How The Infatuation Led Chase Sapphire To Back A Grassfed Culture

The Infatuation’s Infatuation With Grassfed Culture’s Uncompromising Kitchen

The Grassfed Culture founders are a trio whose individual family legacies ultimately brought them together, despite attempts to carve their own independent paths. Hackler spent two decades running a wine import business, only to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, an Albanian immigrant who ran restaurants in South Carolina, and his father, also a restaurateur.

“In wine, you’re selling to distributors and retailers, and you’re never really actually speaking to the people that are drinking your wine,” he said. “I wanted to have that deeper connection with our end guest and consumer.”

Like her husband Hackler, Restrepo Hackler also comes from a restaurant family. And like Hackler, Restrepo Hackler also took the long way back to a hospitality industry within her Colombian blood, pursuing jewelry design in Florence as apprentice to master engravers who count Tiffany and Bulgari as clients. It’s with that ornamental optic she designs venues where Vargas’s epicurean expressions come to life.

“I think a lot about how this person visiting is going to interact with this space, and how can I make this space provide happy feelings,” she said. In planning their restaurants, Restrepo Hackler sources everything from lighting to furniture from local artisans, treating each destination as an extension of the community it serves.

Vargas, he’ll tell you, is a man of nature. Growing up in Santa Marta, Colombia and traveling the world with his parents, his seduction by food ignited in the markets of New Delhi. He trained at Osteria Francescana in Modena under Massimo Bottura; at New York’s Eleven Madison Park; and at Fäviken Magasinet in northern Sweden, a town of 1,300 people near the Arctic Circle where, as he put it, “there were more reindeer around you than people.” In that cold Nordic kitchen, Vargas learned to treat nothing as waste, to preserve, to coax the maximum from the minimum, to understand flavor is inseparable from intention.

When he arrived in South Florida at Restrepo Hackler’s sister’s recommendation and Hackler’s request, he was genuinely confused by Miami being a city that doesn’t compost. “It’s so lived everywhere else in the world,” he said. “The mass production of things and the explosion of agriculture in the United States just makes everybody think one way, and one way only.”

Grassfed Culture became one of the first hospitality groups in Miami to compost, and one of even fewer where every restaurant concept is anchored in an ethos of no seed oils, only organic proteins, open-fire cooking, natural and biodynamic wines. “It’s a signature of who we are and how we live,” Restrepo Hackler said. “We always say that we feed the same way we feed at home. We feed our kids; we feed our families.”

Their portfolio spans South Florida and Georgia. Los Félix and Krüs Kitchen anchor Coconut Grove; Atlanta is home to FÜM, a live-fire Italian restaurant with a dedicated pasta room and dry-aging chamber, now expanded with the rooftop Rabbit Ears cocktail bar. Their Tacos Maria operates as a fast-casual taco window inside ZeyZey, the group’s 15,000-square-foot live indie music venue in Little Haiti, named after the word for “happiness” in Iku, the language of an indigenous community from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia (Vargas’s hometown). At ZeyZey, Hackler explained, “we’re making all our cocktails from scratch, craft cocktails at scale, not using high fructose corn syrup. It’s a holistic view of how a music venue can run.”

Pipeline, a cocktail bar and bakery promising a collision of Vargas’s Nordic tutelage and tropical Latin American roots, is next. “We think about things through a cultural lens, city culture lens,” Hackler said, adding that doing things the right way often means the hard way. “It’s how we execute service, how we support our teams, how we support our farmers, how we support our city, how we run our businesses, how we care for our community.”

The Tiny Farm Behind The Infatuation’s Favored Miami Table

“The majority of farm dinners are not that exciting, because they’re not really telling a story. They’re either just doing it because it’s the trend, or because it excites people,” Vargas said of how Under The Stars came about. “For us, it was just organic, it was just natural to think about really showing both worlds; what Roberto is doing as an ecosystem within our industry, and what we do with service, food, and ambience. That’s what really tells a story; things that are real and not just following something else.”

The Roberto in question is Roberto Grossman, a former senior creative producer at Fusion Media Group, Univision’s English-language network, who walked away from a television career after reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s seminal work that ignited a generation of food-conscious Americans. Over Zoom, Grossman told me the book led him to a simple conclusion: “I know what I’m going to do. I’m not going to start complaining about things. I’m just going to grow my own food.”

He moved to Homestead, started on a half-acre backyard, and spent eight years growing and sharing boxes of organic eggs and vegetables with his Fusion colleagues before going all in, learning farming entirely from books, podcasts, and farm visits around the world. Tiny Farm has since grown to seven acres, now in its ninth growing season, supplying 15 Miami restaurants and 120 households weekly through its Community Supported Agriculture program. Vargas has worked with Tiny Farm since season one. “He found us. He’s one of the first chefs I worked with,” Grossman said.

Grassfed Culture has invested substantially in Tiny Farm’s infrastructure. Together, they’re co-creating a milpa: an ancient Mesoamerican farming system rooted as much in philosophy as in agriculture, where corn, beans, squash, and companion crops grow in mutual regeneration, each supporting the others without depleting their shared soil. The milpa will supply both Los Félix and Krüs Kitchen year-round. “It’s not just about being local, but about being sustainable,” Vargas said, “Because you can be local and not sustainable.”

In contrast to nearby industrial agriculture farms, Tiny Farm focuses on high quality, diverse organic regenerative farming yielding nutrient dense vegetables. “What Tiny Farm is trying to do is build an ecological space where there’s life above the soil, in the soil,” Grossman said. “Creating life instead of destruction, which is normal agriculture.”

Flowers are planted to attract diverse insects, both predators and pollinators alike, as a natural form of pesticide. “You bring assassins,” he said. “You bring good ones, bad ones, but eventually nature finds an equilibrium always.” And while most South Florida farms go dormant in summer, Grossman runs at 50% production, keeping workers employed year-round and remaining a reliable source for chefs as he plants heat-loving crops such as okra, Seminole pumpkin, and tropical fruits.

“Most chefs I work with want me to grow what I feel comfortable growing and they’ll use it,” Grossman noted. Just as Vargas did for Under The Stars, other chefs design menus around what he delivers. “If that’s what’s easy for us to grow in the summer, the chefs figure out how to use it.”

The Infatuation, Chase Sapphire Reserve, And The Art Of Mutual Benefit

“Those relationships between the corporate world and the small business farmer, small businesses like Los Félix and Grassfed compared to a Sapphire Reserve,” said Thais Thiesen, Grossman’s partner and co-founder of Tiny Farm. “We can’t have one without the other. If we can find ways to work together more like this, it’s great because it’s good all around. It helps them become more human, these big corporate conglomerates, and it helps us do these kinds of things more easily and have the support from the big guys.”

That symbiosis is foundational to The Infatuation. Originally founded as a blog in 2009 by two music industry executives, its candid, opinionated restaurant coverage grew into a platform that eventually acquired the Zagat Guide from a neglectful Google. After Fast Company named it one of the world’s most innovative companies in 2019, JPMorgan Chase came calling in 2021. By then, The Infatuation was operating in 50 cities and had raised $33.5 million in equity funding before the acquisition.

Today, its writers and editors anonymously cover more than 1,500 new restaurants globally each year, organizing recommendations by destination from Accra to Amalfi to Tokyo. The platform integrates with OpenTable for the Sapphire Reserve Exclusive Tables program, where Under The Stars lived within the “Your Table, Reserved” series, one of 30-plus dining events planned this year across the country.

“We are trying to bring together, in the Sapphire Reserve program, great restaurants for our customers that are beloved, respected restaurants in their community,” Paul Needham, CEO of The Infatuation told me. “Places people want to go to, where those exclusive tables are really valuable. We want geographic coverage, different cuisines, different price points. Our ambition with the whole program nationwide is to find really great partners, like the Grassfed Culture people, who we can work with and introduce our customers to.”

The Infatuation’s Playbook For Brands That Want A Seat At The Table

“It always arises from those connections and from those stories that we’re building in parallel with ourselves, and our industry,” said Vargas. “And the ecosystems that we’re shaping within our hospitality business.” In this lives the entire playbook Chase, Grassfed Culture, and Tiny Farm have written together. For C-suite leaders wanting to implement this same playbook, here are the CliffsNotes:

1. Acquire intelligence before you acquire brands. The Infatuation spent 12 years earning editorial credibility before JPMorgan Chase acquired it and integrated that knowledge into the Sapphire Reserve program. Enterprise brands seeking entry into cultural conversations will find authenticity faster by acquiring a respected organization, then allowing it to retain independence after the deal.
2. Depth of relationship is a competitive moat. Grassfed Culture earned Under The Stars by spending four years demonstrating their value to Chase through Formula 1 lounges and Art Basel activations serving thousands of guests. By the time Chase asked them to create a dream event, “yes” was already the default answer to anything Grassfed Culture proposed. For CMOs building partnerships, the investment calculus improves when relationship depth is the primary metric.
3. Invest in your suppliers to make them part of your legend. Grassfed Culture put real money into Tiny Farm’s infrastructure before Roberto Grossman’s seven acres appeared on a Chase invitation. When Tiny Farm became the setting for Under The Stars, the story carried weight because the relationship preceded the audience. Grossman’s regenerative farming technique is why Grassfed Culture’s menus drew the attention of Chase’s dining experiences team.
4. Let the city tell you what it’s missing. Hackler didn’t open ZeyZey because live music venues were trending. Miami had none doing craft cocktails from scratch alongside Michelin-grade sourcing standards. So he built one. The Infatuation operates on the same logic, mapping geographic white space and cuisine gaps rather than chasing established demand.
5. Values travel when they’re structural. ”We feed the same way we feed at home. We feed our kids; we feed our families,” Restrepo Hackler said, accounting for how Grassfed Culture restaurants can boast Michelin recognition in multiple categories, a pioneering composting program, a music venue named for happiness in an indigenous Colombian language, and a seven-acre farm partnership whose harvest supplies their most compelling recipes. The common denominator is how their way of living is expressed through hospitality. The brands consumers defend are the ones doing things the hard way because they understand there’s no other way to do it right.

Ultimately, Chase cardholders are offered a parallel universe of culinary discovery, deploying The Infatuation’s street-level intelligence to introduce restaurants quietly reshaping American cities. For Grassfed Culture, that universe expands this week to Atlanta for the Skyline Soirée, a four-course dinner at FÜM with rooftop cocktails at Rabbit Ears, courtesy of Chase Sapphire Reserve.