One of Milwaukee's most elegant dining experiences takes place in a Riverwest parking lot

In a gravel parking lot on the north edge of Riverwest, a long, wooden dining table is set on a platform overlooking a patch of land filled with raised garden beds. It’s lined with glass jars filled with fresh-cut flowers and large bamboo lamps emitting a soft glow of candlelight. Budding hops vines create a natural pergola over the table.

Below it, 16 diners are being served their next course, a warm salad of brown butter-glazed carrots and kohlrabi with a tangy pistou sauce made with carrot tops. A relish of diced cucumber and watermelon radish is huddled on the side. Everything on the plate was grown in the garden they’re currently seated in.

It doesn’t get much more local than that.

It's the monthly five-course dinner event held by Crops on Top, an urban farm located in an industrial parking lot at 3700 N. Fratney St. The dinner highlights the crops grown at the farm, just harvested before the meals are prepared, and the menu is created by the trained chef who also is part-owner of the farm.

Brothers Joel and Jamie Lichosik started their urban farm and business, Crops on Top, in 2021. Joel, a trained chef, began selecting which produce they'd grow based on what he knew he’d use in cooking, with an aim to eventually hold dinners at the farm and educate guests about sustainable food.

A year later they held their first five-course dinner. Since then, Crops on Top has been hosting a formal 16-person, sit-down dinner once a month from June through September (weather permitting).

The urban farm dinner experience

Guests are encouraged to arrive a few minutes early before each dinner so they can walk around and get a closer look at what’s growing (and a peek at what’s been harvested for their meal) before being seated.

Depending on the month, you could brush by towering tomatillo plants, pass through the summer shade house that offers protection for lettuce, see tromboncino squash dangling from metal arches, or stroll by snap peas climbing up garden trellises. You might spot bees, butterflies and maybe even a hummingbird buzzing by. The farm’s raised beds are built using as many recycled and repurposed materials as possible to put an emphasis on sustainability.

The farm is next to Amorphic Beer, which partners with Crops on Top to pair rare and often unreleased beers with each of the five courses. Before each course is served, Amorphic Beer co-owner Ron Hockersmith speaks about the beer pairing and the story behind it.

As the beer is poured, each course’s food is plated and served. Then it’s Joel’s turn to speak. He explains each dish and where the ingredients came from in the farm surrounding the dinner table. Joel creates the menu a week before each dinner, taking note of which produce is at peak ripeness at the time and what dishes he can create from each one.

“I try to make the menu flow from course to course, but it’s always about what’s available at the time,” Joel said. “That's the most fun part. I walk out and stick my head in the garden and think, ‘What’s the feature this time?’ ”

That means he needs to flex his creativity during early growing season.

“In June, I’m running around going, ‘Oh my God, what do I have to cook with?’, but by July and August, there’s so much growing it’s a little harder to choose what I’ll be using.”

While each dinner is different, the July dinner’s courses included a farm salad with roasted beets, Easter egg radish, arugula and beet puree. A cheese course featured St. Andre Triple Cream cheese with an English pea, snap pea and olive tapenade and an edible flower garnish. There was a cozy course with brown butter glazed carrots and kohlrabi, carrot top pistou (a French-style pesto) and a relish made with cucumbers and watermelon radish. A meat course highlighted grilled hanger steak cooked beautifully medium atop a velvety Walla Walla onion soubise sauce with charred sprouting cauliflower. There was dessert, too: a date delice cake with a fuschia-hued rhubarb Grand Marnier mascarpone and a fluffy vanilla whipped cream.

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Aside from the meat, cheese and baking ingredients, which Joel sources from a local Sendik’s Food Market, everything served at dinner comes from the farm.

Each course is artfully plated on compostable palm-leaf plates. The table’s flower arrangements come from the farm, too, and diners can take a bouquet home if they wish.

It’s a beautiful experience to eat food in the farm, mere feet from where it was just harvested. But what’s even more special is having such a talented chef there to explain the thought process behind each dish.

The food is the creation of a culinary expert

Joel’s culinary background runs deep. Growing up in Mequon, he fell in love with cooking the way many budding chefs do: while making food at home with his family.

“My dad would do brunch every Sunday, and I’d want to help out,” he said. “When I think back about it, I realize it was my way of getting time with Dad, because I have four brothers, so the competition for hanging out with Dad was always huge.”

From there, he moved on to making meals for Mother’s Day and other special occasions.

Joel left Wisconsin in 1994, moving to Seattle for an apprenticeship. There he ended up in the culinary scene and worked at a couple restaurants with James Beard award-winning chef and restauranteur Tom Douglas.

He worked at a restaurant for a couple summers in Denali, Alaska, as well. While there, he found an opportunity to work in Antarctica, where he spent two seasons between 2012 and 2013 cooking for a group of scientists working in the field.

“That was the extreme ‘Top Chef’ stuff,” Joel said.

Antarctica was a test of just how much he could do with the limited ingredients he had to work with, and he had to cook for 40 hungry scientists doing grueling work in extreme conditions.

“The meals were about employee morale,” he said. “They’re out there working 14 hours in the snow and storms, and I had to plan a menu on 5,000 calories a day per person.”

The meals may not have been gourmet, but they were creative, and sometimes everyone got a little treat.

“The bonus was when we’d get a shipment of fresh vegetables and fruit from New Zealand, and everyone was super happy to get mangoes and papaya when you’re locked onto a glacier.”

From there, Joel worked at a restaurant in Aspen, Colorado, where he met Stephanie Izard, a James Beard award winner and the first female winner of the Bravo cooking competition “Top Chef.” After making that connection, Joel moved on to become chef de cuisine at Izard’s Chicago restaurant, the Little Goat Diner.

In 2018 he moved back to Milwaukee, where he worked for a couple local catering companies before starting Crops on Top.

Since then the farm has grown, as have Joel’s opportunities to cook for the people who visit it.

Casual dinners and local restaurant partnerships

Aside from the monthly five-course dinners, this year Crops on Top introduced more casual monthly dinners consisting of three courses often around a common theme, like a Filipino-inspired night or an Asian barbecue-inspired night. The casual dinners are treated more like a standing garden event, with high-top tables and lawn furniture placed throughout the farm to encourage mingling, often with live music playing from the farm’s large shipping container-turned-stage. It's a fun entry point for those curious to try Joel’s cooking and learn more about the farm.

Crops on Top has also begun to provide produce to local restaurants, including Seven Swans Creperie, where Joel’s commercial cooking space is located, as well as Cafe Corazón.

The public can purchase produce from Crops on Top, too. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesdays and Thursdays, they run a market out of the farm’s shipping container, selling just-harvested produce to locals.

“We have our regular customers who show up every week, and we really love it,” Joel said.

He has his sights set on expanding the farm to include separate shipping containers for growing mushrooms and hydroponic gardening for salad mixes so they can operate on a more year-round basis.

Working year-round includes looking for spaces to hold the dinners throughout the year, too. That would mean even more opportunities for people to learn about the importance of sustainable eating, cooking and what beautiful food can be created from what’s grown in your backyard — or, if you’re Joel and Jamie from Crops on Top — in an urban parking lot.

What to know about Crops on Top dinners

Upcoming five-course dinners: Aug. 24 and Sept. 14. Price per person is $150. Five full beer pours from Amorphic Beer are included.

Upcoming casual dinners: Sept. 8. Price per person is $35. Beer is available for purchase on site.

How to reserve your spot: Reserve your seat at amorphicbeer.com (click the “Order Beer for Pickup + Special Event Tickets” link).

Rachel Bernhard joined the Journal Sentinel as dining critic in June 2023. She’s been busy exploring the Milwaukee area food scene to share her favorite finds with readers along the way. Like all Journal Sentinel reporters, she buys all meals, accepts no gifts and is independent of all establishments she covers.

What should she cover next? Contact her at rseis@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @rachelbernhard or on Instagram at @rach.eats.mke. 

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: In a Riverwest parking lot, Crops on Top hosts elegant five-course dinners