Brendan McKinaly preps plates for his culinary venture, Under an Elm. Pig & Plant’s focus is on hyper-local ingredients.
After working a decade in fine dining in Chicago, Emily and Max Day were ready for a change. So in November 2015 — with an infant daughter in tow — they moved to Middleton to be closer to family and to forge their own path in the restaurant industry. Not long after they got settled, Pig & Plant was born. It’s a private chef service and pop-up dining company, the couple’s way of finding their niche within Madison’s growing local food scene.
“The service industry is not nine-to-five,” says Emily. “This is how I get to be a stay-at-home mom and also work on my craft. It’s also a way to build toward the goal of opening our own restaurant.”
Emily is the chef on the husband-and-wife team. Max is a level-two certified sommelier with front-of-house experience at Michelin-starred restaurants in Chicago. Together, they have been hosting private dinners at their home in Middleton Hills. Emily has also been working as a private chef for weddings and other events. Pig & Plant’s intimate pop-up dinners have been a way for the Days to reward investors on their GoFundMe website and to introduce themselves to the community.
“We moved to Madison, and we didn’t really know anyone,” says Emily. “I started by asking my neighbors whether they wanted to come over for dinner. Those people told their friends about it. Then I started getting requests for private dinners. It became a way to connect with people who love food.”
Emily describes her style as a chef as “hyper-local.” She sources most of her ingredients from a large garden plot on a friend’s farm in Black Earth. The couple also harvest mushrooms and other naturally occurring edibles. Emily has also been busy pickling and canning vegetables for the upcoming winter.
“My thing is to make everything. I buy as little packaged food as humanly possible,” she says. “My last event was a wedding brunch. I made fresh English muffins and breakfast sandwiches with Willow Creek Pork, which I had turned into chorizo. I made the granola. The yogurt.”
Brendan McKinaly is the executive chef for another new pop-up dining company called Under an Elm. He fell in love with food while serving in the Army in South Korea.
“South Korea has a culture of food. Everything is centered around dinnertime,” McKinaly says. “It’s 30 plates on a table, and each one is different. It’s all things that they’ve grown or raised themselves.” That experience “really opened up my eyes to what food could be.”
After leaving the Army, McKinaly worked his way up the ladder at fine restaurants in Miami. There he met Tim Williams (now general manager for Under an Elm) and pastry chef Melissa Mejia. McKinaly’s partner Nel Bailey, also from Madison, is the company’s director of beverage. The group recently had its first private dinner and plans on hosting eight-seat private dinners every few weeks.
McKinaly is also big on preparing dinners from ingredients that he sources from area farmers’ markets, community gardens and Peacefully Organic Produce in Waunakee.
“There are a lot of people who aren’t challenged from a culinary standpoint. I like the idea of giving someone something that they’ve never had before and changing their perspective of it,” says McKinaly. “I want people to walk away and say, ‘What the hell did we just go through?’ In the best possible way.”
At Under an Elm’s first pop-up dinner, the menu included beef hearts with mushrooms, as well as parsnips and fermented shepherd’s purse (a wild green).
“Not enough people eat beef heart,” says McKinaly. “It’s part of the cow that gets thrown away a lot, and that’s sad. It’s in abundance, and we want to show how good it can be.”
The ultimate plan for McKinaly, Bailey, Williams and Mejia is to buy a farm and start a small restaurant on the land. The goal is to source all the food for the restaurant from the farm, says McKinaly. “These pop-up dinners are how we are going to get there.”
