The Uprooted Kitchen
On June 1, 1999, Chad and Erin Romanoff packed up all of their belongings into a yellow truck and moved from New York City (population 7.4 million at the time) to Scottsdale, Arizona (population 200,000). They didn’t know a single person in Arizona, but knew they wanted to live somewhere that had warm weather and sunshine.
Erin and Chad moving from New York, NY to Scottsdale, AZ on June 1, 1999. (Photo Credit: @uprootedkitchen Instagram post)
The Romanoffs are the owners of The Uprooted Kitchen, a cozy “plant-based eatery” in Gilbert, Arizona. I am a regular at The Uprooted Kitchen, despite the fact that there are plenty of good, healthy options along the 17-mile drive there. While I am not vegan or vegetarian, I spend a lot of time investigating ingredients and where food comes from. The Uprooted Kitchen is probably the only restaurant I trust as much as my own cooking as far as clean ingredients go. My mom jokes that I don’t necessarily eat everything she cooks, but I’ll eat anything that Erin makes. (My mom is an excellent cook, by the way, and I don’t believe there is a Thai restaurant that can rival her duck curry or papaya salad.)
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Chad and Erin met at Indiana University in Bloomington as college freshmen. “When I met Erin, I fell in love with her instantly,” Chad says. “She changed my life, in so many ways.”
“I was the world’s worst eater,” he says. “I literally grew up eating cheerios, crackers, really bland foods. I couldn’t mix any flavors together. No vegetables, and the only fruit I kind of ate growing up was a banana.”
From top left, clockwise: lemon berry cashew cheesecake, chipotle lime sopes, tempeh breakfast sandwich, tiramisu. (Photo Credit: @uprootedkitchen Instagram)
Fast forward to today, where Erin serves up dishes like chipotle lime sopes, berry cashew cheesecake, and tiramisu, full of flavor for The Uprooted Kitchen’s customers and Chad.
“It took a lot of time,” says Erin. “But that was our entertainment in college—staying home, cooking, watching a movie. Those were such fun nights for us. Chad would help a little bit, coming up with flavor ideas.”
Chad’s family was floored when they learned he was eating some of the things Erin was cooking. Because they were dating, he was much more open to things she would cook, and more importantly, he trusted her.
“Every meal I made, he would be like, ‘This is the best thing ever!’ I was introducing him to things he would never put in his mouth in a million years,” she recalls.
Throughout their journey, from cooking date nights in college to managing a kitchen at the Romanoff’s restaurant, Chad has been a constant source of encouragement and support for Erin. The two moved from Bloomington to New York so Chad could complete his graduate degree in occupational therapy at Columbia. After he finished, he said it was Erin’s turn, and they packed up and moved across the country to Arizona where she attended culinary school and he began work as a pediatric occupational therapist. Later, it was Chad’s idea to open their own restaurant. Knowing he wouldn’t continue his career in occupational therapy forever, he wanted to think of something they could do together, long-term.
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In 2012, they opened The Uprooted Kitchen as a vegetarian food truck. The Romanoffs bought an old 1968 Avion travel trailer and, despite never having stepped foot in a trailer prior to that, set out to convert it into a restaurant on wheels. They ripped out the floors and did all of the plumbing and electrical work themselves. Construction and planning took about six months. Chad continued to work full-time as an occupational therapist, and Erin would do prep work while their twin boys, Cole and Jonah, were at school.
Erin and Chad with their sons, Cole and Jonah, moving a refrigerator into their brick-and-mortar space, November 2016. (Photo Credit: @uprootedkitchen Instagram post)
“All the hard work we put into that and the new things we learned prepared us for starting a business,” says Erin. “It kept testing us. We’d come up against another obstacle and be like, ‘Is this a sign? Or do we just need to forge ahead?’ It kept teaching us that we had to forge ahead.”
Eventually, The Uprooted Kitchen outgrew the trailer due to limitations with kitchen space, and Chad and Erin converted their business into a brick-and-mortar restaurant in 2016. Today, it is one of 12 small local businesses located in Barnone, a massive repurposed barn: what used to be a space to store hay and equipment was transformed into a modern day craftsman’s community. It sits on Agritopia Farm, where Chad and Erin source several of the ingredients for their dishes.
Many of the menu items change weekly based on seasonality and to add variety. All of the produce is organic and locally sourced, and every item on the menu is plant-based, a distinction the Romanoffs are very deliberate about using.
“We focus on whole foods. We don’t even really publicize that we’re vegan, because vegan food can be processed too,” Chad explains. “We really stress that our food is plant-based, that we make everything from scratch, and it’s minimally processed. It just happens to be vegan.”
The term “plant-based” refers to foods that come from plants and do not include animal products. Adding “whole foods” typically means that processed foods are excluded as well. A vegan diet is one in which animal products are not included, but could include processed items. For example, most nut milks are considered vegan because they do not contain cow’s milk. However, they might still be processed if they contain additives like carrageenan or high fructose corn syrup, and thus not be part of a “whole food” diet.
The Romanoffs were hesitant at first about transitioning from a vegetarian concept to plant-based, a term that was not commonly used four years ago.
“When we first opened at Barnone, you would not believe the number of people that would walk up to the menu and make really horrible faces and then walk away. It was a very regular occurrence, daily,” recalls Erin. “We kept thinking, no one’s going to understand what we do. No one’s going to get it, we felt super foreign.”
“Today when people walk by, we get way more positive comments and looks at our menu. It’s very promising and hopeful. Even if they’re not going to eat with us, they’ll say, ‘I’ll send my so-and-so!’ They’re open minded to the fact that we have something to offer that’s not super weird.”
Google searches for the term “plant-based” have increased approximately seven-fold since 2016 when the Romanoffs opened The Uprooted Kitchen in its current brick-and-mortar form. High-profile celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, Arnold Schwarzenaggar and Venus Williams have contributed to the growing popularity of plant-based diets. And in October 2019, the release of The Game Changers, a documentary about professional athletes following plant-based diets, further added to a surge in people seeking out information on plant-based diets. The film became the best selling documentary on iTunes at that time within a week.
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Chad and Erin taking to-go orders at their restaurant, June 2020. (Photo Credit: Kimie B. Marin)
While the menu changes weekly, there are a few constants when visiting The Uprooted Kitchen: Chad’s smiling face greeting customers and taking orders, and Erin busy at work in the kitchen.
Chad loves chatting with customers and getting to know them, often remembering little details from prior conversations. Their customer base is extremely diverse—many patrons are not necessarily strictly vegan or vegetarian, but simply people who appreciate good quality, nourishing food.
“We started out this way for health reasons. And we both love animals and we love the earth. So it’s just an all-encompassing thing for us. It just makes sense. You should eat the food that Mother Earth provides.”