Kevin Willmann is well known in foodie circles as a chef who passionately utilizes local produce. Most recently chef at Erato in Edwardsville, where his upscale rustic cuisine drew diners from throughout the St. Louis region, Willmann has struck out on his own, opening a small, 50-seat restaurant in the midst of a residential section of South City. “I think that’s what a neighborhood spot’s about,” he said. “You put yourself out there. We’re smack in the middle of a neighborhood. That’s awesome to me. To be able to sell yourself to fewer people, have that foot traffic and create those relationships.”
Farmhaus is a very evocative name. What are you trying to get across? You’re in the middle of the city.
I know. We spelled the name “haus” which is a little kickback to Grandma, where all this started. She was German. Their whole clan moved over. … The gardens of my youth are really what stayed with me and encouraged me to keep doing this. The neat thing now is that it’s come full circle. We try to tread the water with all this local stuff. Six, seven years ago, it was brutal because it was so expensive.
How much do you envision sourcing locally and how much will you rely on conventional sources?
I think this will be the closest we’ve gotten to realistically [being] fully locally sourced. I don’t have any idealistic visions of being able to do it 100 percent. We don’t have enough infrastructure on the farmland to do it 100 percent. Within a couple hundred miles, we’re getting closer.
You’re opening in March – that’s a tough time to be sourcing everything locally.
My style has always been responsive. If you have this huge broad spectrum, it’s so difficult to narrow in on what you want to do. But if you let yourself respond to what’s around you, it’s so much easier.
Do you mean culinarily or in a business sense?
I mean in the sense of the produce. What’s going on right now? Just change the menu. Locking into a menu in my opinion is the stupidest thing anybody could do. You’re forced to buy commercial everything.
What’s your opening menu going to look like?
It’s going to be somewhat heavy, because we’re not going to be very thick into [the growing season] yet. We do have some things … already. We are excited that we’re going to have a noticeable opening with produce, so that’s encouraging. Winter vegetables and things that are finishing, and we imagine that by the middle of March, we will have a lot of stuff: greens, leeks, some of the earlier peas.
Many diners are familiar with your cooking, so how is this going to be an evolution?
With our increased kitchen space, we get to be serious across the board. … The limitations are lifted. Everything that came out of the kitchen at Erato came out of a small, 4-by-2-foot table, so it had to go from pan to plate.
How else are you pushing the local concept?
No one has ever taken the local wines seriously. That’s always been a discouraging thing to me. This is such a food-driven restaurant. The … fun wines to pair with food typically aren’t the big, sophisticated wines. We’ve had so much fun tasting. We drove through Alto Pass [in southern Illinois] and went to some of the more premier Illinois-side wineries. Some of them have been open for 35, 40 years. There is so much that is so explosive and so different, so unique – the Chambourcin that comes out of the Illinois side is just remarkable. Awesome fruit quality. How cool is that going to be? To pair local wines with local food? And I think that’s an evolution for us. It furthers the concept.
Are you going to have vegetarian dishes each night?
The most exciting thing for someone who is a vegetarian would be to get a hold of us [ahead of time], because then our possibilities increase. Time to prepare makes such a huge difference because if we need to pull something out of something we’re already doing, we have to know a day ahead of time to do anything interesting. If I were to put some kind of style on the vegetarian stuff we do, it would be very rustic and very simple. Showcasing the ingredient itself. There’s nothing like taking these little baby turnips and things we get and just roasting them. It’s so simple.
Are you directly collaborating with farmers, asking them to grow specific things for you?
Definitely. I just got a call from a really good grower of ours who specifically focuses on the spring and fall, which are just awesome times – people think that the growing season starts in April and ends in November, and it just doesn’t. We had produce all the way to New Year’s Eve last year. It’s not hard to throw a hoop house over things and continue to harvest into February. We actually encouraged a farmer last month from the East Side, who does all of the raspberries and things for us, to grow some hogs for us. He wanted to try it and so he grew some Chester White hogs. Tore ’em down a few days ago, and we’re waiting. Started some charcuterie and everything.
It sounds to me like you’re following your instinct, that you’ve really learned from each place you’ve worked and are applying that here.
The least successful places I’ve seen have been the ones that try to do everything for everyone. If you try to do what you do very, very well, that is such a recipe for success. And the closer I get to that, every time it seems to work. I think if you have your passion in every dish, and you’re excited about it, then it makes it more exciting to sell it. Then it becomes more than just making money, which I haven’t done yet either. [laughs] The line between work and play gets diluted, and that is the goal.
Farmhaus
3257 Ivanhoe Ave., St. Louis
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2010.