With all the produce being grown and delivered, pickled and fermented vegetables and fruit were a big part of the program. Back then, I was buying 200 pounds of tomatoes a week from him at the height of the season."įor a few seasons, Old Major also had its own vegetable garden adjacent to the Infinite Monkey Theorem winery on Larimer Street. There was Mike 'the tomato guy,' who was growing tomatoes in an empty lot in the Highlands. "They're small-business owners, too, and I wanted to do everything I could to help. "I loved it when farmers would show up at the back door and I would just buy everything they had," he recalls. And while Brunson is no longer making ham and biscuits, he's curing whole hams by the truckload, and he just added a beef dry-aging room that will hold 10,000 pounds of meat that will be sold at the River Bear butcher counter at Leevers Locavore and other locations.īut Old Major wasn't just a shrine to meat in all its grilled, roasted, braised and cured forms the menu was also dedicated to highlighting local farmers and their produce. Scott Lentz So the charcuterie boards that once graced nearly every table on busy nights at the LoHi eatery served as practice for the dry-cured meats now hanging at River Bear that will soon hit the market. "A lot of the things we're doing at River Bear came from Old Major," the chef notes. But his past at Old Major still informs his current work. Watts has not yet announced a name or plans for his new project.įor Brunson, though, the future lies in sausage, salumi, dry-aged beef and a growing focus on Colorado-raised meat. Watts is no stranger to fine dining in Denver he opened Acorn at the Source in 2013 (just months after Old Major debuted), and then joined Old Major as executive chef in 2016 before moving on to launch Corrida in Boulder in 2018. Even though his flagship restaurant, Old Major, has seemed like a permanent part of the Denver dining scene ever since it opened in 2013, Brunson had already been preparing to step away from the restaurant before the coronavirus pandemic shut it down in mid-March.Īnd now that he's taken the next step in his culinary adventure with River Bear American Meats, a cured-meat and butcher company he founded in 2019, he's saying goodbye to Old Major and has sold the restaurant at 3316 Tejon Street to longtime friend and colleague Amos Watts. "Everything you do in life is a stepping stone," says chef Justin Brunson.
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