Chef Craig Devilliers and owner Laurentia Torrealba sit at a picnic table outside Graze with a selection of the restaurant-and-market’s offerings, including lamb, braised short rib, butternut squash, pastries and more.
In a 130-year-old post office building within sight of the Clark and Fayette county line, Laurentia Torrealba and chef Craig Devilliers are looking to bring farm to table to a new level with Graze.
“If you start looking into local food, there’s not a real recognized definition of ‘local.’ For a lot of people, it’s 400 miles, but what I want to say is for us, local is this county or it’s the surrounding counties,” Torrealba said.
“The lamb you’re going to eat, I raised it. The beef, I can walk you to the cows. It’s going to take us two minutes and you can almost see them [from the restaurant],” she said.
Torrealba is the owner of Colibri Farm in eastern Clark County, where she raises sheep. She gets her beef from the restaurant’s landlord, Douglas Owens, owner of Brookview Beef Farm, which is adjacent to the former Pine Grove Community post office along Combs Ferry Road in extreme western Clark County. Torrealba also gets vegetables from Crooked Row Farm, within two miles of Graze, and pastured pork and poultry from nearby Wholesome Living Farm.
“Every day you’ll come in and there will be two or three items on the blackboard, so that way we can actually do stuff fresher, do seasonal stuff, and that way we’ll have a lower inventory,” she said.
Torrealba said the small building always hit her as an ideal spot for a country store or restaurant to serve the nearby community. Then after winning a home chef competition with her husband in the lead up to the recent Crave Lexington food and music festival, she had the idea of being the one to test that theory.
“There’s such a range of people coming through here. There are construction workers from the pipeline. There are also ritzy housewives from Combs Ferry, and we really want to create a menu for those guys where they can grab a burger on the go and they can feel happy with it,” she said. “But for those people that want to come eat and sit down for an hour and drink a glass of wine, [we’ll have that too]. We want to do something so everyone can feel like this is their country store, because it’s their community.”
Torrealba, a native of northern South Africa near the Zimbabwe border, enlisted the help of her fellow national Devilliers, who is from South Africa’s eastern cape.
The two did not know each other until a year ago when she noticed the name Devilliers as the executive chef on the menu at Bellini’s in downtown Lexington and thought he must be a fellow countryman. She emailed him to introduce herself and see if the upscale Italian eatery would be interested in buying her lamb, which she also sells to Lexington French eatery Le Deauville and Berea’s Boone Tavern.
While Graze has a rustic feel and operators with a pedigree that would suggest high-end dining, neither Torrealba nor Devilliers want their high-quality fare to be cast as fine dining.
The daily blackboard menu will always feature a lamb or beef burger and entrees in the $12 to $13 range. There will also be a meat case for retail purchase, but Torrealba said meat available for take-home purchase can also be fired up by the chef, even if it is off menu.
Devilliers is looking forward to being out of a fine-dining kitchen and the freedom Torrealba will give him on their menu. Graze has a small kitchen, and they don’t anticipate adding a fryer.
“I don’t want to fry,” Devilliers said. “I just want to use coals and a grill.”
Devilliers hopes to expand the grilling capacity out back of the building as the 15-seat restaurant expands into al fresco dining come spring. Graze also features the pastries of current Transylvania student Emily Novak, who Torrealba said has plans to attend Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in New Zealand upon graduation next year.
For now, Graze is open starting at 11 a.m. with service running through an early dinner until 6:30 p.m., though both Torrealba and Devilliers said they will accommodate diners coming in shortly after. They are also considering opening for breakfast.
[gallery ids="225611,225612,225613,225614,225615"]