The St. John Restaurant Goes Hydroponic
The St. Martinville restaurant growing vegetables onsite, and without dirt
Vines are curling up the walls of the old icehouse in St. Martinville. On the outside of the building, this would spell neglect–another forgotten building on a rural road. But the plants here are unfurling indoors, fruiting cucumbers, tomatoes, and the occasional eggplant for the restaurant that stands a few yards away.
At night, the lights pop on, drawing diners across the parking lot of the bustling St. John Restaurant to the illuminated windows. On display is a delicate operation to provide the restaurant with hydroponic, hyperlocal produce.
The St. John Restaurant owner Chip Durand conceived of adapting the old structure into a greenhouse—it’s actually an expansion—a few years ago, purchasing two small parcels of land adjacent to his restaurant from the City of St. Martinville: one includes the old ice house while the other stretches along Bayou Teche.
He laid out his plans to the City Council back in 2017, as reported by the Daily Iberian: “We’re going to use concrete from the ice house to build a greenhouse, and we’ll grow cucumbers, tomatoes—all our vegetables, year-round, to supply the local restaurants. And we’ll have a space there for a farmers’ market, and a place to raise chickens and ducks and geese. I raise cattle, so there’ll be some beef there too.”
Ongoing labor shortages make him hesitant to pursue the full vision, which includes a country store along the bayou that will sell beef, duck, and eggs from his own farm, Durand Ranch. “If I knew I had the help, I’d start in two weeks. Before COVID, we’d get some sort of application almost every day. Last year, we got twelve or fifteen, total.”
In the twelve years since he took over the restaurant from late owner Chef Craig Baudoin, Durand’s plans have been cautious but constant. The restaurant quickly outgrew its forty seats after Durand took over, and the business relocated to the old Talley pecan warehouse in 2014. Renovations celebrate the warehouse’s original wood, and Durand built the sunburst light fixtures himself, from metal pipes and buckets. You can almost taste the history—or you can actually taste it if you treat yourself to the J.B. Talley Pecan Warehouse Pie or the mind-bogglingly good Pecan Praline Bread Pudding, both showcases for current chef Grayling Thibodeaux’s background in pastry.
Durand and Thibodeaux have kept most of Baudoin’s menu, with bestselling dishes including Chef Craig’s Original Jumbo Lump Crab Cake. Quality ingredients are prized— “I drive down to New Iberia every Wednesday or Thursday to get the crab meat fresh,” said Thibodeaux, and the steaks are all Certified Angus Beef. While the menu does not explicitly state that the cucumbers and tomatoes are now grown onsite, and have been since January 2023, the greenhouse grabs attention. Sales are on the rise for these relative bit players in a steak & seafood environment.
The most efficient way to enjoy The St. John’s ethos is the beef tenderloin salad. The house-grown cucumbers and tomatoes are sliced and layered next to juicy cubes of steak with a crisp bed of lettuce beneath. Lettuce is an upcoming addition to the greenhouse. “The goal is to eventually have everything in that dish come from here,” said The St. John’s new farm-to-table director, Luke Dugas. The twenty-five-year-old St. Martinville native graduated from LSU in environmental engineering before moving to Denver, where his work designing and installing indoor farming systems took him all over.
“Before this, I was traveling to different schools around the country,” he said. “I’d build the systems and have seminars on how to operate them. It’s proven that with these hydroponic and aquaponic systems, you can teach an entire K-12 curriculum in life sciences, chemistry, and biology. It’s a really big passion for me–to teach people.”
He started his relationship with The St. John as a consultant. “Chip knew he wanted to do something hydroponic and sustainable, to take a farm-to-table direction with the produce. We spent about a year going back and forth, putting together some designs and plans. Before you do a project like this, you really need to estimate how much space you have and how many vegetables can be produced.”
Dugas joined the team full-time last fall. “I built out all of these systems, cut the wood, did the plumbing, and now I’m here managing the systems and also doing some training to upkeep them,” he said. New team member Delanius Narcisse, or “D,” has been an asset. “I couldn’t do any of this without him,” said Dugas.
"We spent about a year going back and forth, putting together some designs and plans. Before you do a project like this, you really need to estimate how much space you have and how many vegetables can be produced.” —Luke Dugan
The greenhouse currently supplies half of the cucumbers and tomatoes the restaurant uses and is scaling up to meet the whole need. Dugas uses the Dutch bucket system in his design. “People have different strategies; you can spend decades learning,” he said.
Each plant is rooted in a small white bucket containing perlite, a volcanic rock. “It gives the root something to hold onto. You want a material that water can pass through and drain and will also keep air in it too. Air is really important.”
The buckets are connected by tubes to a large reservoir of water, rich with nutrients that Dugas has picked out specifically. “It’s all set on a timer, which comes on once every hour for about five minutes to irrigate the plants,” he said.
Water drains from the plants and back into the reservoir to be used again. Durand and Dugas dream of expanding the operation into aquaponics, in which fish and plants are raised in the same water—the fish fertilize and the plants purify. “We’ll do the catfish farm after the country store,” said Durand.
He took a long sip of iced coffee, which he says is necessary fuel for all his ongoing ventures. “Hey, maybe we roast our own coffee next?” he called over his shoulder, already on the move back to the restaurant.
The crowd packed in as soon as the doors opened for Friday lunch, and I squeezed in on the side porch. I treated my fork as a spear, targeting all the fine ingredients I now know came from so much care. The sweet potato fries disappeared in a cloud of steam, and the culprit hid her orange fingerprints. The pecan praline bread pudding fell in the category of “I shouldn’t, but how could I not?” Bayou Teche moved slowly outside the window. The land between it and me was bare for the moment, but with a vision, a system, and regular bursts of nourishment, I expect we’ll see something sprout soon.