A LITTLE STORY

Chester Gardens, in a lot kitty corner from the café, is part farm & part neighborhood improvement project. Since the 1970s, gardening & cooking, united in a dining experience, is increasingly common. Planning the two together is a mainstay of modern cuisine. Cooks have always known that walking through one’s garden in the cool of the evening to harvest what will soon become dinner & then preparing that dinner is an undertaking difficult to equal. Connection to land, to craft, to family & to home come together in one experience.

We can’t duplicate that experience commercially, but we can bring to our customers a garden that they may stroll through to see our produce as it grows. We use that produce in our café in the summer to enhance our salads & as vegetable sides. The cooks love the freshness of it. The customers like knowing where our food comes from.

Our garden manager, Rita Bergstedt, is a veteran of the Duluth food scene. She has been a restaurant owner, gardener, chef & culinary instructor for many years. We feel very lucky to have someone with her talents on our team. Rita does a wonderful job of supervising the varietal choices, organizing the beds & maximizing the aesthetic appeal of our gardens. In addition to the flowers & vegetables in the main garden, she plants a small herb garden exclusively for kitchen use east of the café parking lot. We just could not be luckier than to have Rita & have our garden.