Slanted Porch by Rachel Dahl, Special Assignment
Owner and chef Steve Hernandez and chef Kelli Kelly, of the Slanted Porch Restaurant, show off the prime rib of Nick Behimer’s 4-H steer.
T
he restaurant that saved dinner in Fallon, Nevada is also the restaurant that owner Steve Hernandez and Chef Kelli Kelly are hoping will save local farms. The Slanted Porch is their vision of farm-totable sustainability of local agriculture—and that vision has come to life in a beautifully restored 1912 farmhouse at 310 South Taylor Street in Fallon. A “Nevada Grown” restaurant, the Slanted Porch vision is to highlight local agriculture producers—helping them promote their products, and serving the freshest, safest food available. Nevada Grown is a non-profit organization that supports and promotes Nevada farms, ranches, restaurants, and retail outlets. “I can tell you the names of the every person who touched that steer before it became your steak,” said Chef Kelly, “and much of what we serve has traveled less than 100 yards from seed to serve.” Kelly refers to the beef she is serving in the restaurant as the steer purchased from Nick Behimer, a local 5thgrader who sold his 4-H project to the Slanted Porch this
spring during the Fallon Livestock Show. Nick and his brothers, Bob and Ethan also sell eggs from their 3B Egg Company to Kelly for use in the restaurant. “We do prefer to buy from kids,” said Kelly. “This is a really good way to teach kids about business.” Explaining the unique position of the Slanted Porch to promote local agriculture, Kelly says that it’s the relationships between the restaurant and local ranchers and producers, similar to the mission of the Nevada Grown program, that work to make everyone more successful. Through interactions between Kelly, Hernandez, and various producers in the setting of the small farm conferences sponsored by local cattlemen and dairy organizations, the Slanted Porch has become a bit of a marketing exchange and promoter. “I’ve learned through working with Steve how to market local producers at the restaurant, I’ve learned that language,” she said. “We always highlight local producers when their products are on the menu,” said Kelly. “It’s a selling point.” According to Kelly, she uses cheese from the Sand Hill Dairy, pork from Bryant Behimer, lamb comes from other 4-H kids, and produce from several small farmers in the area. She buys chicken from Rise and Shine Farms, which owns the first poultry processing facility in Nevada. “We traded 48 pounds of carrots to Workman Farms for squash, next week we’ll have beans from Lattin Farms, Scott Goodpasture at Pioneer Farms has cabbage and snow peas for us, Salisha’s Delicious is part of the Farmer’s Collaborative as well,” said Kelly. And on top of all that, Kelly uses Churchill Vineyards brandy in her cooking and serves their wine in the restaurant. The local producers featured at Slanted Porch are also part of the Nevada Grown program. This fervor for local agriculture comes naturally to Hernandez who grew up in Fallon and fell in love with the culinary life watching his Grandmother cutting parsley from her garden to use in homemade recipes. He is a graduate of the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco and worked in prestigious restaurants there before moving closer to home to become the Executive Chef at the Bistro Roxy in Reno. He has always had this idea for a farm-to-table restaurant in Fallon, so when the opportunity presented
Nick Behimer shows off, then happily enjoys, a hamburger The Slanted Porch Chef Kelly made for him using Nick’s own home-grown 4-H steer, which The Slanted Porch purchased. 20 September / October 2013
The sign at The Slanted Porch. he moved home and spent three years restoring the 1912 farm house on South Taylor Street that five years ago became the charming Slanted Porch Restaurant. Kelli Kelly grew up in Southern California, studied Political Science and was a sailor on tall ships. She said became a cook and a deck hand all for the love of a boy. “I met a boy and ran off to the Caribbean.” She became a relief cook in Florida on one of three boats, working five weeks on and one week off. Responsible for three meals a day, along with three desserts, snacks and “the obligatory five-gallons of rum punch,” she cooked in a galley the size of a walk-in freezer. Eventually she attended culinary school at the Art Institute of California in San Diego, and moved to Fallon in 2010, following her husband Neil Kelly who was an instructor at the Top Gun School at NAS Fallon. They stayed in Fallon when Neil retired because Kelli had her job at the Slanted Porch. “We retired and bought our house here to settle down and invest ourselves in this community,” she said. She says that she has found her calling melding her Political Science background with her love of the restaurant. “People can say the choices they make about food aren’t political, but they’re fooling themselves.” “Our whole vision is to make honest, straight-forward food out of great ingredients that were grown a few miles from the restaurant.” Kelly said she wants to bring that political mindset into the industry. “You can have three ingredients in a beautiful dish and honor that idea—we don’t need the pistachio crust or the fancy plum sauce.” With that idea in mind, the Slanted Porch once again will be participating, along with local producers in this year’s Tractors and Truffles event that is sponsored by the City of Fallon and held on September 14th at Oats Park. According to Kelly the celebrity guest chef will be Ryan Scott from the TV show Food Rush, and will focus on a variety of cooking methods. Hernandez and Kelly are watching the growth of the local food movement from the Slanted Porch with excitement and some pride in their part of that growth. “If we can be the location, the connection between the rancher, the farmer, and the consumer and ignite the community,” said Kelly, “that has the ability to encourage self-sustainability in all of us.” Be sure to check this space in the next issue for another feature on a Nevada Grown producer.
See the Behimer Family Beef Story in the next issue of The Progressive Rancher.
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