Places

Restaurants are places to eat

The primacy of place

Restaurants are places nested within other places – neighborhoods, communities, towns, states – that create points of contact for the members of those larger places, like the pore space in healthy soil. A stopping place, a holding place: we are the ‘there there.’

Places

Articles

The Feel Good

The Feel Good started with a sentence fragment from a collage I had made (yes, those three words), a sense of exasperation about the direction …

Articles

The Sight of Green

Humans are wired to relax and thrive at the sight of green.     This isn’t just woo-woo hippie stuff. As Esther Sternberg describes in her …

Articles

Protecting Democracy

When I opened my first restaurant, I spent so much time there my mom sent me a twin bed for Christmas. The mattress company delivered …

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm....a sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

Restaurants

Restaurants are places to eat that are both public and private – you sit at a private table within the public din and hubbub of the dining room. In some way, this can be more permissive of conversation and intimate than our private homes. People experience restaurants in their body – so that is where the design starts for me, in my body, as feeling, sensation, emotional tone or note. I want to make people feel safe, at home, ensconced, in every place – but each approach is a little different. 

Restaurants

Modern General

Tools for a better life, the motto of Modern General Feed & Seed, is at the heart of everything we do here. A curated selection…
Restaurants

Vinaigrette ATX

Just off of South Congress, in a low-slung mid- century building from the fifties that was once known as the Pig Stop, Vinaigrette ATX nestles…
Restaurants

Vinaigrette ABQ

Our ABQ restaurant, on historic Route 66, was a mechanic’s shop, then a produce market, and then sat vacant for years until we found and…
Restaurants

Vinaigrette Santa Fe

Santa Fe Vinaigrette lives in a landmark adobe house at the end of a dusty lane in the historic northeast of town.

Farms

Farming was an innovation that changed our relationship to nature, allowed communities to become permanent, and ideas and advancements to build and accrete. Farming is the harnessing of natural processes for human ends, but it is not “natural.” As our ancestors got better at farming, nature was simplified as culture became more complex. One way of looking at human culture is as the conversion of the accumulated complexity of the soil and its ecological overstories and inhabitants to human ones. In farming, we can look at the logic of nature to inform how we grow, or we can be inspired by machines. We are on #teamnature. But it isn’t always easy. 

Farms

Los Portales Farm

On ten terraced acres along the Nambe river, our NM farm is a wonder of agroecological farming that provides seasonal vegetables and fruit and farm…
Farms

Bastrop Farm

Our retreat and farm-to-be in Bastrop, tucked in a looping bend of the Colorado River just East of Austin, is in the works!