigerator, it’s easy to serve beautiful things,” he added.
Work & Class/Grow + Gather
Across town in Englewood, chef Dana Rodriguez has teamed up with (900 E. Hampden Ave.) to open in the urban farm’s former restaurant space. Much of the produce for Work & Class and the adjacent breakfast and lunch spot, Dayshift, is sourced from the on-site hydroponic system, climate-controlled rooftop greenhouse and various gardens.
“When we took over the space, that was one of the most interesting things to me,” Rodriguez said. “All chefs want their own little farm.”
During the last week of February, multiple varieties of lettuce were growing in rows of indoor hydroponic towers, each carefully tracked and rotated through a system that records planting dates, harvest times and yields. At the time, the leafy greens appeared on the menu at Dayshift as a simple salad with goat cheese, honey, pumpkin seeds and thinly shaved red onion.
“I try to do the least (with the lettuce) because it’s so good. They’re so fresh and organic, you can put any dressing and it’s just perfect,” Rodriguez said.
Upstairs, the rooftop greenhouse grows herbs and edible flowers used by both the kitchen and bar, which features a build-your-own cocktail program with bases like pomegranate, ginger, thyme and spicy basil sour, each listed with suggested spirits.
With warmer months on the horizon, Rodriguez is planning dishes that will feature ingredients like pattypan squash, mushrooms, beets, cucumbers and zucchini, while the farm’s heirloom tomatoes will remain a centerpiece paired with items like burrata or polenta. Rodriguez noted that the tomatoes and strawberries also make a surprisingly good pairing in drinks, including a fresh take on a Bloody Mary.
“When you try the fresh tomatoes next to the ones you order from companies, itap not even close,” she said. “I told them, ‘Give me a lot of tomatoes.’”
Other seasonal ingredients like rhubarb will make appearances, likely in desserts such as strawberry-rhubarb panna cotta. Some fruits and vegetables are so special they’re treated like rare seasonal gifts, including figs from trees grown from cuttings brought from Greece by Grow + Gather’s founder, George Gastis, passed down through generations of his family.
Come summer, as production ramps up, the urban farm will become even more central to Rodriguez’s restaurants, with plans to supply both Work & Class locations, Super Mega Bien and Carne, with fresh produce.
Rodriguez’s connection to farming also runs deep. She grew up in Mexico on a farm where nearly everything the family ate was grown or raised at home.
“My mom would say, ‘We’re making chicken soup today. Go to the back and get a chicken and some vegetables,’” she said.
“These days in the United States, we process the food too much, and that’s why everybody’s getting sick. Knowing that we can have access to fresh produce is such a unique thing, and we can be the difference.”
Wolf’s Tailor
Everything planted in the garden at the two-Michelin-starred Wolf’s Tailor (4058 Tejon St., Denver) is intentionally edible, designed as an extension of the kitchen and bar. Creative garden director Shelli Nelligan-Anderson works alongside Id Est co-founder Erika Whitaker and the restaurantap leadership team to plan each season months in advance, sourcing seeds and starters from farms around Boulder.
Produce like shiso and lemongrass is used creatively (like for pastries) while a wide range of herbs and flowers appear throughout the savory dishes and cocktails. During the summer, the garden blooms with pollinator-friendly plants like nasturtiums, begonias and alyssum, creating a vibrant ecosystem that staff harvests daily.
Guests experience the garden firsthand, too, whether through cocktails designed to be enjoyed among the herbs used to make them or bouquets picked straight from the beds and brought home as a souvenir.
Wildflower
Influenced by his time cooking in Paris, chef Aiden Tibbetts, who helms Michelin-recommended (3638 Navajo St, Denver), builds dishes around the produce first rather than protein, allowing the vegetables to take
center stage. Many of them are sourced from Tibbetts’ mother’s backyard in Aurora, where they harvest the week’s bounty every Sunday during growing season.
Known as T2 Garden, the 2,700-square-foot space (which they plan to expand by 1,000 square feet this year) spans seven terraced plots that produce a steady stream of seasonal ingredients throughout the growing season. Flowers like tree blossoms (lilac, apple, crab apple, pear), violas, marigolds, dahlias and nasturtiums typically bloom first, followed by perennial herbs like thyme, oregano, and chives. Basil is replanted yearly.
In late summer, the bounty comes to full fruition with crops like tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, squash, melon and carrots. The garden’s heirloom tomatoes star in a returning signature dish each summer, featuring coconut fennel pollen custard, plum consomme, leek oil and sesame tuile.
Black Cat Farm
At Black Cat (9889 N. 51st St., Longmont), the kitchen is supplied by the 500-acre certified organic farm that it sits on.
Chef Eric Skokan and his wife, Jill, grow more than 250 heirloom and heritage varieties of vegetables, along with grains like einkorn, rye and buckwheat that are cleaned and milled on-site.
The farm also raises heritage breeds of sheep, pigs and poultry, many of which are listed on The Livestock Conservancy’s endangered breeds list. Because the produce is harvested daily, Skokan selects varieties for flavor rather than durability, allowing the menus at Black Cat and its sister restaurant (1964 13th St., Boulder) to change constantly with the seasons.
Customers can also purchase fresh produce and meats from its Farm Store in Boulder (4975 Jay Road) and at the Boulder Farmer’s Market.
