New Organic Spot Harvest

When local farmer Ivor Chodkowski opened Harvest restaurant on Market Street earlier this year, Louisville locavores were buzzing.  While many independently owned restaurants in the city have started to build connections with family farms around the state, Harvest is the first to build a menu upon entirely local ingredients.

The décor alone speaks for the mission of the establishment. Crisp white walls are hung with black and white portraits of the farmers who probably grew and harvested most of your meal. A sprawling map of Kentucky on the back wall pinpoints the local farms that provide the food for the restaurant. Rustic wooden tables and a friendly wait staff remind you that you are, in fact, living in the southern United States (if the bacon and sorghum cookies on the dessert menu didn't already give it away).

The menu at Harvest changes often as different fruits and vegetables shift in and out of season. The fresh, all-natural ingredients are what make every single dish at this Market Street hotspot phenomenal. All of the flavors and textures are well thought out and blend together perfectly, sometimes in unexpected ways. Cold cucumber and cantaloupe soup is not something I would normally think to try, but it was refreshingly different and satisfying.

My first trip to Harvest was on a lazy Friday afternoon with my friend Leah, who was equally as excited about trying everything on the menu. The daily special was bratwurst with house made potato salad and a Falls City beer for $13. Other lunch options were sweet potato hummus with pickled carrots, bibb lettuce, and toasted garlic-chile aioli on focaccia bread.  Looking around the restaurant, the popular item of the day seemed to be the burger with bibb lettuce, cheese, and hog jowl bacon jam on a pretzel bun. I'm not much of a meat eater, but the pretzel bun would have sold me pretty quick.

            I ended up getting the best pizza I've ever had in my life. Fluffy crust was slathered with herbed goat cheese pesto and topped with heirloom tomatoes and greens. It was unbelievably simple and well proportioned. The salad special was heirloom tomatoes, greens and fresh sweet corn, topped with fried okra. Again, this was another dish that was flavorful without being overly complicated.

            The dessert menu was bursting with Kentucky pride, touting sorghum cookies with ice cream and candied bacon along with chocolate cake with a Kentucky colonel mint filling. Bourbon also made its star-studded cameo quite often, working its way into a poached sweet potato good enough to find itself settled in with the rest of the desserts. We ended up splitting the warm, blueberry cinnamon bread pudding with house made blueberry whipped cream. As one can imagine, it was the perfect way to cap off an afternoon at a new local favorite, in every sense of the phrase.

            Harvest is located at 624 East Market Street in the NuLu district.  For more information, visit HarvestLouisville.com.