Meet Jim Taugher | Owner and Chef

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jim Taugher and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jim, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
Well, I started making pickles for a restaurant that I was the Chef De Cuisine for. We were kind of a “Forrest to fork” kind of a place. I kept pushing the owners to have the menu reflect how we used to eat. Abundance in the summer and early fall, but the winter menu should have dehydrated, fermented, and pickled items on the menu in a big way. They eventually saw the light and turned me loose. I went waaaaaay down the fermentation rabbit hole. One thing about me is that if I find something really interesting, I tend to get a little obsessive. I began to devour books, Youtube videos, online and anywhere else I could find information about fermentation. Customers eventually started saying “you should sell these”, so I started to do it as kind of a side hustle. As the business grew, so did the toxicity of the restaurant. In July of 2021 I quit to just do the pickle thing. The business wasn’t quite ready to support me yet, but I just couldn’t take the environment anymore. Not being ready definitely was a motivator to get my but in gear and do anything it took to start selling.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
When I graduated college in 1991 I moved to Seattle on kind of a whim. Obviously a pretty cool time to be out there with Grunge just starting to explode. Just kind of screwed around, had some fun and half assed tried to do something with my degree. After a couple of years I moved back home and realized that bartending through college was when I was at my happiest and decided that Hospitality was my jam. I went back to school to get a degree in hospitality management. To pay for it, I knew that it was back to bartending, but I wanted to do something different. I started looking for work at comedy clubs in the Milwaukee area. Eventually I got hired at one and I dove in head first. I put everything I had into that job and soon became the bar manager and eventually general manager. After three or four years, I felt like I wanted more and began looking into the possibility of opening my own club. I moved to Madison and started to work and research. Eventually I convinced my dad to invest and help me get started. When negotiating the lease I made what I thought was a smart move at the time and talked the landlord into having the first lease be a three year lease instead of the ten year he wanted. I figured in three years I would know if we were going to make it or not. We quickly became one of the highest regarded comedy clubs in the country. People like Lewis Black, Craig Robinson, JIm Gaffigan, and Dave Chappelle all worked there. Unfortunately somebody bought the building and wanted to use it for themselves as a night club. Once the lease was up we were done. and I didn’t have enough money to start over. The next idea was to rent out small theaters and bring in some of the bigger names to do shows there. That went well for a while, but then Comedy Central started booking whole tours of small theaters for those same comics. They couldn’t pass up 40 city tours just to do my one gig and it all dried up. Not to be deterred I decided that instead of giving up, I would go bigger. I got an investor and decided to book Jon Stewart for two shows. One in Madison and one in Milwaukee. I worked my ass off trying to make those shows the best I had ever done. Unfortunately, I think I just agreed to pay too much for the shows which made the ticket price too high. No matter what I did, I just couldn’t get the tickets to move. The day before the show and three months after getting married, Jon’s manager called to cancel the shows. In one phone call I lost almost $90,000, a twelve year reputation, and a job offer to manage a new big comedy club in Philadelphia. My new wife and I packed up our our belongings and moved to Minnesota to live in my in law’s basement. No doubt this was the lowest point in my life. I had a hard time getting work, because for the last fifteen years I was either working for myself or a Milwaukee comedy club that no longer existed. I struggled, worked crappy jobs, tried a number of unsuccessful business ideas and just tried to get back to normal. That meant Hospitality again. I started bartending again. One of the restaurants I worked at was run well enough and poorly enough at the same time to inspire me to want my own place again. This time a restaurant and bar. I quickly realized that although I had held every front of the house position possible at one time or another, I knew very little about the back of the house. This meant going back to school again. This time culinary school. I’ve always been a good cook and when I am learning about something that I like, I obsess and over achieve. In fact, I used to get some gentle ribbing from my fellow students about it. My motto in that time period became, “If it can be achieved, it can be overachieved”. In order to graduate I had to work at a restaurant as an intern for 9 months. I chose one of the best restaurants in town to work for and therefore the toughest. After the internship was done, I was hired as a full fledged line cook. From there I moved around to different fine dining restaurants around town and even came back to the original one, but this time to work in the pastry department, so that I could learn another skill in the restaurant. Eventually I was given an executive chef position at a restaurant in Lakeville, MN. it was a step down in culinary terms, but a big step up career wise. From there I was able to get a position of chef de cuisine in a restaurant group. They had a weird rule that because they had an executive chef for the company, the highest position you could archive at any location was chef de cuisine. You were the executive chef at that location, but your title was CDC. This is where the fermentation and pickling started. My sister in law came up with our logo. The little squiggly line on it is the international symbol for fermentation and Capricorn. As luck would have it, both my wife and I are Capricorns, so no brainer there. Now it is just the pickles and some personal chef gigs here and there.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Well, I still have comedy in my blood, so a trip to Acme comedy club would be essential. The Twin Cities are a food mecca, so there are dozens and dozens of fantastic choices. Top two on my bucket list that I haven’t been to yet are Owamni a James Beard award winning restaurant owned and operated by indigenous chef Sean Sherman and Petite Leon with Jorge Guzman at the helm. Guzman has been nominated multiple times for different James Beard awards.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My wife (Heather Hansen) for sure. She has been by my side through many entrepreneur efforts. Some successful, and many not so much. In fact, we met when I owned a comedy club back in the late 90’s / early 2000’s. She knows that I will always want to do my own thing and even though many of my efforts didn’t work out, my determination would ensure that someday something would. I also had a regular customer (David Sewell) at the restaurant that was a big fan of me from day one. He and a friend of his came to the restaurant almost weekly from the day we opened. He would always get sneak previews of things I was working on and really had fun with it. When he realized that my happiness at the restaurant was slipping, he let me know that he owned a commercial kitchen that he used for charity events. With COVID in full swing, it was sitting empty. He offered me free use of the kitchen until I started making money and then reasonable rates once I did. I never would have survived the first winter without that help.

I would also like to thank Brian and Nikki Podorski. They have been extremely helpful informing me about various farmers markets, and holiday shows.  They share my posts which is big, because they have a much larger following than me.  Any time they come across something that might help me or my business along, they are quick to share it with me.  Two very kind and generous people.  The same goes for Charles Lovejoy of Lovejoy’s Bloody Mary Mix.  Always ready to share information or make an introduction.  A closs act through and through.  These people all (not by coincidence) have created great products as well.

Website: https://www.fermentationstationco.com/

Instagram: @fermentationstationco

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gourmetpicklesandprobiotics

Image Credits
TJ Turner