The Future Of Regional Cuisine In A Pandemic Winter: Q+A With Josh Niernberg, Grand Junction Chef + Entrepreneur
Photos courtesy of Josh Niernberg
“It definitely could be smoother than it is right now — that’s for sure — but we’re hanging in there,” Josh Niernberg says over the phone from his Grand Junction home. He had to close his three restaurants in Grand Junction at the end of September in response to a positive test at one of his restaurants. “We’re just trying to extinguish the flame, to prevent it from continuing to spread, and we’re just going to stay closed until that’s done.”
The full closure lasted two weeks, but Niernberg has many thoughts on the future of Colorado cuisine as the state heads into winter. Despite the challenges of 2020 on the West Slope restaurant industry, the 2020 James Beard Award semifinalist says there’s still plenty to look forward to in 2021 as long we can come together, support regional food and acquire rapid testing.
You are the founder of Bin 707 Foodbar, Taco Party and Bin Burger. How have your restaurants weathered the 2020 storm?
There’s a lot of different ways to answer that question. The biggest one right up front is that the revenue loss we’re seeing this year to date is about a million dollars. That revenue loss isn’t necessarily reflective of our ability to continue to operate. We were early adapters with everything that we had available to us, including loans and grants. We were able to use those and make a bunch of moves to keep the doors open when it was looking pretty bleak. We’ve experimented with everything and some things have worked better than others. We shifted the entire service staff to delivery; we did the online marketplace; we did wine club; we did cocktail club; we did cocktail kits; we were selling smallwares.
The Foodbar is doing dinner service only. It’s really allowed us to focus in on the quality of the food that we’re serving; we’ve taken our dinner menu and turned that into the greatest hits of some of the dishes we’ve done over the past 10 years. We’re able to really focus on a small menu, so every last detail is getting extra attention. Honestly, Bin 707 Foodbar is probably a better restaurant during COVID than it has been previously.
Our next move is to go to the individual greenhouses where we’ll have climate-controlled, private dining tables inside of greenhouses on our outside patio to carry us, hopefully, until about December. I think part of my job responsibility is keeping up with food media and what’s happening in the world on an international scale, especially with COVID, to see how other communities around the world have dealt with this. We saw this about six months ago in the Netherlands, and then we saw some of those start to pop up throughout California in April and now Denver and some mountain communities, as well. In our case, we’ll have seven different greenhouses. Four of them will be two-top tables and three of them four-top tables. So, it’ll give us about 20 extra seats outside.
As we get into winter and navigate what’s to come, whether that means going back to closures or occupancy changes or any of those things, we will be able to do the delivery service that we were previously running again. We invested in a location-specific QR code that allows us to put our code in tables of wine tasting rooms or breweries. If a guest sits down in a brewery that doesn’t have food service, they’re able to scan the QR and pay for their food and order from our menu; it tells us exactly where they are so we can deliver to people throughout downtown Grand Junction.
What changes do you wish to see in the restaurant industry in Colorado as we head into 2021?
I’m not too concerned with the changes as much as I’m concerned with our ability for rapid testing so that we are able to make better informed decisions. We’re still in this position that the business owners are responsible for enforcing the rules, because the rules differ from place to place, as do the business owners themselves and their opinion of those rules. I think that puts all of us in a far more difficult position. The rules regarding alcohol consumption, drinking and driving, selling to-go alcohol, those are crystal clear and nobody questions us, right? We’re required to put consumer advisory notices on our menus, two asterisks next to dishes that are served to temperature — that’s required for us to be able to have our operating licenses. I don’t think that COVID should be operating any different. If we get better enforcement just as we do for safety and for liquor enforcement, coupled with better access to rapid testing, it would really help everybody operate smoother.
You are a pioneer of “farm to table” in the state. Why is that concept so important to you?
I’ve always looked at farm to table as minimal intervention to the issue itself. And, that’s not necessarily what we do. We explore preservation on all fronts. We try to put out a product that’s unique to us rather than recreating existing recipes. We’re going into 10 years of this. Our state is relatively young, and for us to be doing what we’re doing for roughly a tenth of our state’s history, it actually does start to define what Colorado cuisine looks like.
Now we’re trying to just explore that as best we can. It’s not so much farm to table as it is regional cooking. The only way to do that is to be able to have a staff that’s engaged enough. That can be the conduit between our mission, regardless of the importance of the purpose of it, and the guest experience. So currently through COVID, I think that mission of defining Colorado cuisine takes far less importance, as does all the other social and economic factors that we’re all collectively dealing with right now. But the fact of the matter is that the guest experience is still by far the most important thing that we can do.
What advice can you give to readers who want to support their local restaurants?
I think every little bit of business helps. There’s a lot of people that are not focused on what restaurants are going through right now. It’s all of those things that anybody has ever done to support businesses is just as important now as it’s ever been, whether that is a Yelp review or a gift certificate.
We’re all dealing with the same larger issues at hand here, but regional food has such an economy behind it. The more emphasis that all of us can put towards eating regionally sourced foods, whether that be at restaurants or a grocery store, it helps us, it helps strengthen our economies locally and regionally, which helps get us out of this mess.
Originally published in the Winter 2020-21 issue of Spoke+Blossom.