Culinary Spartan The Farmbar Lands in Downtown

Awendaw-based farmer Tara Derr Webb plans to open Charleston's first sustainable restaurant out of a vintage trailer in January or February. The Kickstarter funded project The Farmbar will serve a 10-item menu out of a renovated Spartan Landcraft located in 1600 Meeting Street, a new collaborative work community in downtown Charleston.

In addition to the banquette-style seating inside this shiny Landcraft of culinary awesomeness, Derr Webb has Restoration Hardware artisan Mark Sage slated to craft outdoor seating and a lounge area out of vintage finds. She also hopes to simultaneously open a foodcentric retail space called Farmbox in an adjacent shipping container.

The restaurant's all-American menu offers cozy roast porchetta sandwiches, duck fat hash, and fingerling tater salad all sourced from Derr Webb's four-acre farm Deux Puce/Two Fleas Farm in Awendaw. It will also carry pork from Caw Caw Creek in Columbia, SC, Four Barrel coffee, and Kings County Distillery moonshine (to be stored in a not-so-secret trap door inside the trailer).

No chefs have been selected for the project yet, but she would like to bring emerging chefs from Charleston, London, and San Francisco on board, who she'll make owners in the project. While Derr Webb has no formal culinary training, the owner worked in management positions for both Arnold Rossman's PlumpJack Group and James Beard winner Reed Hearon in San Francisco and considers herself an admirer of the thriving Slow Food movement. Her self-published "cookery" book Senza La Ricetta, a guide for cooking without recipes, launches in late November and will be available for early December delivery.
— Ashley Mason

· The Farmbar [Official Site]