Taliesen Riverview Cafe
Odessa Piper (left) and Barbara Wright are spearheading a fresh approach to food at Taliesin.
A pair of former Madison chefs are launching a food and education program at Taliesin, the former Spring Green home and studio of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Odessa Piper, chef/founder of L’Etoile, and Barbara Wright, former chef/owner of Monroe Street’s The Dardanelles, are co-leading a new work-study program for the Taliesin Fellowship. The hope is to breathe new life into the Riverview Terrace Café near the Taliesin campus by offering farm-to-table educational opportunities for wannabe chefs.
The café, Frank Lloyd Wright’s last commission and the only restaurant he ever designed, has recently been taken over for the first time by the Fellowship after a variety of restaurant tenants have failed to prosper there. The building also houses the Frank Lloyd Wright Visitor Center and the Taliesin gift shop.
Wright, who last year served as chef for Fellowship students and members at Taliesin, this season has taken over the Riverview kitchen. She’s also chef and manager for the new program, which recently hired eight student interns to work the café’s spring-to-fall season.
Piper, who now lives in Boston, will serve as project consultant, traveling to Spring Green one week out of every three during the inaugural season. She will work on menu development, source foods from local producers, offer students lessons in sustainable food philosophy, develop the cafe’s wine program, and assist in baking and food preservation.
The program will provide students with a modest work-study stipend and affordable housing in Spring Green in exchange for cooking and restaurant services, Wright says.
“Frank Lloyd Wright’s general philosophy of learning by doing supported what he called his School for Organic Arts,” Wright says of his farming, cooking and food preservation efforts. “We hope Wright’s educational philosophy of ‘do one, learn one and teach one’ will prevail with this group.”
The goal is to prepare and serve seasonally inspired dishes created largely from produce grown on Fazenda Boa Terra, the organic farm and CSA operated by farmers John Middleton and Lidia Dungue on the Taliesin campus in partnership with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Taliesin Preservations Inc. and Otter Creek Organic Farm.
Fazenda Boa Terra is Portuguese for “Good Earth Farm,” a name chosen to honor Dungue’s Brazilian heritage.
After operating The Dardanelles from 1997 to 2010, Wright cooked for the Benedictine sisters and visitors to The Holy Wisdom Monastery in Middleton. She was cooking for the Fellowship last fall when the chef at the Riverview Terrace Café one day walked off the job and she was asked to take over.
“They said they had a rocky season and kept losing staff,” Wright remembers. “I realized that if you offered more than just a job, some kind of enhanced experience, there would be lots of people who would love to do it.”
Wright suggested developing a corresponding educational program teaching students farm-to-school cooking and proposed the idea to Piper.
Piper agreed to act in an advisory capacity, especially with regard to cooking “farm to fork.” The intern program will begin, and the restaurant will open, May 1.
“At some point I would love to do wine and cheese happy hours,” Wright says. “We also hope someday to be able to offer dinners or picnics to the APT crowd, but we’ll have to add these things little by little.”
Wright hopes the sustainable agriculture vibe of the Driftless Region, the part of the state in which Spring Green is located, will contribute to the initiative’s success.
“There’s a movement here in the Driftless that is strong like the current of the river,” she says. “People want food from here and understand what the land is able to give. You can just feel it.”
