Blyth Timken | Creative Director & Owner
I feel fortunate to have been born into a family that gathered around our dining room table most nights to eat a nicely made home cooked meal and sit at the table and talk (thanks Mom!!!). It is the major influence on my design for Real Food Nation and it is still one of my favorite ways to experience time besides travel.
I want people to experience sitting in a pleasing, homey environment dining on quality food that people have cared for and that has been used to produce food that nourishes the body and fills the mind with joy. I had never been a drive thru person because the food and containers are bad in every way possible. However, after having children, I was a starving breastfeeding mama with sleeping kids in my car. It made me think that with healthy prepared foods a drive thru is a really good idea.
Andrew Mac Lauchlan was a wonderful surprise to my life as are our two lively and loving children, Gilman and Oliver. It is these three that really inspired my ideas about opening a new kind of restaurant - slow food ready to go.
I was a vegetarian the day I learned that bacon was not a vegetable, but rather from the side of one of the barnyard animals from our farm in Ohio. Unfortunately, between the hard physical labor of building my own house and being 7,000 ft. above sea level in Santa Fe, I gave in to the voice in my head saying "EAT MEAT"! That is when I made the commitment to free range, local meats and eggs. I believe we are omnivores and it is how an animal (including our species) lives that is important because we all die.
Herstory:
High School (Ethel Walker School) and University ( U of Denver) I excelled in procrastination , horse back riding and I studied and lived abroad in England and France my junior year. I was a B student.
After graduating, I lived and worked in Africa for 5+ years. I have some highlights. I moved to South Africa and worked on a feature film with 2 leopard cubs. I moved to Kenya. My first job there was covering the Rwandan genocide for the Nation, the East African newspaper.
After, witnessing the horrors of Rwanda, I moved to Arusha, Tanzania to walk the length of the country with a friend, but I found a dream job with a company that led horse safaris so I walked with him 175 miles and returned to Arusha. Between the kindness shone to us on our walk and working with ex-race horses my soul was restored a bit. It is in Arusha that I first experience restaurant/bar work and climbed Kilimanjaro (I put them together because they were equally hard to accomplish). I was incredibly fortunate to be hired to work for Hugo Van Lawick, a Dutch documentary maker and conservationist, as his camp manager in the Serengeti. I was in charge of food and all tent related item. I lived in army tents, bathed out of a bucket and loved every minute of it until I almost died of septicemia (blood poisoning).
In 1998, I moved to Santa Barbara, California to study documentary filmmaking. A year later I moved to Santa Fe because it looks just like Tanzania (without malaria!) and I am a bit of an odd-ball free spirit and others of my kind are easily found here. Mostly, I wanted to move closer to my family in Ohio. I decided to learn about building and sustainable architecture. I had ranch land I wanted to work as a benefit to people lives. Now we will grow food (sustainably) for the restaurant (only 9 miles away).
It all came together, when I met Andrew. He is wonderfully versatile, enthusiastic and supportive - that he is an amazing chef was, as they say, gravy.
After we married in 2004, we did the three things you just might suffer the consequences of doing together: travel, build a house and open a restaurant ( I will throw having children on to the list).
Our kids are a major motivation for building Real Food Nation. If we do not adopt more intelligent ways of living our lives, we will ruin the future for our young loved ones. I love Gilman and Oliver and I do my best to have a positive effect on what will be passed to them in time.
Andrew MacLauchlan | Chef & Owner
A nationally distinguished chef and cookbook author, Andrew derives his expertise from over twenty-five years of restaurant experience. He has held hands-on chef positions in resort hotels, fine dining and retail kitchens. His cooking career began at the age of fifteen in a Country-French cuisine restaurant near his family's home in Vermont. The restaurant grew its own organic produce and Andrew's job included weeding and harvesting in the restaurant garden. It was here that Andrew developed a keen interest in quality ingedients, cooking methods and the business of running a restaurant.
Through the 1990's Andrew continued to refine his craft through extended periods of work at Chicago's internationally renowned Charlie Trotter's and Mark Miller's Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, NM and Las Vegas, NV.
With a keen interest in culture and cuisine, Andrew has traveled in many areas of the world including Japan, China, Southeast Asia, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, West Africa, Britain, France, Italy, and Germany.
Most recently Andrew collaborated with P.R.I. in Houston TX, consulting in their test kitchen and overseeing training and menu development for their 73 restaurants nationwide.
A passionate writer, his work has appeared in Fine Cooking, Art Culinaire, Food Arts, Pastry Art and Design, Chocolatier, Nation's Restaurant News among others. He is the author of New Classic Desserts '95 (nominated for the James Beard Cookbook Award), Flavored Breads '96, Tropical Desserts '97, The Making of a Pastry Chef '99. Andrew's culinary awards and honors include: James Beard Awards Outstanding Pastry Chef nominee '00, Johnson & Wales University: 125th Distinguished Visiting Chef '00, Pastry Art & Design Magazine: Top Ten Pastry Chefs in America '99.
Kim Müller | Co-Chef
Kim Müller has worked in the restaurant industry since 1973. Growing up with parents who both liked to cook gave Kim an early interest in food and cooking. With her father trained to cook in the Army and her mother a self-taught cook in the day of Julia Child, Kim not only learned to cook at a young age, but gained an appreciation for the bounty of foods one could have in California. As a college student, with aspirations of coaching collegiate tennis, Kim supported herself by working in restaurants from San Jose, CA to State College, PA. In 1983 Kim made the decision to leave graduate school and pursue a full-time career as a chef. She moved to New Jersey and began her education in the "school of hardknocks." From a southwestern chile-centric restaurant in Greenwich Village, to a high-profile South Street Seaport seafood restaurant, Kim spent 5 years working in New Jersey and New York, before heading back to California, in 1988, taking over as Chef at the acclaimed Border Grill, owned by chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken.
Kim moved to Santa Fe in 1994 to start a new project, the Double A. When that project ended Kim spent a brief period at Café Escalera, working with David Tanis. Choosing to leave the restaurant business, Kim worked for Wild Oats Markets during its biggest period of growth, as a Regional Foodservice Manager.
In 2004 Kim was offered the position of Chef de Cuisine at the venerable Compound Restaurant, a Santa Fe institution since the 1960's, purchased by Mark Kiffin in 2000. At the Compound Kim further developed her affinity for the seasonal cuisine that is the signature of the restaurant.
During this time Kim became very involved with Slow Food, signing on as a Co-Leader of the Santa Fe convivium and in 2006 Kim was selected to be one of 70 U.S. Chef-Delegates to Slow Food's Terra Madre conference in Turin, Italy. Since returning from Italy, Kim has become even more committed to supporting local farms, sustainably raised meats and ocean-friendly seafood. Supporting the Santa Fe Farm to Restaurant Project and the Santa Fe Farmer's Market is an important part of the day to day impact we can all have on our local economy and our food supply.
In March of 2007, ready for a new challenge, Kim took over the kitchen at La Mancha restaurant at the historic Galisteo Inn, in Galisteo. It was the opportunity to support local producers and have the freedom to cook the best of the season that drew Kim to this new venue. La Mancha was recognized in both national and local press during Kim's tenure, as a destination for top notch local and seasonal cuisine.
The opportunity to be part of Real Food Nation, with Blyth and Andrew's forward-thinking approach to sustainable food, was too good to pass up. Having the chance to change the way restaurant food is done is something any chef hopes to do at some point and Real Food Nation was just the thing Kim was looking for.
In addition to her work with Slow Food, Kim is also a volunteer "Super Chef" with Santa Fe's Cooking with Kids, as well as a member of the Monte del Sol Charter School Foundation.
