A Trip to Hollygrove with Matthew Kopfler of PPX

Welcome to Farm Fresh, a new feature where Eater joins chefs on their trips to local farms and farmers markets, to see what they're buying and how they plan to use it. For the inaugural edition: Matthew Elliott Kopfler of PPX Dinner Club.

Grid View

• Snacks.
• Kopfler with Mike Fabianski, Restaurant Sales Manager at Hollygrove
• In Hollygrove's vertical aeroponics growing area.
• An animal somehow involved in the making of eggs.
• Macon Fry the Garden Guy, the man responsible for (among other things) Hollygrove's arugula.

PPX Dinner Club is a pop-up that happens every Wednesday in the patio otherwise known as F&M's, with other special events thrown in here and there. One benefit of the pop-up model is that chef Matthew Elliott Kopfler can go to Hollygrove Market & Farm every Wednesday morning to pick up the ingredients he's going to cook that evening. He says that about 60% of his weekly menu ingredients come from his Wednesday trips to Hollygrove; the rest he gets from Rouses. (Though in an event with NOLA Locavores last weekend, they did a 100 percent local meal, including salt sourced from Houma.)

Kopfler coordinates with Hollygrove's Restaurant Sales Manager Mike Fabianski ahead of time to see what's fresh and what he needs. They agreed to let us shadow them this past Wednesday, cruising through the farm and community garden area, digging up green onions and munching on every flower blossom they passed. For a beet salad, he was getting beets (obviously) and arugula that was cut that morning, plus queso fresco from Rocking R Dairy in Tylertown, MS, just across the state line due north of here. For a chicken and egg dish, not only were most of the ingredients from a local farm, but most came from within 10 feet of each other, including the eggs.

PPX Dinner Club is every Wednesday at 504 Lyons Street, from 7-10PM. And this Sunday they're doing a special Christmas feast at RiverLuna on Maple at Fern for $15 a head. And Hollygrove's public farmers markets are every Tuesday from 12-6PM and every Saturday from 10AM-2PM.

· PPX Dinner Club [Facebook]
· Louisiana Christmas Supper with PPX Dinner Club [Eventbrite]
· Holly Grove Market & Farm [Official Site]