Family Farmed is a group out of Chicago dedicated to expanding the production, marketing and distribution of locally grown and responsibly produced food. They have a website called Good Food on Every Table where they feature stories of farm to table pioneers in Chicago and neighboring cities. They recently interviewed and featured our owners, Chef Bruce Ucan and General Manager Anne Shadle and told the story of how we came to believe in farm-to-table sourcing.
The intro reads, “The Mayan Café presents traditional cuisine of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that since 2007 has delighted diners (and reviewers) in the restaurant row in Louisville’s East Market District, a.k.a. NuLu. And they have done so in part by going all in on sourcing ingredients as locally as possible, a decision that made them a farm-to-table front-runner in Kentucky’s most populous city. Co-owners Anne Shadle and her brother-in-law, Mexico-born chef Bruce Ucán, had already been moving in that direction by holding Mayan Market Mondays, featuring a rotation of producers who sold at Louisville’s main farmers market. Their decision to plunge deeply and irrevocably into farm-to-table came in 2008 after Ucán viewed the documentary “Food Inc.,” a powerful indictment of the nation’s industrialized corporate agriculture system. The owners made a decision to purchase only locally and sustainably produced meats, and to buy as much local produce as they can (while being clear with customers that their cuisine requires some tropical ingredients such as pineapple and coconut that are not grown locally).”
