Award-winning chef Judi Barsness, owner of Chez Jude in Grand Marais, is committed to reflecting the freshest of the Minnesota seasons and highlighting the region's harvests. With organic, locally grown, and wild-caught ingredients, she creates menu offerings that she and her talented staff call, "Minnsine...Contemporary Minnesota Cuisine." Judi incorporates fresh herbs grown in Chez Jude's kitchen garden into many of her recipes while maintaining strong relationships with farmers, ranchers, and fishers around Lake Superior and throughout Minnesota.
One such farm is Hidden Stream Farm in Elgin. Farmers Eric and Lisa Klein, who are well known for their Food Alliance Certified grass-fed beef and their pastured poultry and naturally raised pork, have also successfully created an interdependent community of sustainable produce farmers for restaurants. When chefs need a particular vegetable, the Kleins visit neighboring farms to get it. "We supply lettuces and radishes in the spring to potatoes and onions in the fall, and everything in between," says Lisa. This initiative has offered another avenue in aiding the sales and success of nearby farms and encouraged restaurants to incorporate a greater variety of local foods.
Each spring and fall, some of the Klein's partnering farms venture into the woods, searching for wild morel mushrooms for Judi and other chefs. This is the third year Judi has worked with the Kleins, and their relationship also enables her to offer menu items that are in season in Southern Minnesota before they are ripe in the north. Judi, a second-generation chef, and Eric and Lisa Klein, who run a second-generation farm, continue the abundant legacy of caring for the land, the animals, and their communities.
