For most of his 25-year career, Chef Keith Chapman built restaurants, kitchens and culinary programs for other people. This month, for the first time, he’s building one of his own, a few hours at a time, out of a small kitchen tucked inside Agricole Farm Stop in Chelsea.
Chapman’s new venture, The Rooted Table, debuts with its first public pop-up Sept. 19, followed by two more confirmed dates, Oct. 3 and Oct. 10. Service runs roughly 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., with menus released about two weeks ahead of each date.
It’s the first public-facing concept from Keith Chapman Culinary Group LLC, the company Chapman founded after a career that took him through fine dining, pastry, teaching, catering, consulting, and hospital food service. He was an instructor and shareholder at Zingerman’s Bakehouse and led culinary development for Picasso Restaurant Group inside the University of Michigan Health system, including the restaurant at the new D. Dan and Betty Kahn Health Care Pavilion. He’s also appeared on FOX 2 Detroit’s Morning Cooking School and NBC’s Live in the D. In 2026, he finished as a Top 10 finalist in the Favorite Chef competition, presented by Carla Hall in partnership with the James Beard Foundation and Taste of Home.
Chapman said going independent wasn’t the result of one bad job or one big break. It was 25 years finally adding up. He moved downstate from Marquette right out of high school to attend culinary school, the same year he lost his mother. His father, he said, “dealt with that loss in his own way and largely disappeared” for a time. Chapman became a father himself while still in culinary school, and providing for his family shaped the rest of his career.
Courtesy photo: Keith Chapman Culinary Group
“I’ve known since I was young that someday I wanted my own company,” Chapman said. “Eventually I had to stop waiting for the perfect moment and put faith in myself.”
Chelsea wasn’t a new connection. Chapman said he’s been coming to town since the early 2000s and has built friendships and professional ties here over the years, including work with the Peas & Carrots Hospitality team during the transition of The Common Grill, alongside Chef Craig Common. Agricole appealed to him for a more practical reason, too: the roughly 30-seat kitchen inside the Farm Stop was built, in part, to give developing food businesses a place to start.
“I didn’t want ‘farm-to-table’ to simply be language on a menu,” Chapman said. “Agricole creates an opportunity for the relationship between farmer, ingredient, chef and guest to be visible.”
The concept has shifted since Chapman first sketched it out. He originally envisioned a small farm-to-table restaurant. Along the way, the business grew into something bigger: a catering company with an open door. Catering and private events form the core of the business, he said, but running a kitchen inside a space with that much community foot traffic made an open-door pop-up format a natural fit. The Agricole pop-ups double as live, in-progress introductions to that larger vision while Agricole and KCCG continue discussing what a longer-term relationship might look like.
Longer term, Chapman envisions a rotating seasonal menu, grab-and-go offerings, private dinners, ticketed seasonal dinners and eventually culinary education, with Michigan-grown ingredients forming the foundation of the menu and outside sourcing filling in the gaps. He’s holding off on naming specific farms and producers for now, in favor of a more deliberate way to credit them later, possibly through rotating producer spotlights.
Keith Chapman Culinary Group is already booking catering, private dining, and consulting work outside the pop-up schedule. More information is available at TheRootedTableMI.com or on Facebook and Instagram, where Chapman posts menus, event details, and behind-the-scenes updates.
