Every time Garin Fons dreams up a new piece of meat to cure, stuff, or process—say, nduja or goat bacon or pistachio- studded mortadella—he sends the ingredient list and the processing notes to Wisconsin state meat inspectors and waits for the go- ahead. If they don’t like something about one of these formulations—say, too many nitrates in the recipe, or a fermentation period that’s too long—they reject it.
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“Last year at this time I had four employees,” says Hunter. “Right now I have 40.” That’s because in the last year the collective has opened Underground Kitchen, a brick-and-mortar restaurant and cocktail bar just off Madison’s Capitol Square. That’s in addition to Underground Meats, which they operate next to the restaurant’s prep kitchen in an old industrial space on Madison’s east side. This burst of activity has been in the offing for a long time now, and though they make it look easy, it wasn’t so simple to get the meat business off the ground.
The Hunter brothers grew up in Tyler, Texas, the sons of Christian missionaries who relocated the family to South Africa in ’93. Jonny came back a year later, eventually starting college at UW, and Ben followed him in 2000. Both found work among a group of volunteers that cooked locally sourced vegetarian lunches in the basement of a Presbyterian church. In 2003 the brothers and others in their circle began the catering business that occasionally staged relatively well-publicized underground dinners; they subsequently took it out on the road to Chicago and New York.
“One side of the building thinks we are going to kill someone; the other one is investing in seeing this project get off the ground,” Hunter e-mailed me back in December 2009.
E-mail Mike Sula at msula@chicagoreader.com.
