N'Gina Guyton: Lady. Boss.

Of Soil and Water Farm

         N’Gina Guyton is an artist dressed up as a boss. She owns South, one of Sacramento’s most beloved restaurants, as well as The Quinn and The Good Saint, a shop for thoughtfully curated vintage and an event space, respectively. I am visiting N’Gina at the site of her newest project, Of Soil and Water Farm. This piece of heaven is right outside the city of Sacramento, and today N’Gina is dressed in teeny tiny shorts, tall rubber boots, and freshly cropped, bleached hair. 

          When I write that South is beloved, I am not being hyperbolic. Since they opened their doors in 2014, there have been lines of locals waiting patiently for N’Gina’s family recipes: fried catfish and chicken, kale so tender you want to write it a love song, and cornbread, as well as banana pudding parfait and fried green tomatoes. It’s hard to imagine the food scene in Sacramento before South, frankly.

          We walk the 2.6 acre farm and N’Gina shows me rows of tomatoes, basil, leeks, and okra, followed by rows of watermelon, romaine lettuce, Nasturtium, green onions, cucumbers, and Blue Lake green beans. There are rows of collard greens, marigolds, and corn next to new irrigation gently watering down cilantro, chard, kale, and spinach in the morning sun. Future plans include fruit trees; N’Gina points to a portion of freshly tilled earth just beyond the tidy rows of crops, and explains that the ground is being prepped for hot compost. Later this winter, they will be dropping in twenty trees; 10 different fruits, two of each. And a larger plot of earth will soon be dedicated exclusively to kale, since kale is a popular dish at South. A single pollinator garden on the periphery will be one of many as the farm matures and develops, and the framing for a green house is up on a foundation of pea gravel, waiting for walls and a roof. Of Soil and Water Farm was purchased almost 2 years ago. “To be honest, when I first bought the farm, I was intimidated and so I kept procrastinating getting started,” she shares.  

           “My primary goal with farming has been inspired by a need to supplement the kitchen at South. For two solid years, we were having serious issues with the produce we were getting in, because it wasn’t consistent. We were getting super woody okra; e coli warnings on kale recalls; green beans that snapped in half like sticks and when you chewed into them, they were super fibrous.  It was bringing down the quality of what we were doing, and the customer doesn’t know that it's the farmer. The customer thinks it’s me, even though I am not growing it, I am serving it. So it started to be reflected back in our bottom line, and I wanted more control and variety then we were able to get. I think farming in general across the United States is like, we’re only going to produce these top twenty things for consumption, and those are the top twenty things you see at the grocery store, and the top twenty things that you get when you go out to eat. And there’s like hundreds and thousands of different varietals of every single vegetable and fruit…and we eat a tiny narrow slice of it all, and I wanted variety without paying through the nose to get it."

New rows, new crops, new farm.

           N’Gina recalls being on her grandfather’s farm in Tylertown, Mississippi as a child. “And that feeling it gave me to be outside, and the quiet, and having your space, and being able to watch things grow, and take these long walks down a dirt road. I just needed a little piece of that.”

 

          Growing produce for the restaurant was not the only motivation behind acquiring the land. Sometimes a woman needs a room of her own, and sometimes she needs a whole damn farm. “Divorce is never easy, and this one was exceptionally hard. But I am glad everything happened the way that it did because this time around it forced some healing for me. Spirit was like, ‘We are done playing games. You are now going to heal, and it’s not going to be a pretty ‘go-to-therapy’ kind of crying. This is going to be a dark night of the soul. Tear you down to your bones and build you back up…’ This healing process was excruciating, and I was running the restaurant, mothering kids, dealing with Covid, had a breast cancer scare…and this scare in the midst of this healing led to living more holistically.  Self-care was something I never, ever did for myself. I have that Virgo tendency to always do for other people, somebody else is first, I’ll be last, somebody will figure it out and give me something at some point in time—they will see how much I am giving, and they will give me something. And then you’re just waiting around, resenting everybody. Everybody." N'Gina explains that taking exquisite care of herself has paid off, and that being in alignment with herself has not come easily. Some folks fall away, but falling away from yourself is so much lonelier. The new short hair is emblematic of the new freedom she feels.

 

          “South is coping well in the pandemic, I’m not gonna lie. Everybody loves comfort food. I was scared in the very beginning to share that South was coping well, because I felt like I needed to be apologetic for my success. But we literally every day go in and ask ourselves, where can we zig where everybody zags? How can we set ourselves apart?”

 

          “First we stopped being really stuck up, which we were. Really stuck up, before the pandemic. I had this attitude that I’m only going to be serving fine dining Southern food, and we’re going to move the restaurant in that direction. I’m going to be Black Alice Waters. Fine dining wasn't an authentic instinct; it was something that would get me into food magazines or get me the respect of other white/male chefs. Fine dining would help elevate the cuisine out and away from notions of ‘lazy Southern food.’ And then the pandemic hit.”

 

           I ask N’Gina if they’d been planning on abandoning the bucket of chicken sold at South, and she says they were in fact looking to retire the witty and oh-so cheeky bucket of fried chicken.  I tell her how I got one of those buckets of fried chicken for my husband for Valentine’s Day a few years ago, and it was a very romantic gesture for someone whose primary love language is food. She laughs. “The bucket was one of the things that we adjusted in response to the pandemic. We added different sizes, people are at home now and everyone is eating. And people need value, let them get a bucket and have leftovers for picnic chicken the next day. We just started thinking about the food people were eating at home instead of in our dining room…how do we re-create that family meal and package it so it’s easy and fun. If you’re already stressed about Covid, and working from home, the last thing you want to deal with is, ‘Now I gotta cook.’ So we just wanted to make it easy and affordable. And then when the ABC’s [agencies like OSHA, etc] said we could serve to-go alcohol, it was a wrap.”

 

          N’Gina is a self-taught chef, and there are generations of women standing behind her in the kitchen. She started cooking at age 11, when her mother recruited her to cook for Thanksgiving.  “My mom knocked on my bedroom door: Get up. You’re cooking Thanksgiving with me. I was like, what did you say Patricia?”

 

         “My mother was an excellent home cook. She brought out the family cookbook with all those handwritten recipes on the cards. Some of those recipes come from my great grandmother and great-great grandmother. Some of the recipes are a hundred years plus. That was my beginning as a necessity and not as a passion."

 

          “I went to UC Davis and totally screwed around, I was on academic probation and my dad was like, ‘You’re out.’ But my deal was, I could stay and live in Davis if I worked. That's when I joined the Randy Paragary family. I was part of the opening crew for Café Bernardo Davis, and this is where my passion for food started. I was serving, and when I started I didn’t even know there was a difference between red and white wine. There was a lot of education that Paragary gave the staff, and that started a passion and curiosity around food. I finished my degree at CSU Sacramento in Fine Art.”

 

          “Southern food does get a bad rap for being unhealthy but I think that it can be very healthy if I am using quality ingredients. Clean ingredients. Of Soil and Water Farm is a completely organic operation. Not one chemical. Clean water, clean soil. Not only do we cook with love, now we grow this food with love. And we hope that it resonates and people can feel that energy in their body."

 

          An artist, dressed as a boss, with a side of organic peach cobbler so good it’ll make you hug somebody. I can't wait to see what else she creates.