Chef Matt Steigerwald
Chef Steigerwald is regionally known and well renowned as the chef and owner of the nationally lauded Lincoln Café in Mount Vernon, Iowa. The Café advocated local and organic food with a focus on the betterment of the community through mutually beneficial relationships with local farmers and producers, as well as rooted investment in the local economy of Mount Vernon and the surrounding area. In addition to praise from countless Iowa and midwestern publications, Steigerwald received positive notices from wide-ranging media outlets, including the James Beard Foundation, the Travel Channel, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Week Magazine, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Later he purchased an adjoining location where he opened the Lincoln Wine Bar, which soon became a social hub for the community, offering an international wine and beer list, world-class cheeses, and house-cured hams and sausages. In 2012, the Wine Bar remodeled to feature a Stefano Ferrara oven and expanded their menu to include wood-fired pizzas. Steigerwald was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, and attended the University of Northern Carolina at Chapel Hill. Early in his career he trained with iconic southern chef Ben Barker at his now-closed Magnolia Grill in Durham, North Carolina. He later went on to work as a chef at Vertigo in downtown Raleigh and Helen’s in Richmond, Virginia.
Maggie Harris, Front of House Manager
After 8 years in the service industry, it was working for Matt at the Lincoln Café that really inspired Maggie to delve into cooking and start looking at food and the restaurant industry as a career rather than a job. Rapid Creek Cidery perfectly encapsulates everything that she loves about food and restaurants: it is focused on quality, locality, beauty, and subtlety, and on creating and fostering a community of people who value the same things. Before Rapid Creek Cidery, Maggie helped manage the Lincoln Wine Bar in Mount Vernon, Iowa, before moving to Maine to work at Salt Water Farm, a fine-dining restaurant with a similar focus on farm-to-table ingredient sourcing and drawing inspiration from the farm in which the restaurant was located.