I’m crazy. And I’m sure people around here think I’m insane. It’s a sickness. But if I go into therapy I’ll lose my edge. Life is short, and I have a mission,” says M.J. Adams. “Someone has to bring good, fresh food back to places like South Dakota, to save the country from chain restaurants. Which are pretty much all you get out here.” And saving Middle America—specifically Rapid City, South Dakota (pop. 60,000)—is what Adams is determined to do.
Rapid City was not, at first, an easy sell. “They called me the vegetarian restaurant because I served vegetables. People would come in and ask why I didn’t have cinnamon rolls the size of my head. They told me my portions were too small and my prices too high. Each week I would end up giving my food away at the mission.” So why Rapid City?
Adams, who trained at the French Culinary Institute, had already made it in that toughest of cities, New York, receiving a rave review in The New York Times when she was head chef at Seasons, in Brooklyn. But she had come to realize that life was about more than accolades and recognition. She longed to run her own place, perhaps with a little bakery attached, and to be closer to her father and sister, who lived in Wyoming and Rapid City, respectively. Middle America needed her, and she was up for the job. So in 1996 Adams packed up her belongings and drove the 1,710 miles to Rapid City with her second husband, Carlos, in her ten-year-old Ford Tempo.
She found a space, named it The Corn Exchange, and began cooking the kind of honest food she’s passionate about: the rustic, wholesome dishes she had learned from her Czech grandmother—stuffed cabbage, ginger cake with nutmeg sauce, rhubarb strawberry compote—as well as the satisfying, savory food inspired by her mentor, Edna Lewis. And lots of fresh vegetables—asparagus, beets, spinach, and Swiss chard—from local organic markets.
But hardly anyone in town came. Where, they asked, were the 16-ounce rib eyes? The wine coolers? The ketchup? Adams persevered, fighting what was turning out to be an uphill battle. “My dream was becoming a nightmare,” she says. And worse was in store.
In May 1997, The Corn Exchange was consumed by the largest fire in Rapid City’s history. Shortly afterward, her marriage began to falter (eventually it collapsed). Adams thought it was all over. Then, incredibly, the town rallied around her, throwing a benefit that, along with federal disaster assistance arranged by Senator Tom Daschle’s office, enabled her to rebuild. To her amazement, The Corn Exchange had become a civic cause.
Rapid City had finally understood what Adams was trying to do, and she, in turn, had put the town on the map. As one local diner put it, “Rapid City had become home to the best restaurant between Minneapolis and Denver.”
The new Corn Exchange is a handsome space, with exposed brick walls, wood floors, a tin ceiling, and a gorgeous copper bar. A sepia photo of Adams’s mother, whose own difficult life fuels the restaurateur’s determination to succeed, hangs by the small kitchen at back. And people now travel to Rapid City just to eat Adams’s food: Maytag blue cheese and potato tart, mussels with Berber butter sauce, buffalo empanadas, savory frittata, trout with caper lemon sauce, saltwater salmon with rhubarb chutney, and butterscotch pots de crème.
“I’m very opinionated,” she admits. “I’ve always wanted to educate people. And I’m driven to help make America eat better. But how can we do that if we don’t use—and grow—fresh, wholesome produce? Here in Rapid City I’ve had the opportunity to prove that you can have a great restaurant anywhere in the country. If I’d done this in New York, there would have been fewer headaches, less risk, but far less reward. They say it about New York, but it’s really true about Rapid City: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” And Adams still hankers after the little bakery. “My third husband,” she says, “has to be a French baker.”
The Corn Exchange
727 Main Street
Rapid City, South Dakota
605-343-5070