Chef Clayton Chapman Brings the Food Revolution to Omaha

The nota­bil­ity of this fact is not lost upon The Grey Plume’s founder, chef and co-owner, a remark­able 26-year-old Omaha native named Clayton Chapman, who returned home after grad­u­at­ing from culi­nary school and trav­el­ing abroad. “When I moved back to Omaha, I didn’t have the inten­tion to stay here,” Chapman told Organic Connections. “I actu­ally wanted to move to Northern California where it was more com­mon to know your farmer and your grower than not. That was the cul­ture that I wanted to be sur­rounded by.

“But I’m very proud of Omaha. I love the com­mu­nity here; I like the peo­ple. This was where I grew up. Thus it was a mat­ter of either going and liv­ing in a com­mu­nity where farm-to-table was already estab­lished or try­ing to estab­lish it here on our own.

“I decided to stay. There was a small group of grow­ers that I had known for a num­ber of years, and from there the rela­tion­ships grew. Because our com­mu­nity in sus­tain­able agri­cul­ture is small, if I’m talk­ing to a grower that raises bison, they might be able to pass me on to some­body that raises rab­bits. So the cycle of want­ing to know how food is raised and what you are putting in your body—we have the abil­ity to do that. It’s pretty wild.”

As one might sus­pect, Chapman came across his cho­sen path quite early in his col­or­ful life. “I’ve been in the restau­rant indus­try since I was 13 or 14 years old,” Chapman said. “I attended the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago for culi­nary school; then I spent about 18 months at a restau­rant called Tru in Chicago, where I worked my way around the kitchen and worked my way up. From there I spent some time in Togo, West Africa, with my older brother, who was in the Peace Corps, fol­lowed by a few months in Europe just kind of trav­el­ing and eat­ing and expe­ri­enc­ing French cui­sine. I moved back to Omaha in 2007 and accepted the exec­u­tive chef posi­tion at an Omaha fine-dining main­stay. We opened The Grey Plume in 2010.”

Chapman and his restau­rant are now part of a bur­geon­ing trend that might have come late to Omaha—but come it has. “Five years ago it was pretty obscure,” Chapman recalled. “Omaha isn’t nec­es­sar­ily on the fore­front of trends by any means—but we’re very recep­tive and respon­sive to what’s going on through­out the rest of the coun­try. In the last few years the culi­nary scene has expanded. You’ve seen a lot more chef-operators open their own restau­rants here; you’ve seen the boom­ing of farm­ers’ mar­kets through­out the city, and greater inter­est in the idea of com­mu­nity gar­dens. The aware­ness that has been grow­ing coast to coast even­tu­ally made its way to the Midwest and has really helped. You now have a large com­mu­nity here that’s very con­scious of where they are sourc­ing their food and who is rais­ing it, and what they are putting in their bod­ies. So, for the restau­rant, we’ve been very blessed with a great response and a lot of help and support.”

Chapman wanted the sus­tain­abil­ity of his estab­lish­ment to extend beyond the food. “We work with over 50 local grow­ers from whom we source all of our food, and we felt that we couldn’t nec­es­sar­ily serve sus­tain­able food with­out pro­vid­ing a sus­tain­able envi­ron­ment,” he explained. “We felt like they went hand in hand, and if we were going to be authen­tic in the way that we wanted, we really needed to pro­vide a sus­tain­able din­ing environment.

“We part­nered with the Green Restaurant Association. They have a few dif­fer­ent types of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion; their ‘sus­tain­able cer­ti­fi­ca­tion’ applies to new builds and ren­o­va­tions. We were the first restau­rant in the coun­try to pur­sue that cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and it meant every­thing from the ground up: recy­cled dry­wall, recy­cled steel fram­ing, recy­cled wood floor­ing, zero VOC paints, LED and CFL light­ing. We installed low-flow water aer­a­tors on our hand tanks to reduce our water con­sump­tion, and low-flow toi­lets to reduce our con­sump­tion in that capac­ity. We have a full recy­cling pro­gram, and a full com­post­ing pro­gram with our local farm.”

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Chapman truly went that extra mile. He and his team even had a local artist con­vert recy­cled wine bot­tles into bread plates for the restau­rant, and another local arti­san hand-carve bread­boards out of reclaimed walnut.

At times, the quest to be totally sus­tain­able has been met with con­sid­er­able chal­lenges. For exam­ple, Chapman obvi­ously didn’t want soda laced with high-fructose corn syrup served at The Grey Plume. “As a restau­rant oper­a­tor, you work with these big com­pa­nies that man­age your soda sys­tem,” he said. “They pay for all the repairs and man­age the soda gun. Well, these sodas all have high-fructose corn syrup, and we weren’t going to sup­port that. So we searched high and low, and ended up part­ner­ing with two com­pa­nies that don’t use high-fructose corn syrup in their prod­ucts. We then had to find another com­pany to install a soda gun sys­tem, and we have to main­tain it on our own.”

Another such search occurred when Chapman wanted to switch to organic flour. “Up until fairly recently, it was impos­si­ble for me to find organic flour because it seemed that there was no one in the state of Nebraska doing it,” he con­tin­ued. “I could obtain it out of state, but I was hav­ing to bring in pal­lets at a time and we weren’t able to go through it. Finally we found this small mill in Marquette, Nebraska, that pro­duces cer­ti­fied organic flour. It’s all whole wheat, whole grain, hard white, though, so we had to adjust all of our recipes and fig­ure out how to bake with this really dense flour. Since our bread is baked in-house with­out any com­mer­cial yeast, it took a lot of exper­i­men­ta­tion and work; we had to con­vert every­thing we were doing to accom­mo­date extra ris­ing time. But it was some­thing that we were very pas­sion­ate about supporting.”

Chapman has cer­tainly pulled it off, and it has been very suc­cess­ful to boot. Now he’s tak­ing sus­tain­able prac­tices out­side the restau­rant. “We’re in the process of set­ting up a com­mu­nity gar­den,” he con­cluded. “We’re excited. We had a gen­tle­man who’s part of a devel­op­ment project in the neigh­bor­hood who was will­ing to donate the land for us to get this going. We want to use a por­tion of it for our own grow­ing and edu­ca­tion pro­gram for our team at the restau­rant, but we def­i­nitely want to spon­sor it for the neigh­bor­hood. There are a lot of young fam­i­lies and multiple-children fam­i­lies in the neigh­bor­hood, so it’s a great learn­ing tool.”

We’re sure we’ll be hear­ing much more from a newly green, sus­tain­able Omaha in the future—due in great part to Chapman and The Grey Plume.

For more about The Grey Plume restau­rant and Chef Clayton Chapman, visit www.thegreyplume.com.