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This restaurant group grows 50,000 pounds of seasonal produce on its own regenerative farm

Maryland’s Atlas Restaurant Group has 22 high-end restaurants that are supplied with fresh, local produce.

This restaurant group grows 50,000 pounds of seasonal produce on its own regenerative farm

[Photo: Atlas Farms]

BY Talib Visram5 minute read

The shishito peppers served at Azumi, one of the luxury properties of Maryland’s Atlas Restaurant Group, are “absolutely unbelievable,” says the group’s managing partner Eric Smith. The carrots are also sweet, the lettuce is crispy, and the heirloom tomatoes are the fresh centerpiece of the Greek salad at the group’s Mediterranean restaurant, Ouzo Bay.

Those items all come from Atlas Farms, a five-acre property owned by the group that produces crops for the menus of 22 upscale restaurants, from the Italian Tagliata and elevated Mexican Maximón, in Baltimore’s Four Seasons Hotel, to crab house Choptank. The farm uses regenerative agriculture practices, including not using pesticides and no tilling, which helps ensure healthy soil. Atlas believes it could be a replicable model for other restaurant groups, and wants to expand its own restaurants’ self-sufficiency by introducing livestock to the farm, among other pursuits.

[Photo: Atlas Farms]

“This is a full-on production farm,” says Larson Weinstein, manager of Atlas Farms. It’s not a new concept for restaurants to source from their own farms—a literal farm-to-table dining model. The first prominent example was Blue Hill at Stone Barns: Opened in 2004, it’s a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in New York Sate’s Hudson Valley, which uses produce from its surrounding farm. At Thomas Keller’s three-Michelin-starred French Laundry, in California’s Napa Valley, the farm that produces food is open to public tours and often serves as an idyllic setting for events. What sets Atlas apart, Weinstein says, is that the farm is producing for a large collection of restaurants.

[Photo: Atlas Farms]

With the group’s directors, brothers Eric and Alex Smith, Weinstein built Atlas Farm, in northern Maryland’s Carroll County, from scratch in 2019. Previously an apprentice on a Virginia farm that supplied Michelin-starred restaurants in D.C., Weinstein now runs Atlas Farms with two employed farmers and support from his family. They grow produce that was previously sourced from other local farms, but weren’t wholly happy with the quality or flavor. “We decided that we’d rather have control over the product that is hitting the tables than purchasing it from somewhere else,” says Eric Smith. “It’s literally grown right down the street, so I know exactly where it’s coming from.”

[Photo: Atlas Farms]

The farm is designed to specifically serve the chefs and their needs in a given season. Sometimes, they want produce they can’t otherwise find locally. For instance, Tagliata’s chef, Julian Marucci, couldn’t find a domestic Calabrian chili pepper variety similar to the one he tasted in Italy. He brought some peppers back from Italy, seeded them, and they’re now grown at Atlas Farms.

[Photo: Atlas Farms]

The setup also allows for fresher food. They grow arugula on the farm, chill it overnight, and serve it the next day—a fundamentally different system from ordering from a California wholesaler and shipping it cross-country. Wholesalers prioritize high-yielding, disease-resistant, long-shelf-life crops, Weistein says, whereas Atlas wants to prioritize taste. “Flavor is really rarely even considered when you’re talking about these big-production farms,” he says. 

[Photo: Atlas Farms]

So he says the carrots are sweeter, and the romaine crispier. They also produce beets, radishes, garlic, spring onions, and Smith’s favorite, the shishito peppers. That’s an example of a trendy item that’s harder to find at a reasonable price on U.S. shelves. At Whole Foods, “a clamshell of shishito peppers [is], like, $9,” Weinstein says. “We’re growing those things that the big boys haven’t decided that there’s value in that market yet on their scale.”

Weinstein approximates that Atlas produces about 50% of its seasonal produce. They still use wholesalers for the other half, and for nonseasonal items, like tomatoes and shishito peppers in the winter, or citrus fruits year round—“we’re never going to be able to give them lemons,” he says. But they but now produce about 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of their own produce a year. The aim is to be sustainable and zero waste: They grow enough to meet the demands of the chefs, and have enough restaurants to absorb any leftovers. Bruised tomatoes, for instance, aren’t wasted, but used in restaurants that make salsa and don’t need visually stunning produce. 100% of the tomatoes used—about 11,000 pounds a year—are from the farm. “We would have never featured an heirloom summer salad and have gotten tomatoes shipped across from a California hot house,” Weinstein says.

[Photo: Atlas Farms]

The regenerative farming methods are central to producing the flavorsome crops. Regenerative agriculture is a holistic approach to farming, rooted in Indigenous methods, that prizes animals, plants, and ecosystems working together to produce fertile soil for high-quality food production. It doesn’t use artificial chemicals, like pesticides, and doesn’t till the soil, which is viewed as destructive, encouraging soil erosion and losing valuable organic soil matter. In other words, the less disturbance, the better. Atlas is also gaining its organic certification from the USDA, a strenuous, three-year process of which the company is now in its final year.

[Photo: Atlas Farms]

The plan is to scale up to 100% of what’s seasonally possible in five years’ time. After expanding the fruit and vegetable production, they’ll turn to livestock: first, increasing hens’ egg production, then introducing more chickens and pigs for meat. Crucially, that would also help its regenerative practices: to have animals rotationally grazing on the land. “Those two animals can really integrate very well into a vegetable operation,” he says. “They can really help us with composting and returning nutrients and organic matter back to our soil.”

The faster they scale up, the faster they can demonstrate it as an imitable model for other restaurant groups—or grocery chains, residential developments, even big tech companies with cafeterias. Weinstein stresses that this has to happen to restore America’s farmland. He fears that massive industrial farming, at its current production levels, will destroy the soil to the point where production will dry up, and the country will struggle to feed the population.

Just as the land may dry up, so may the workforce. If bigger institutions were to replicate it on a larger scale, Atlas’ model could help to get more young farmers involved in an industry where the average beginner age of new farmers is 47. These groups could employ young farmers, eliminating the tradition of expecting new farmers to buy their own land, which is becoming economically unfeasible. “We’re going to lose a whole swathe of these young, first-generation farmers if we can’t find a way to employ them,” Weinstein says.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in London, Talib Visram is a Staff Writer at Fast Company in New York, where his digital and print reporting focuses on the social impact of business. A Master’s-trained multimedia journalist, he’s hosted a variety of audio and video programs, and moderated live events More


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