Pizza is the main dish at Frankfort pub but you can also take local flavors home

You could easily mistake Locals Food Hub & Pizza Pub as just another place with a trendy, feel-good name that slings pizza, sells beer and collects profits.

But you’d be wrong.

There’s the atmosphere: At lunch on a Friday the big screen TV is dark; in the one size-fits-all restroom (on the door is a sign with stick figures of a male, a female, a unisex figure and an alien with “whatever ... Please Just Wash Your Hands” written below) with a step stool so young people can reach the sink.

And then there’s the information about where Locals’ food comes from: A map with lines from the shop in Frankfort to its suppliers in 20 Kentucky counties; a sign in the dining room says that between the time Locals opened in July 2021 and March of this year it had spent $506,363 with local suppliers.

“We’re very proud of that number,” Birch Bragg, one of the founders and owners of Locals who is listed on its website as Chief Visionary Officer, said during a recent chat in Locals’ airy, open dining room, “we average about $24,000 a month in purchases from local Kentucky producers.”

Those purchases go to 122 Kentucky producers, and assure that the pizzas and all the other offerings are as fresh, local, tasty and nutritious as possible.

For the pizzas that means the wheat berries are from out of state but the flour is milled at Great Bagel in Lexington, the cheese comes from Kenny’s Farmhouse Cheese and the sausage from hogs that run in the hardwood woods on Bragg’s own nearby Nature Friendly Farm, even the wild yeast that makes the sourdough was harvested from Woodford and Franklin counties. For the salads, everything in them is “coming from a certified organic grower in this county or the next county over.”

Along with the restaurant is a store – the food hub – that offers local produce and goods like canned tomato sauces, frozen pasta, cheeses, pickles, Kentucky beers and, of course, Ale-8-One for people to take home.

The store also is now a participant in the Kentucky Double Dollars program that matches SNAP purchases up to $20, making local food more affordable.

Bragg says the goal is not to replace visits to farmers markets or participation in CSAs but to expand the demand for local foods. And that’s where the pizza pub comes in. “Somebody who has never ever participated in local food before ... they come down here and they order a pizza and they get a beer and by default they are now a local food consumer,” he said.

Locals has nurtured plenty of local customers but also draws many travelers who are in the area to visit distilleries, as online reviews attest. “The margherita pizza was probably the best I have had,” wrote a woman from Michigan. A man from Puerto Rico thanked the driver who pulled the tour bus over for a lunch stop at Locals. “The food was tasty, delicious and fresh. We were a group of 17 and they handled our orders expeditiously.”

Bragg said he and his partners, who include his wife Michelle, Joseph Fiala (a local restaurateur and acupuncturist) and Taylor Marshall (a Frankfort real estate dealer and partner with Fiala in Bourbon on Main) are focused on getting local food into more homes, not only to support farmers and give consumers access to healthier, tastier food but also to create a more secure food system.

The COVID pandemic was the first time many people experienced shortages of some foods, Bragg noted, as the long supply chain that brings commodity, industrialized food to market began to break down. He thinks the answer is to create more food production nearby, as happened during World War II when Victory Gardens were encouraged. “Why do we wait for a pandemic or a war or an oil crisis or some major global disruption to focus in again on local systems,” he wondered, “why don’t we do that all along so that it’s not a shock when it happens, so that we’re prepared.”

Kentucky food producers are prepared to provide more food, Bragg said. “One of our biggest fears at the beginning,” was that they wouldn’t be able to find abundant local sources for the hub and pub. What they found was just the opposite: it’s the demand not the supply that’s lacking. “We have the infrastructure, we have the network, we have the people growing the food who could supply so much more food than they currently are,” Bragg said.

Locals will be counting on that supply when they open a second location, in the Smoketown area of Louisville in summer 2024. Their estimates are that the Louisville location will easily do twice the business as the one in Frankfort, and likely more than that. Doing the math, Bragg said that means that by the summer of 2025 the two locations will have purchased in the range of $1.4 million from about 200 local producers. “Most of them are ready for that, they are ready to expand,” Bragg said. And that’s how Locals likes it.

Locals Food Hub & Pizza Pub

Where: 863 Wilkinson Boulevard in Frankfort

Call: 502-682-7332

Hours: 11 a.m. – 9 p.m. daily (8 p.m. in winter)