![]() We wanted to support our friends and neighbors to create a stronger financial community. We wanted our food to serve as a bridge in our community and as a vehicle for growth into the future.When it comes to souvenirs, Milwaukee offers a range of unique and memorable items that capture the spirit of the city. We purchased the Café in 2013 with the idea that we could create a restaurant that was about more than just food – we wanted to showcase the amazing farmers and food artisans that call this place home. After working in kitchens for over a decade, I decided that if I wanted to cook with the best ingredients possible I would need to move back to the Driftless – back to the epicenter of the organic food and farming movement. As Wisconsin natives, the Driftless Region is where we call home. With the help of my wife Ruthie and 30 employees, we own and operate our 44 seat restaurant. My name is Luke Zahm and I'm the Chef and Owner of the Driftless Café. Be a part of helping our Farmers, our Community and our Region grow! We are a locally-focused, farm-to-table restaurant in rural WI. They were drawn to the farm scene, the Waldorf school, and Wonderstate Coffee. They’d never been here, but didn’t want to go back to Madison or Chicago. Mary and her husband, Eric, decided to skip the gridlock traffic jams which were slowly chipping away at their sanity, and drive themselves to Viroqua. As she said this, it dawned on me that I couldn’t remember the last time I really had to wait impatiently in traffic… a peace of mind I’d taken for granted. She’d attended college in Madison and worked at a high end restaurant in Boston but needed a change. Mary Kastman, a Chicago native, moved to the Driftless for a slower pace, a different quality of life, and a more sustainable work culture. These are the ties of resilience in the Driftless food community. They intend to share these narratives with folks who experience our produce in their entrees. We walked through gardens and greenhouses with cooks and waitresses and told our story. She stressed the importance of their team knowing where the ingredients come from, appreciating the hard work that goes into them, and understanding the story of the people and places they bring into their kitchen. Summer of 2020, when we were all going stir crazy from staying home, Mary organized a socially distanced farm field trip for her staff. The extra income helped us get through a hard winter. In the fall of 2019, when the farm was in one of it’s leanest seasons, the cafe hired my husband, Rufus, as a bartender and server. The cafe has been sourcing produce from us since they opened and I’ve personally hucked hundreds of boxes to their backdoor. The ties between the Driftless Café and our farm, Keewaydin, have woven us tightly together. This is the food community I know and love, entangled and thus supportive and resilient. She told me a story of a farmer comping their entire greens order one week because he knew the restaurant was struggling through the shutdown. In a year that devastated the restaurant industry, Mary says she’s learned about relying on the kindness of strangers. As the world closed the grim chapter that was 2020, Executive chef, Mary Kastman and the team at the Driftless Café prepared an eight course New Year’s Eve dinner themed, “Resilience”.
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