Bob Borchardt’s family goes way back with food. His great-grandparents owned a store that sold produce, meat, and dry goods in Pilsen in the 30s and 40s, and his grandparents ran a restaurant and bar where his grandmother made hearty midday dinners of braised meats and spaetzle for the truckers coming in and out of the nearby South Water Market. In the 90s Bob took over his father’s company, which serviced restaurants with specialized tasks like maintaining professional stove hoods. And five years ago he started up Cuisine Populaire (cuisinepopulaire.com), a new-media and video-production company that makes DVDs on global food, wine, and culture. Some of them feature his brother, Bradley Borchardt, a Bangkok-based chef.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Today Bob and Jennifer, both 45, own Harvest Moon, a 20-acre certified organic farm in southwest Wisconsin. They’re in some ways a typical family-run organic outfit, selling whole and half CSA shares—including winter shares beginning this year. But they’ve also been innovative, teaming up with Uncommon Ground on Devon to offer “Farmer Fridays,” a weekly farmers’ market that runs from 4 to 8 PM. It’s as much for the farmers as the patrons who’d prefer to shop after work: “We can’t be getting up at two in the morning,” Jennifer says.
Toying with the CSA idea in the living room of their Roscoe Village house back in 2005, the Borchardts went on Craigslist and typed in “organic farm in Wisconsin.” Up popped one with “a red brick house with pretty rolling landscape,” Jennifer says. They went to see it, and although they didn’t end up buying it, they became friends with the couple that owned it and spent the summer there “playing farmer” on a two-acre mixed vegetable plot. After that, says Jennifer, “I realized that I could do this as a vocation and finally be in the food business from the angle I wanted.”
Earlier this year Jennifer, armed with seed catalogs, sat down with the Chicago chefs to pick out what Harvest Moon would grow for them. “Choosing varieties to grow together deepens the level of involvement and commitment on both sides,” she says, and the process makes each party more aware of the issues and challenges the other faces. Plus, she says, “the chef has an idea of what he’s getting, and we know we have a market for it.”
