Chef Billy Allin represents restaurants' growing interest in food

Billy and Kristin Allin’s home seems like any other on its Decatur street — quaint and well-tended, with a mini patch of green lawn and neighboring houses crowding either side.

The backyard is another story. A patio, a sloping yard, a wooded backdrop and — hello — a path.

The path leads through a thicket of tall trees, meanders past a jungle gym and arrives at a sudden, sunny clearing. At the entrance, a hand-painted sign hanging from a trellis announces the “Cakes & Ale Garden.”

Although the Allins named their Decatur restaurant for a line of dialogue in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” this scenery brings “As You Like It” more to mind. It is a regular Forest of Arden out here.

You can feel an almost animistic magic emanating from this hidden garden. Don’t get me wrong — the setting remains suburban, with various backyards abutting it. But to stand in this flat, sunny acre carved from an old-growth forest and surrounded by trees puts you in mind of fairy tales and pagan rituals. At the very least, it would be a perfect spot for a paintball tournament.

Chef Billy Allin doesn’t trumpet the fact that he has been growing food for the restaurant here for the past two years. But if you order the leg of lamb with cranberry beans, eggplant, peppers, onions and minted salsa verde, chances are that anything on the plate that doesn’t go “baa” came from his backyard.

Allin — who has earned many plaudits for his homey, market-driven menu — joins a small but growing club of local restaurateurs who have started growing whatever food they can. Molly Gunn and Nick Rutherford, owners of the Porter Beer Bar in Little Five Points, farm an empty lot near their Inman Park home. Hector Santiago of Pura Vida Tapas in Poncey Highland grows chile peppers on the restaurant’s roof. The owners of Canoe in Vinings, perhaps taking a clue from Michelle Obama, have turned some of their lush riverside gardens over to vegetables.

The granddaddy of this movement, of course, is Bacchanalia — the west side dining icon whose owners Anne Quatrano and Clifford Harrison supply the restaurant with vegetables and eggs from their north Georgia farm.

Allin has no claim to be a great gardener. He is still learning about when to plant tomatoes and which varieties thrive. He doesn’t know what to do the raised beds now filled with verdant, frilly, inedibly sharp rocket. Don’t get him started on the birds; they help themselves to every blueberry he grows.

Speaking of birds ...

“Murphy!” he shouts. His dog, a retriever/Aussie mix, has found a bird stuck under the netting surrounding a tomato plant. The dog pounces, tearing the netting. The bird flaps its wings pathetically. Soon the dog and the bird are all tangled up in a whirlwind tussle that seems straight from a Tweety Bird cartoon. Miraculously the tomato plant, heavy with ‘Green Zebra’ fruit, survives, as does the bird.

Tomatoes are perhaps Allin’s main focus, for practical reasons.

“I could grow more eggplant, but it’s cheap,” he says. “If I need more eggplant, I can buy it from a good local farmer. But tomatoes are $5 a pound! The more I grow, the better.”

This season, Allin will attempt a fall garden. He knows he’ll have no trouble with baby kale, arugula and romaine, but he’s also going to try his hand at root vegetables and broccoli. He’s even hoping to see whether asparagus will take for an eventual spring harvest.

“We have always shopped the farmers markets but never did we really understand the planning, labor, expense and so forth of the business of running a successful garden,” Allin says. He also loves the fact that his young boys, Liam and Van, can see where their food comes from.

You might say this represents a “trend,” but that kind of misses the point. It would be a trend, perhaps, if any of these restaurants were showing off their green thumbs as marketing material.

But these seem to be more modest endeavors. These chefs and restaurateurs are growing whatever food they can because it makes sense. Economic sense. Taste sense. Even spiritual sense.