Our Story
A farm, a kitchen, and nearly three decades of feeding Ojai.
It started with a seven-dollar organic tomato.
Steve was selling vegetables at the Ventura farmers market. Olivia was running a bakery in town. She visited his farm in Carpinteria and said, 'Wouldn't it be great to have a restaurant on a farm?' A decade later, they fell in love at the Ojai farmers market while buying kabocha squash.
They opened the Farmer and the Cook on a shoestring in 2001 — a little organic grocery store-café on what some called the 'wrong side of town.' The fridge was blinking. But from the start, people kept coming back. It took nine years to turn a profit, but that was okay. They were dreamers, and they've had a lot of laughs along the way.
Steve — The Farmer
An adherent to the organic farming movement since the 1960s, Steve farms 12 CCOF-certified acres in Ojai and devotes much of his energy to training farmers and consumer education. Four new organic farmers in the area formerly worked for him. The farm is an open resource, and the CSA program includes volunteers, long-term participants, and first-timers alike.
Steve is president of the Ojai Center for Regenerative Agriculture and former president of the Cornucopia Institute. He attended Harvard College for one year — due, he says, to his innate curiosity — and holds a degree in Literature from UC Santa Barbara. He has worked in organic certification and policy across the country, from CCOF in Carpinteria to the Texas Department of Agriculture to the UN/FAO Codex Alimentarius.
Olivia — The Cook
Olivia's path to cooking started on a beach in San Blas, Mexico — tortillas, beans, and coleslaw in a beautiful setting. She was eighteen. How could something so simple taste so good? That was the local, organic, scratch-cooked food of the 1970s.
She went to college for a master's in nutrition, all the while avoiding her destiny as a cook. She wanted to be bona fide, to have a profession. After eating well in San Francisco and Seattle, she had the guts to follow her passion and opened the City Bakery-Café in Ventura in 1988.
When she and Steve finally opened the Farmer and the Cook together, Olivia built the kitchen she'd always imagined — and eventually, the bakery with its 30-foot picture window looking out at the Topa Topa Mountains and the Ojai Trolley passing beneath the live oaks.
Today, a team of home bakers arrive early each morning to measure, whip, roll, and form the recipes that fill the bakery shelves. On Thursdays they celebrate Brian's sample pizzas. Dancing together in slow and fast motion, they've had to learn to brake on a dime and get along in this happy room where joy is the main ingredient.
We are dreamers, and we've had a lot of laughs along the way.
— Olivia & Steve