In early 2013 an inquiry came through our wedding form that wasn’t about a wedding. Where it asked for a date, she’d written “not getting married.” Where it asked for three adjectives describing the day, she’d written “nope.”

Allison Sandbeck had been cooking at the Driftless Cafe in Viroqua for about three years, with four kids at home and a baking business on the side. Amy Arnold had pointed her toward us, which tracks, because a month earlier we’d spent a day in Amy and Kelsey Sauber Olds’ studio outside town and posted the whole thing as part of our Artist Stories series. Allison had seen it. She told us the work of ours she’d been enjoying most wasn’t the weddings, and asked whether we ever took on more behind-the-scenes work.

Then she explained what she was actually after, which didn’t fit in a form field:

“Often in the food, hospitality world the process gets lost, the people and experience forgotten, and the best indication that we are doing the right thing is that it’s all gone.”

That’s the whole problem with cooking for a living. Do it perfectly and there’s nothing left at the end of the night. She wasn’t after a menu shoot or marketing photos. She wanted a record for the people in that building, several of whom had been there years and years, with John Tully leading the way. Her phrase for it was a tangible reminder that what we do is honored and beautiful.

She also worried, in the same message, that we might have eaten badly there at some point. “I am hoping you have had positive experiences in our hands.” Then she apologized for how long the message had gotten and signed off by telling us that if she didn’t hear back, no hard feelings, carry on.

We said yes.

Then she got practical, and honest about what we’d be walking into. The kitchen, she warned us, was a photographer’s nightmare: overhead fluorescents, no natural light, a back door they could prop open in short bursts except it was a screen. On money she pointed us at the cafe’s own barter system, a thing called the Blue Book that regulars and farmers and family all ran on. Decide how much of the fee you want to eat, she said, and how much you want in cash. Completely up to you.

We ate most of it. One of the best trades we’ve ever made.

The first night we met, our family got the last of the Sicilian dough and the pizza stuck to the pan and tore coming out. Allison apologized for that too, then immediately offered a better read on it than an apology. Hand made imperfection.

We shot it that March. Nobody in the building knew it yet, but that was the last stretch of the restaurant as it existed then.

Some  behind-the-scenes photographs from March 2013, inside the kitchen and dining room at The Driftless Cafe.

 

Start with the building, because it’s older than any of this. It went up in 1896 as a carriage house, back when Viroqua needed somewhere to keep horses and buggies. At some point it got split in two, and those halves led separate lives for decades. Before it was a cafe, one of them was Nate’s Supper Club, which is the kind of Wisconsin institution most towns used to have and most towns have since lost. It’s also where a young Luke Zahm and a young Ruthie both worked, and where the two of them met, long before either had a reason to think they’d come back and buy it.

By March 2013 it was the Driftless Cafe and John Tully was running it. He’d built the farm-to-table foundation the restaurant still stands on, in a county with one of the highest concentrations of organic farms in the country, and he did it back when farm-to-table was a lot less trendy than it is now. The story usually gets told starting in 2013, but the reason 2013 worked at all is that someone spent the years before it proving a farm-sourced menu could survive in Viroqua. Allison described the place as a family, many of them there for years and years, with John leading the way. That’s what we were photographing, though we mostly thought we were photographing food.

Luke Zahm had moved back to the area in 2011 with a restaurant in his head and no building to put it in. He spent fourteen months working the bakery and deli at the Viroqua Co-op, feeding people his food and learning how to describe what he wanted. Then he and Ruthie cashed in everything, the 401k and the savings both, and started taking meetings with banks. Luke has told the story of carrying their newborn son into those meetings and asking for a loan. Nobody would give him one.

What happened instead is the part we like. One of the cafe’s own earlier owners stepped in and helped finance the purchase of the business, and a conversation with a local farmer solved the rest. A restaurant that exists because its own community underwrote it, rather than because a bank approved it, tends to behave differently afterward. This one has.

The Zahms took over later that year and eventually did the thing nobody had done since the 1890s, which was put the carriage house back together. The two halves became the two dining rooms you eat in now. If you sit in the right-hand one, there are tree trunks running floor to ceiling, left behind by tenants who came before, and abstract paintings by Julius Trees Parrish, a Viroqua artist whose family runs the music store up on Main. Then came the back of the building, and the wood-fired oven, and the covered garden that turned out to be one of the better small event spaces in this part of the state.

Luke has hosted Wisconsin Foodie on PBS since 2020, which pulled him partly out of his own kitchen, so Mary Kastman runs it now and has earned her own James Beard nod doing it. The menu still changes nightly and still often isn’t settled until the afternoon, because it depends on what the farms brought in that day. The large majority of what the restaurant spends on food stays inside a hundred-mile circle, most of it a great deal closer.

In 2024 we photographed a wedding dinner out in that back garden, twenty people at a long table under the clear roof, which is something that was physically impossible on the day we took the photographs above.

Amy and Kelsey eventually folded their two practices into one, and their two names along with them. They go by AAKSO now, carving figures out of basswood together rather than working separately in wool and wood, and we went back and photographed them again a few years on. Allison is still baking. She’s out at Red Clover Ranch these days, twenty miles south near Soldiers Grove.

And she was right about the thing she wrote to us in the first place, which we’ve thought about a lot since. The better the work, the less of it survives the evening. That’s true of a kitchen. It’s most of the reason we do this at all.