Jefferson native Tony Pille is one of three founders of Dirt Burger, a vegetarian fast-food restaurant opening this summer near the Court Avenue District in downtown Des Moines. The restaurant’s affordable, farm-to-table concept will be made possible by Pille’s organic vegetable farm in Greene County. They hope to franchise the model. ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALDDirt Burger will technically be a Des Moines restaurant when it opens this summer, but as co-founder Tony Pille explains, it doesn’t happen without his farm near Paton. The restaurant’s signature veggie burgers are made with organic ingredients Pille grows in Greene County. ANDREW McGINN | JEFFERSON HERALDPille’s farm near Paton has boasted heirloom tomatoes, fava beans, purple mizuna and more. HERALD FILE PHOTOPille surveys organic produce sprouting at Sun Gold Farms near Paton. The produce grown on Pille’s vegetable farm reads like a shopping list for gourmet chefs and foodies. It soon will be used in a new kind of fast-food restaurant. HERALD FILE PHOTO

Billions and billions (soon to be) served

Tony Pille about to shake up the fast-food industry

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

There’s nary a Gen X’er alive who didn’t at some point dream of being taken by the hand and led by Ronald McDonald through McDonaldland, that magical realm where burgers ripening in the Hamburger Patch just called out to be picked.

That was obviously long before pictures started making the rounds on social media of “pink slime” — the meat product used until recently by McDonald’s that looked to be straight out of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”

Today’s consumers are savvier and more interested than ever in knowing where their food originates. It’s in part why only one in five millennials has ever eaten a Big Mac, according to widespread media reports last year.

Lifelong Greene County resident Tony Pille and two business partners believe the zeitgeist is right for their fast-food restaurant concept, Dirt Burger.

For one, they have an honest-to-God hamburger patch to their name.

That’s mainly because a “dirt burger” isn’t beef or even meat at all — it’s a veggie burger made from the adzuki beans, garbanzo beans, amaranth, flax and more that Pille, 43, grows near Paton at Sun Gold Farms, his organic vegetable operation.

And what’s a burger without fries?

Pille grows potatoes, too, near Paton.

Dirt Burger, which will open its first location mid-summer in downtown Des Moines, promises to be a farm-to-table operation like no other — one that matches McDonald’s in price but then has the audacity to be nutritionally superior and locally grown to boot.

“It’s all the good things about food that people seek out,” Pille explained Friday, the day he and his partners signed the lease for a building near the vivacious intersection of Court Avenue and Fourth Street in Des Moines.

“This is guilt-free fast food,” he said, “which is kind of unheard of.”

Dirt Burger is arguably the right concept at the right time, just as Dick and Mac McDonald capitalized on postwar car culture when they started McDonald’s in 1948 in San Bernardino, Calif., with an emphasis on speed.
“I don’t think 20 years ago there was a market for this like there is now,” Pille confessed.

Dirt Burger will be located on a revitalized Fourth Street next to The Randolph Apartments, an eight-story building that embodies the ongoing gentrification of America’s urban centers.

The former Hotel Randolph, built in 1912, was a flophouse of the first order until its recent restoration by Minneapolis-based developer Sherman Associates.

Today, as an apartment building, it boasts a 24-hour fitness center. The hotel’s historic phone booths now act as charging stations.

Dirt Burger, which will be housed in the adjacent, circa-1876 Youngerman Block, isn’t the only new business moving into the neighborhood.

“This is going to be, like, a high-end salon for men,” Pille said, pointing to Dapper DSM, an incoming business that bills itself as a “Grooming Lounge” according to the poster in the window.

“If they can sell that,” Pille quipped, “hopefully we can sell food.

“Have a dirt burger, get your beard trimmed.”

While downtown Des Moines gets the honor of being home base for Dirt Burger — where they’ll have two electric cars and six electric scooters making deliveries of dirt burgers, smoked lentil sausage, flatbread pizzas and salads — Greene County is its spiritual home.

“This doesn’t happen without the farm,” said Pille, a 1992 graduate of Jefferson-Scranton High School who established Sun Gold Farms after a career as a chef.

A webcam inside Dirt Burger will be fixed on the farm 70 miles away, Pille said, “so you can see where your food comes from.”

It was as a chef in Des Moines more than 20 years ago that Pille first crossed paths with business partner Christopher Place, who by coincidence was born in Jefferson. (Remember the Place’s five-and-dime store on the Square? That was his family’s.)

Place went on to become executive chef at Iowa State University, and now serves as director of culinary operations for Sam & Gabe’s in Des Moines.

Their other partner in Dirt Burger, Shawn Chapman, owns Sam & Gabe’s and will act as the new venture’s business director.

The “dirt burger” itself was born in 2008 when Place and Pille — then working as chef and sous chef, respectively, at Proof in Des Moines — concocted a vegan burger using quinoa.

“I affectionately started calling them dirt burgers,” Pille said.

Quinoa is still part of the burger’s equation, along with lentils and even Marmite, the British food spread made from yeast extract.

The burger’s Japanese adzuki beans aren’t nearly as exotic as they sound.

Greene County farmers in 2001, in an effort to help Iowa find an alternative to corn and soybeans, briefly experimented with growing adzuki beans as part of the Greene Bean Project.

The finished product, a third-pounder, looks enough like a burger to satisfy even the hardest core of carnivores.

“It actually looks like ground bear,” Pille said of the cooked burger, assuming, of course, you know what ground bear looks like.

“People that would never go to a vegetarian place like it,” he said. “That’s a win.”

Dirt Burger could trigger a quantum leap forward for Sun Gold Farms, which until now has only had one employee, Pille, even as it doubled in size from two and a half acres to a little more than five.

Beginning this summer, Pille will employ a full-timer and one part-time employee. He also welcomes any and all help.

A tasting and meeting for potential Dirt Burger investors planned for Tuesday at Sam & Gabe’s, 600 E. Fifth St., Des Moines, will seek backers to make improvements to the farm as well, particularly a new building for the processing of produce.

“We want to take this as far as we can,” Pille said.

That means franchising.

“We want drive-throughs similar to Hardee’s, McDonald’s or whatever,” Pille said.

Even the farm would be franchised, Pille said, with future Dirt Burger locations contracting with a nearby local farm for food.

A restaurant industry friend in California recently told him, “Dirt Burger would explode out here.”

But an aspiring national franchise needs more than just good, affordable food on the menu — it needs the right kind of branding.

Dirt Burger promises to “take the pretentiousness out of vegetarian food.”

“It’s an old joke,” Pille said. “How do you know when someone’s a vegetarian? They’ll tell you.”

Here’s the kicker: Between the three founders, there’s not a vegetarian in the bunch.

“I’d say we’re all health conscious,” clarified Pille, who says they’ve done trials with three types of cheese on the dirt burgers — American, smoked Gouda and Brie — and they’re all good.

Getting non-vegetarians in the door is the goal of Dirt Burger’s branding.

“Vegans and vegetarians are already going to eat here,” Pille said. “We don’t need to market to millennial females. We need to market to their jock boyfriends.”

That’s where humor comes in.

They’ve come up with a host of cheeky taglines, including “There’s a beet in my meat” and “All other veggie burgers are manure.”

The branding of Dirt Burger — including a logo resembling both a spatula and a spade shovel — has fallen to Grimes-based Avidity Creative and its Denison-raised founder, Adam Feller.

“As for the vibe we’re going for, think Jimmy John’s for vegetarians,” Feller said in an email. “Being vegetarian or vegan already comes with a stigma of being a little ‘snooty.’ So the goal is to make vegetarian be something that is tasty and OK for ‘manly’ or masculine guys to eat.”

Well, would you believe one of the strongest men in the world is a vegan?

Patrik Baboumian, Germany’s strongest man and the self-proclaimed “Vegan Badass,” has a plant-based diet.

Pille said they hope to reach out to Baboumian to attend Dirt Burger’s opening.

Hopefully by then, Pille will have made peace with the venture’s name.

“I still sort of hate the name,” he confessed. “I think it’s the worst name and the best name at the same time.”

Contact Us

Jefferson Bee & Herald
Address: 200 N. Wilson St.
Jefferson, IA 50129

Phone:(515) 386-4161