Herbst’s Hard-Won Harvest – St. Paul, MN

Nov 26, 2023 | eat/drink

Photos by Tim Evans
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Herbst’s concord grape ice cream with sesame mousse on milk toast.
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Chef Eric Simpson’s ambitious farm-to-table menu attests to the Upper Midwest’s agricultural bounty — and its ultimate precarity

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Eater Twin Cities: Herbst Eatery & Farm Stand has cycled through three Minnesota seasons: spring’s green thaw, summer’s scorch, and now, fall’s chilly harvest. Chef Eric Simpson is already preparing winter’s dance of canning and fermentation, dreaming of summer’s zucchinis dried and rehydrated for February meals. Herbst has one of the Twin Cities’ most ambitious farm-to-table menus, a testament to the Upper Midwest’s agricultural bounty. But it’s also a testament to its precarity — to the region’s droughts and hailstorms — and the tenacity it takes, from both farmer and chef, to get a single kohlrabi on the table.

Herbst debuted on Raymond Avenue in May. It was tricky, Simpson says, to open in the spring, when many of Minnesota’s slow-waking farm fields have just been planted. “I was sitting down with Jörg and I showed him a spreadsheet from our farmers with their projections,” says Simpson, who partnered with owners Jörg and Angie Pierach to open the restaurant. “There was this blank spot right down the middle. That was March and April. I had sweet potatoes, rutabaga, and turnips.” He opened with a menu of pork rillettes in ramp oil, blistered snap peas with pecorino, and smashed radishes in a red pepper vinaigrette.

By then, the Pierachs had had Herbst in the works for a while — they bought the space in 2019. (They’re no strangers to the neighborhood restaurant game. Jörg is co-owner of southwest Minneapolis’s Tilia.) Years ago, the Pierachs bought a home in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, where they grew close with family farmers in the area. One farm stand in particular, stocked with Roma tomatoes and acorn squash, inspired Herbst. Simpson came on later to helm the kitchen. After a winding cooking trail through Miami, England, and New York, where he worked with chefs Missy Robbins (A Voce and Lilia) and Paul Liebrandt (the Elm), it’s his first Minnesota gig. He’s been adapting his seasonal clock, he says, from the Hudson Valley to the Upper Midwest’s sweet but truncated growing season. Ingrid Norgaard, an alum of Tilia and Petite León, serves as chef de cuisine.

Herbst has two main suppliers: the Wisconsin Growers Cooperative, a group of 36 small western Wisconsin farmers, and the Dover Producers, a collective of young farmers that formed to supply the restaurant with lamb, beef, and pork. It also works with a number of independent nearby farms, like Wild Acres, Squash Blossom, Hidden Stream, and Waxwing. Simpson manages a massive spreadsheet that matches plates with the harvests of the seasons. He’s not an absolutist: There’s citrus, coffee, and other far-from-local ingredients on the menu. But in an era when “farm-to-table” is often slapped on menus as an opaque marketing term, Herbst takes it quite literally.

“The farmers that we work with, their livelihood is directly correlated to what they pull out of the ground,” says Simpson. “Their planning time is so much further out than most people realize. And once you pay for that seed, you’re committed. When you put it in the ground, it’s another layer.” Sometimes a crop yields a surplus; sometimes it comes up short. Herbst’s backup plan for variable harvests has become livestock auctions. “We can’t allow ourselves to put our farmers in a position where they’re not coming out whole,” says Simpson. It’s a relationship of mutual dependence.

Here’s an inside look at five of Herbst’s dishes, made mostly with ingredients from Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Smashed kohlrabi, juniper poppy seed vinaigrette

A grey bowl with a dish of smashed kohlrabi pieces dressed with poppyseeds, sprigs of dill, and slivers of shallot.

Simpson sometimes uses turnips in this dish, depending on the season.
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Herbst’s smashed kohlrabi dish, finished with dill, shallot, and a juniper poppy seed vinaigrette, has a cool minerality, like rose quartz or snowmelt. Simpson, having spent ample time in fine dining restaurants, grew tired of radishes and turnips sliced into wafers and held in water until they’re tasteless. He smashes the kohlrabi with a spatula or the palm of his hand right before it’s doused in the vinaigrette, expelling the vegetable’s volatile oils. There’s a certain risk to a smashed raw vegetable dish — “Dishes like this can piss off our customers when that’s not what they want, right?” — but he keeps one on the menu, rotating the kohlrabi with radishes (“It’s all about minerals and black pepper”) and turnips, which have a “beautiful alkalinity that comes across like horseradish.” It’s a delicate game, though: When Simpson last trekked south to Hidden Stream Farm to replenish his kohlrabi stock, the farmer he visited had lost his entire crop to a freak hailstorm.

“It’s a very different reality when you’re working this close to the source,” says Simpson. “It’s a huge investment of time, money, and brainpower to have it all disappear with one storm.”

Caramelized red kuri squash, creamed kale, Calabrian honey

Rings of orange squash over chunks of squash, finished with shavings of Parmesean, basil leaves, and pistachios, with a kale puree beneath the squash. — The squash is finished with a dusting of crushed pistachios.
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Simpson insists that Herbst’s red kuri squash and creamed kale dish isn’t as complex as it looks. The squash is braised gently in a Parmesan broth, then caramelized in a hot honey infused with Calabrian chile. The creamed kale beneath, he says, is prepared European style — it’s a true puree, with a smooth, even texture. Small morsels of lightly grilled kale nestle beneath the squash, too. As for the glistening red kuri rings, Simpson cuts the squash on a slicer and cooks the rings in a glucose syrup. “It has the approach of making a sugar chip without the sweetness,” he says. “Then they’re just dehydrated. It looks like a pain, but it’s really not.” All the elements in this dish, save for the Parmesan, pistachio, and Calabrian chiles, are produced by the farmers of the Wisconsin Growers Cooperative.

Creste di gallo, chicken liver, black truffles

A beige stone bowl with creste di gallo pasta in a chicken liver sauce, topped with shaved black truffles and Parmesan. — The creste di gallo furls delicately at one edge.
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Grilled pork, coffee, grapefruit, caramelized garlic

A beige stone plate with hunks of roasted pork, a base of pureed, deep-green oregano, and chicory greens on top. — These glossy winter greens come from Waxwing Farm, less than an hour’s drive south from the Twin Cities.
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This pork is grilled, glazed with coffee and malt, then drizzled in a vinaigrette of caramelized garlic, coffee, olive oil, and vinegar. Simpson finishes the plate with pine-dark chicory greens, a cold-weather crop from Waxwing Farm in Webster, Minnesota. An oregano emulsion is pooled at the base of the pork, which comes from the Dover Producers collective. “A lot of those ingredients are not in their primary roles everyone associates with them,” says Simpson. “The garlic is roasted to the point that the sugars are caramelized — it’s almost crispy on the outside, firm, [from] slow roasting it.” The coffee gives smoke and earth; the vinaigrette gives acid and floral notes. “There’s a lot of translation of farm math into restaurant math,” says Simpson. “When pigs are coming in at three dollars a pound for a whole animal, it’s like, oh my God, I have to translate this into how much a steak costs.” After Simpson buys the pork from the Dover farmers, he has it processed at JM Watkins, a small butcher in Plum City, Wisconsin.

Grilled milk toast, sesame mousse, Concord grape ice cream

A beige stone plate with a half-slice of milk toast, topped with sesame mousse and purple concord grape ice cream. — An ethereal PB & J creation, from pastry chef Maria Beck.

This Concord grape ice cream, sesame mousse, and ethereal milk toast dessert is the work of Herbst’s pastry chef Maria Beck. “The milk bread that she made for this is one of my favorite things,” says Simpson. “It’s such a simple bread, but it’s just so comforting and light and fluffy and delicious, and it toasts really nicely.” The PB & J connotations of this dish are strong, he says — both he and Beck are playful with the dessert menu, evoking familiar childhood flavors in simple forms. The Concord grapes actually come from the Pierachs’ farmhouse in the Driftless Area. When they first moved there, Simpson says, the property had a host of dead grape vines — but in the past few years, they’ve sprung back to life. This season, the Pierachs harvested about 120 pounds of grapes.

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Herbst is open all nights of the week, with a special late-night menu on weekends starting at 10 p.m. Catch the fall menu before it’s gone.

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