Meat Up! 99 Counties' Sumptuous Dinner for Omnivores
99 Counties’ Tasty Values
I’ve written before that I have a membership to 99 Counties, the Iowa-based company that aggregates incredibly delicious, regeneratively produced meat and delivers it to customers across Chicagoland as well as its home state. So it was a no-brainer for me to attend their first Chicago farm dinner held Sunday at the Guild Row event space in the Avondale neighborhood.
It was a rewarding evening full of good company, shared values, and man, that food was delicious.
The evening started with a happy hour over wine, cocktails and local beer. A presentation about 99 Counties followed, with remarks by (photo from left) CEO/co-founder Christian Ebersol; Hayden Holbert, owner of Wisconsin’s Avrom Farm and, concurrently, Manager of Customer Experience & Business Development with 99 Counties; and Nick Wallace, the company’s other co-founder, whose vision for a better food system led him to expand his own Wallace Farms in Keystone, Iowa into 99 Counties.
Although I was previously aware that 99 Counties existed, it was Hayden’s decision to join their team that persuaded me to become a member. I’d been buying from Avrom Farm at Green City Market since 2018, because its products were excellent and also because Hayden was a vocal proponent of regenerative farming practices. For me, Hayden’s teaming with 99 Counties was the seal of approval I needed to become a member.
In his pre-dinner remarks, Hayden noted that he is a city kid — he grew up in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood — but he “wanted to be a farmer since I was a little kid.” He started Avrom Farm in 2017 after studying sustainable agriculture in college.
“My goal in agriculture was to affect change in our regional food economy…,” Hayden said. “My vision for my place in agriculture was to work collaboratively with other farmers and organizations to make nutrient-dense food accessible to all people, and to really change agriculture in our region. And so that's why I joined 99 Counties.” [Note: Avrom Farm continues to participate in Chicago-area farmers markets, including Green City and Logan Square, selling its products as well as fried chicken and waffles meals to go.]
For Christian, 99 Counties was a career change after spending about 10 years in San Francisco working for tech startups and venture capital firms. He learned about regenerative agriculture while seeking a way to make an impact on climate change, and connected with Nick Wallace over his hopes to expand the sustainable livestock sector.
Christian said his goals for 99 Counties have three major impacts: “One is that meat should be regenerative for the environment and for the farms and for our planet. The second is that it should be regenerative and restorative to our health. And third is that it should be regenerative for our local communities.”
For Nick, 99 Counties is a much bigger way of doing what he has been doing for years. He started Wallace Farms as a sustainable livestock operation in 2004, eventually converting 300 acres of conventional farmland to regenerative practices. During that time, he quietly developed a loyal clientele in Chicago for whom he made regular meat drops.
Nick said at the dinner that during those long drives between Iowa and Chicago, he saw vistas of Midwest farmland where they only things produced were conventional “corn and soybeans all the time.” He started to think about advancing a better food system by partnering with farmers all over Iowa, and on one trip he asked Siri on his iPhone how many counties there are in the state. That’s how he came up with the name 99 Counties as “the name of the company that is going to change agriculture.”
He continued, “The last time I checked when I lived in the city, there's not a lot of farms. So you rely on the countryside to feed you. And unfortunately, that's been co-opted by corporations. And I'm not anti-corporate, I'm a free market guy. What I don't want is the marriage of government and corporations to produce chemical food in an environment that's going to not serve us.”
The round of remarks concluded with owner Brad Newman and executive chef Jesse Lee of Brasserie by C&C, the restaurant in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood that prepared the evening’s meal. Which, as the photos below show, was quite the meatapalooza. [And sorry about messy plate photo… dinner was served family style so there are bits of previous courses visible.]
The braised pork shoulder (top photo left), Japanese curry chicken thigh (top right) and slow-cooked short rib were sumptuous and melt-in-your-mouth tender.
Omnivores do not live by meat alone, so we also enjoyed a farro salad and polenta with tomatoes (top photo), and a green salad with asparagus and Auntie’s bowtie pasta salad.
Local beer was consumed. The beer at top, a Metropolitan Flywheel pilsner, was actually hyper-local, as that brewery is located about two blocks south of Guild Row on N. Rockwell St. The second beer, an Imperial Stout with a punchy 8.3% alcohol by volume, is from Moor’s Brewing, one of Chicago’s black-owned breweries.
That cookies were served for dessert was no surprise, because the initials in the serving restaurant’s name stand for Cookies and Carnitas, its former, more casual incarnation.
There was no hard sell for new membership (perhaps because so many attendees already are subscribers). Instead, Christian, in brief closing remarks, urged everyone to tell their friends about 99 Counties.
Consider it done.