Relentlessly local coverage of Gilbert and our neighboring communities
Superhero Strong
Catherine Brimie, Tracy Bowman, Maggie, Lisa and William Brimie show
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Visionary and developer is far from an ‘Average Joe’
BY CURT BLAKENEY
In a landscape of strip malls and chain restaurants, it’s nice to see an independent restaurateur having success in Gilbert. But what Joe Johnston—a 2014 Arizona Culinary Hall of Fame inductee—has created in Gilbert is so much more than a string of popular dining destinations. He’s also developed Agritopia, a master-planned community built around a neighborhood farm that resonates with not only its residents, but visitors from across the Valley who admire the neighborhood’s quaint charm, farm-to-table sensibilities and spirit of kinship.
“Oh I like it, and thankfully, the residents like it too,” said Johnston of the agrihood on the northwest corner of Higley and Ray roads in Gilbert.
“I live in this community. My folks live here. My brothers live here. My kids live here. My grandkids live here. We have four generations
Transplant month celebrates life
BY CHRISTINA FUOCO-KARASINSKI
Three-year-old Jordan Drake is a regular little girl, playing dress up, running and jumping with a boisterous energy that rivals any other youngster.
But, by her parents’ admission, she’s a little different. On June 23, 2013, Jordan underwent a heart transplant at Phoenix Children’s Hospital when other attempts to heal a severe mitral valve regurgitation failed.
“I freaked out,” said Esther Gonzalez, Jordan’s mother about her daughter’s diagnosis at age 3 months.
“Now that we’re two years out, she’s doing great. This is the best thing for her. Since then, we have only been to the hospital once.”
Things weren’t so positive for the Gilbert girl. Two months after her diagnosis, doctors replaced her own valve with a mechanical one. The transplant required medications, like blood thinners, that were hard on her little body.
“All the blood thinner did was lead to intestinal bleeding, a brain bleed, seizures and a stroke,” Gonzalez said. “She had to have brain surgery. That was a five-hour surgery.”
Jordan Drake underwent heart surgery in 2013. GSN photo by Kimberly Carrillo
That led to more complications. A stomach infection was so severe that her doctors didn’t know if she would make it through the night. An aneurysm formed under the
SEE TRANSPLANT PAGE 8
Restaurateur and businessman Joe Johnston, the namesake and founder of Joe’s Farm Grill. GSN photo by Tim Sealy
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living here, so I get some nice feedback on a bunch of different levels.”
Johnston’s Agritopia project—its name derived from the confluence of agriculture and utopia—is a bold undertaking. He is best known, however, for his popular restaurants, which have earned him the credibility to move forth with other adventurous projects.
The Johnston family’s dining empire includes Joe’s Farm Grill, Joe’s Real BBQ and Liberty Market—all located in Gilbert. Joe’s Farm Grill was paid a visit by Guy Fieri, the star of Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” and since that segment aired on the iconic show, Johnston’s restaurants have taken on a whole new level of success.
“That’s the gift that keeps on giving,” Johnston said of the feature on DDD. “We keep having people from this state and out of state come to check out the Farm Grill. That’s been very good for business. It helped the Farm Grill achieve profitability a couple years earlier than we would have otherwise. It’s been very helpful.”
Roots in Engineering
Johnston’s route to the restaurant business took an unusual path. After graduating from Gilbert High School, he departed for the U.S. Naval Academy, where he studied marine engineering for two years. He then enrolled at Stanford
University, where he studied electrical, mechanical and industrial engineering for four years. After graduating from Stanford, he returned to the Valley and worked as an engineer for seven years.
As fate would have it, however, Johnston met Tim Peelen at a church function, and while the two were researching gourmet coffee for a group discussion, they stumbled upon a method of roasting coffee beans using a hot air popcorn popper. And so the restaurateur was born.
By 1989, Johnston and Peelen became so adept at coffee roasting, they opened a new coffeehouse, the Coffee Plantation, at the corner of Sixth Street and Mill Avenue in Tempe. Within four years, the wildly popular java café had grown to four locations—with two more stores in Scottsdale and one at the Biltmore Fashion Park—and sales were booming. The duo eventually sold the Coffee Plantation to Second Cup, a Canadian coffee franchisor, which retained Johnston and Peelen for two and a half years to assist with the transition and additional expansion.
In 1997, with his focus solely on the restaurant business, Johnston again partnered with Peelen (and Peelen’s brother Tad) to open Joe’s Real BBQ in downtown Gilbert, capitalizing on the town’s growth. To keep with the
restaurant’s rustic roots and traditional homemade recipes, they converted an abandoned brick building into their new shrine to Texas-style barbecue and Valley food enthusiasts quickly took notice.
Over time, Joe’s Real BBQ established itself as a Gilbert staple and Johnston decided to pursue an old vision, centered around a restaurant located on his family’s farm that would feature organic produce from the fields surrounding it. With the opening of Agritopia in 2003, Johnston set out to turn his dreams into reality, converting his family’s old ranch-style home, built in 1966, into Joe’s Farm Grill and sectioning off 12 acres for the restaurant’s produce farm. It opened in October 2006.
Farming Values
The success of Joe’s Farm Grill allowed Johnston to expand further still, partnering with David and Kiersten Traina to create Liberty Market, an urban bistro that opened in 2009. As can be expected with any of Johnston’s projects, Liberty Market’s cuisine brought a number of accolades, including a Zagat rating and
Johnston’s tale is one that took root in and has continued to grow with the Gilbert community. Since 1927, when the barren desert was cleared and irrigation aqueducts turned desert dirt into lush soil, Gilbert has been a successful farming community, fertile with small-town values that much of the country has lost. The Johnston family moved to Gilbert in 1960 and quickly became entrenched in the farming business, growing cotton in rotation with wheat, sorghum, sugar beets, corn, barley and later on, feed
Joe Johnston stands at the entrance to the community farm that is the nucleus of his Agritopia project. GSN photo by Tim Sealy
crops like corn and alfalfa for the growing dairy cattle population. With a strong desire to preserve and enhance the agriculture and community values they were so deeply tied to, the family thoughtfully created the farming and community components of Agritopia.
“It started with the idea of Joe’s Farm Grill,” Johnston recalled. “I had just sold Coffee Plantation and I wanted to build a restaurant that served the produce of the farm. That was the basic idea.
“And then I thought I would like to live near where I work,” he continued. “So then I started thinking about designing communities and what would be important in those communities. That led to the design of the neighborhood and the project for Agritopia came up.”
Construction began on Agritopia in 2000, and with the intention of making it their future homes, Johnston and his wife, Cindy, as well as his parents, his brothers and their families began to think about what their ideal community would look like.
“One thing that kept coming back was the idea of a village, which is very different from where many people live now” Johnston said. “In a village, you are known.”
Agritopia features 452 single-family homes with low fences, small front yards, front porches, wide sidewalks, lush
parks and other elements intended to foster community engagement. Agritopia residents are embracing the quaint farmcentric lifestyle.
“It’s been super positive,” Johnston said. “People want to know where their food comes from, so they can see over the fields all the beautiful plant life growing. Also, people like to have beautiful places to wander through. We have public access pathways, where people can wander and enjoy, and it’s beautiful.”
The development’s 15 acres of permanent urban farming plots are filled with date and olive groves, as well as plots growing citrus, apples, peaches, plums, apricots and blackberries.
Seasonally, the field plots produce a broad range of vegetables, herbs and flowers, including leaf crops like lettuce, endive and Asian greens, as well as tomato crops like heirlooms, yellow, red and plum.
With so many irons in the fire, Johnston turned over the day-to-day operations of the Farm at Agritopia to Steadfast Farms, run by partners Erich Schultz, Yvonna Schultz and Emma McCartney.
Steadfast Farms follows organic farm standards, focusing on the health of the soil by implementing best practices like composting to build healthy soil, rotating crops properly to avoid plant diseases, and controlling pests using natural
predators and healthy plants. The farm supplies not only Joe’s Farm Grill, but 20 other Valley restaurants.
McCartney mentioned she’s more than happy to educate residents about the viability of the farm and its practices, as well as the proper ways to integrate it into the neighborhood.
“It gives residents the opportunity to get to know their farmer,” she said. “It really fosters a nice sense of community.”
Besides the urban farm, Agritopia also features a community garden, where each person can have their own little farm.
and Agritopia Epicenter.
“Project Q is basically a collection of 10 different small businesses that are threeor four-person operations, everything from what I call a manufacturer to a micro-restaurant that serves wood-fired foods,” he explained. “They are going to be very small, but intensely personal businesses.”
Every Wednesday, members of the Steadfast Farm CSA program pick up their weekly share of fresh organic fruits, vegetables, grains and herbs at the Farm Stand. GSN photo by Curt Blakeney
“There are essentially 50 little farms in there,” Johnston said. So people from Agritopia and Ahwatukee, Chandler, Mesa all farm on their own. “My wife and I have a plot in the community garden. There is a tight sense of community and working together, which is nice.”
Never one to shy away from new culinary ventures within his Agritopia community, Johnston said the family is working on two new projects: Project Q
“And Agritopia Epicenter will have six restaurants focused on food and health, as well as three stories of apartments on top of those restaurants,” Johnston continued.
“Both Project Q and Agritopia Epicenter are about two years out. We are in contract now with an architect for Project Q, and we’re working with our development partners on Epicenter as we speak. We’re done with the (town) in terms of the review board, so we’re just doing our construction drawings.”
With plans for further expansion of his farming and culinary empire, “Farmer Joe” Johnston will continue to shape Gilbert’s future.
Chinese delegates visit Gilbert, meet mayor
BY LYNETTE CARRINGTON
Four delegates from Leshan, China, visited Gilbert in mid-March as part of the Arizona town’s sister cities program to meet and greet business and political figures as well as enjoy lunch in the Heritage District.
“The main point of their visit was to meet with Mayor (John) Lewis,” said Gilbert Sister Cities president Greg Tilque.
“They have never met him before and while they were on this business trip, they wanted to make sure to find time to meet him.”
Mission accomplished. And the admiration was mutual.
“We have had a fun morning and a fun day,” Lewis said. “They have a lot of enthusiasm and they really appreciate this relationship and so I’ve really enjoyed it, too.”
According to its website, Gilbert Sister Cities began in June 1995 to establish cultural and economic ties with other regions of the world, namely Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland, and Leshan, China. As part of the program, Gilbert youth ambassadors are sent to Leshan and Newtownabbey and, in turn,
hosting those cities’ youth ambassadors. The March visitors included the secretary of the Leshan Communist Party of China Committee, Tang Jian; director of Leshan Investment Promotion and Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau, Li Zhiming; vice president of Leshan People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, Zhong Weiji; and officer of the Administrative Section of the Leshan Communist Party of China Committee, Zheng Xiaoxiao.
“They stopped by the Good Government series meeting with District 12 representatives at the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce so that they could meet some of our state legislators and council members who attended.” Tilque said.
“After that meeting they spent some time with Mayor Lewis so that they got to know him. From there they visited local Gilbert business, Colnatec. During their visit to Gilbert a few years ago, a delegation visited Colnatec and representatives from Colnatec visited Leshan.”
According to its Facebook page, Colnatec designs, develops and
manufactures state-of-the-art nanotechnology sensors and electronic instrumentation used in the production of thin film solar cells, mobile displays, optical thin films, high-speed electrical devices and semiconductor wafers.
Through interpreter Zhong, Li stated, “Once we arrived in Gilbert, we found the city’s planning perfect and the air is so clear. The city is very well managed with many different kinds of enterprises.”
Zhong added the group came to Gilbert to “push forward the ties between Gilbert and Leshan.”
Tang proposed the establishment of friendship gardens in the respective municipalities’ parks.
“Each garden will have elements of the two countries and two cities, especially,” Zhong said.
“We reached an agreement with the city manager here and we will do planning very soon. We must find the elements—how to put the American, Arizona and especially the Gilbert elements into the park in Leshan. We’ll have a miniature Grand Canyon in our park. And here, we’ll see Leshan elements. For example, we have the Giant Buddha. So we’ll have a miniature of that.”
The Giant Buddha in Leshan is the city’s landmark. Also during their visit, the delegates toured the Gilbert Historical Museum, and dined at Oregano’s in the
Zheng Xiaoxiao, Zhong Weiji, Ali Allred, Tang Jian, Chloe Crawford and Li Zhiming take a tour of the Gilbert Historical Museum and its Gilbert Sister Cities exhibit during a visit on March 13. GSN photo by Lynette Carrington
Downtown Gilbert Historic District.
Li explained through interpreter Zhong, “It’s quite different from what we have normally back in Leshan, but this is typical of what we should have in Gilbert. I must say this is the best American food we’ve had in the past few days. We now feel at home in our Sister City of Gilbert.”
“Through you and your newspaper, we want to express our feelings,” Li said. “Our city established a Sister City relation with Gilbert in 2002. We’re sincerely appreciative and we welcome the citizens from Gilbert and we welcome friends from the media to our city especially to see the gorgeous Giant Buddha statue.”
While touring Gilbert Historical Museum and its Gilbert Sister Cities exhibit, the Leshan delegates met Highland High School junior Ali Allred and Gilbert High School junior Chloe Crawford who will travel to Leshan later this year as youth ambassadors.
mechanical valve. Doctors could have tried to remove the bulge, but if they touched it the wrong way, Jordan could have bleed to death.
“It was sucking the life out of her,” Gonzalez said.
A transplant was the only option. With the intensity of an action film, the events leading up to the surgery were critical. A helicopter from Phoenix Children’s Hospital took off to California to retrieve a heart donated by the parents of a baby boy who passed away. A doctor, with an ice chest in hand, rushed the heart into the hospital, where Jordan was waiting, already prepped for surgery.
“It was unbelievable,” Gonzalez said of the life-changing surgery.
The surgery was successful and now she has “literally zero symptoms.”
“She truly is a miracle,” said Gonzalez, who was pregnant with a boy during her daughter’s most trying time.
That doesn’t mean that Gonzalez isn’t taking precautions. She keeps her daughter out of day care, where germs run rampant. Her mother—Jordan’s grandmother—keeps an eye on her during the day.
“Heart patients get sick really fast,” she said. “In day care, kids get sick already. Combine the heart condition with it, and that scares me.”
“As far as medication, she’ll be on it for the rest of her life. But she’s down to five medications a day. We started at 15. We’ve been able to eliminate a lot of the medications. She runs around. You literally would never be able to tell, except for the scar on her chest. She’s hyper. She loves life. She runs around.”
Gonzalez said she believes that the
illness could be hereditary. Jordan’s dad has been hospitalized a few times for heart-rhythm issues. Gonzalez’s father has mitral valve issues.
Jordan’s rough beginnings have had a profound impact on her family. Gonzalez is in medical school and volunteers for Donor Network of Arizona.
“I get it when people describe how hard it is when a loved one is in the hospital,” she said. “You’re worried about their life. It’s really, really difficult to manage.
“But I really, really enjoy doing things for Donor Network and being able to spread the word. I’m so glad I was able to meet everybody.”
Arizona celebrates Donate Life Month
April is National Donate Life Month, a time to recognize the gifts of organ, eye and tissue donation across the country. More than 51 percent of the Arizona’s adult population are registered donors.
On Sunday, April 12, Donor Network of Arizona (DNA) will be at Chase Field for the ninth annual Donate Life Day with the D-backs. There will be a registration booth in the community corner where Arizonans can sign up as organ, eye and tissue donors. The D-backs will honor Arizona donor families, recipients and the donation community on the field before the first pitch. Last year, more than 800 supporters from across the state attended the event. For tickets, contact jimperial@DBacks.com.
The fifth annual Health Care for Hope challenge kicks off on April 1, with more than 50 hospitals and health care organizations involved. Participating organizations will hold registration events, flag raisings and more to encourage Arizonans to give the gift of life. Last year, Arizona health care organizations registered more than 5,000 people as donors through this campaign. This year, DNA hopes to exceed that number. More information is available at www. healthcareforhope.org.
Arizonans can sign up as registered organ, eye and tissue donors when they apply for or renew their driver’s license or ID at the Motor Vehicle Division (MVD). They can also become donors by signing up online at www. DonateLifeAZ.org or calling 1-800-94-DONOR.
—Donor Network of Arizona
Esther Gonzalez and daughter Jordan enjoy a laugh. GSN photo by Kimberly Carrillo
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• Bachelor of Science from the University of Oklahoma (1990).
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