by Dennis Dalman
editor@thenewsleaders.com
A College of St. Benedict graduate, her husband and their multiple award-winning restaurant will be the topics of the 2017 Renaissance Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 6 in Room 204 of the Gorecki Center on the CSB campus.
Bernadette Martens Chapman graduated from CSB, Class of ’99.
She married Clayton Chapman, who in 2010 opened The Grey Plume Restaurant in Omaha, Neb.
Their Renaissance lecture is entitled “The Meals We Share: A Chef’s Journey Through Mindfulness, Meaning and Mania.” Chapman is the owner and head chef of the restaurant, and – appropriately enough – he will speak about his business at CSB during the Week of Sustainability, April 3-7.
The Grey Plume has been honored far and wide for its commitment to locally grown food and sustainability principles. In 2015, it received the top ranking on a list of “American’s Greenest Restaurants” by Daily Meal magazine. It was honored as one of the first Green Restaurant Association’s four-star SustainaBuild restaurants in the nation; the first restaurant in the world to meet the trademarked SustainaBuild standard and the first SustainaBuild Certified Green Restaurant in Nebraska.
What Chapman and his staff strive for – and succeed brilliantly at – is meticulous dedication to being a steward of the Earth with a deep belief that good food only comes from good places, sustainable practices and the belief that nourishment and taste are only two aspects of food.
In The Grey Plume restaurant, as its website shows so well, the place’s floor was created from recycled old-barn wood, some of its plates were created by an artist using recycled wine bottles melted down and reshaped, and the restaurant’s water flow is set at one-half gallon per minute. Those are just a few of the many ways the restaurant succeeds in being “green” and sustainable.
The Grey Plume, besides being ecologically friendly, also uses seasonal food produce and livestock raised locally and only from crop-growers and animal-raisers that also use sustainable, healthy and humane practices.
Both CSB and St. John’s University have long advocated, taught and practiced sustainability practices. In fact, sustainability is one of the underlying core values of the Benedictine tradition and has been since its founding hundreds of years ago in Europe before that tradition was brought by priests and nuns to the central Minnesota area. That is why the topic of the Renaissance lecture – sustainable restaurants – is so appropriate.
Chef Clayton Chapman and his wife, Bernadette Martens Chapman (right), a College of St. Benedict alum, pause for a photo with CSB President Mary Dana Hinton when Hinton and other CSB alumni visited the Chapmans’ world-renowned Grey Plume restaurant in Omaha, Neb.
