Since 2017, chef Jordan Taylor has owned a burgeoning group of restaurants in the Sioux Falls area. At first glance, it may appear as if his life was a series of successful steps leading up to this point. His accomplishments, however, mask the struggle and personal perseverance that allowed him to get to this level of achievement in his life and career.

Taylor is a free-spirited man who never fails to make those around him laugh from his self-deprecating humor and humble nature. His 20 years in the culinary industry, however, consisted of trials and setbacks that could have ended his career at any point if he didn’t possess an unrelenting drive to perfect his craft and an unwavering confidence in his own creativity and skill.

Taylor grew up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He comes from a mixed-race family — his mother was Japanese while his father is white. Beyond the racial differences, his upbringing was shaped by the fact that his mother struggled with mental illness and his father’s experience as a loan shark. Eventually, the two split up.

“It wasn’t easy seeing my mom with schizophrenia,” Taylor said. “My parents got divorced when I was in high school, and I know it was for the best because they weren’t happy together.”

After the divorce his mother moved to Minneapolis while his father stayed in Sioux Falls. After high school, Taylor left home to attend college. He decided to pursue a degree in business. 

For his first year of college he attended Mankato State University. His stint there did not last for long, however, due to his grades. His courses associated with business, especially math, were starting to hinder his advancements in higher education. To find a solution to this situation, Taylor transferred to South Dakota State University in Brookings. Even at SDSU, the classes were still a struggle.

“I struggled in economics, as even the terms seemed like a foreign language to me,” Taylor said. “Even when I was getting tutoring from my professor, he got frustrated with me for saying ‘I don’t get it,’ and he responded with throwing his hands in the air saying, ‘I don’t know what to tell you.’”

After several years of struggle, he managed to complete his degree, and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he secured a job at a bank. His time in the banking industry was unfulfilling. He sensed that something was not right, and he wasn’t where he should be. His life seemed as if one were trying to force a square piece into a circle hole—Taylor was made for something different. 

After living day in and day out of the same routine, Taylor realized he appreciated cooking and decided to make that his career. So, he enrolled in culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu.

While his family has always been supportive of him and his decisions, his father was skeptical of his decision to pursue a career in the restaurant industry. His father accompanied him on a campus visit to Le Cordon Bleu. 

“I remember my dad looking at me in the waiting room and saying, ‘I don’t know if this is for you, you’re not really that creative,” Taylor said. 

This moment did create a feeling of doubt and ‘what am I doing with my life.’ However, it did not deter him from pursuing his dream.

“I learned a lot at Le Cordon Bleu, like knife skills and cooking techniques,” Taylor said. 

His new career, however, got off to a rough start. An Asian restaurant offered him a job and implied that he would be trained to eventually take on a role as a sushi chef. With a hopeful spirit, Taylor said yes to this opportunity.

The first day at this job entailed him prepping ingredients for food. The following day was a nightmare. The owner told him to clean out a grease pit at a new location they were opening. Typically, that job is intended for professional cleaners to take care of with the special equipment. Taylor, new to the industry, didn’t realize that. 

“I remember standing in this disgusting hole full of what smelled like shit,” Jordan said. “While most restaurants have a system for this grease, there’s was like a catacomb of gross, and just nasty stuff that I had to shovel.”

What made this job even more disheartening was that he never got paid and the owner never contacted him after he did the manual, repulsive work for that restaurant. 

Eventually, Taylor got hired at a restaurant which allowed him to start making money and he continued to work on his culinary skills. 

After about a year and a half of training at culinary school, he needed to execute an externship to complete his culinary certification. Rather than simply taking an externship that would satisfy the requirements of his certification, Taylor wanted to take risks and ‘go big, or go home.’ So, he told his adviser he wanted to work at Herbfarm. This restaurant, at the time, was one of most critically acclaimed restaurants in the country, but that fact did not scare him away. 

“Maybe I was just cocky or more ambitious when I was younger, but I told [my adviser] to get me the paperwork to apply at Herbfarm,” Taylor said. “They told me just to apply then, and so I did, and I got the externship.”

This restaurant was open only four days a week and utilized fresh food sourced locally. Each item of produce was handpicked from their own gardens, including vegetables, fruits, and edible flowers. This experience showed Taylor that using fresh items can emphasize flavors that can elevate a meal from good to great. It also showed him that the effort required to prep and the process from ingredients from dirt to the plate was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. 

“When I was working there, it wasn’t easy work,” Taylor said. “I remember being in the gardens picking a certain amount of ingredients in the hot June sun and counting how many of each item we would be using in the dishes we would serve that night.”

Having the experience at Herbfarm on his CV opened doors for him in the Portland area. Taylor was able to work at nearly any restaurant he applied to. He was making decent money working in Portland, and he loved his apartment as it was close to downtown and he was in long-term relationship, yet unbeknownst to him at the time, his life was changing.

Restaurant work is not easy and many in the industry deal with the stress by blowing off steam at the end of a long shift. It was high stress and a ‘go, go, go’ mentality. Soon, Taylor was joining his colleagues in the industry. As soon as he got off work, he immediately went straight to partying, drinking and drugs – only to get up and do the same routine the next day.

This lifestyle started to have an impact on his relationship with his girlfriend and on his health. 

“It was a gross lifestyle,” Jordan said. “You work all day and smell like food and are sweating and then when you get off of work, you are still sweating and just going hard on alcohol and drugs.”

The environment of the Pacific Northwest did not help either due to the rainy conditions. 

“I remember just getting out of work and it just raining and being dark,” Taylor said. 

As this viscous lifecycle continued, Taylor got a call that his mother had become very ill. He moved to Minneapolis for a temporary period, living with a close friend to be there for his mother until she eventually passed away. 

This rude awakening made him realize that life is short and that he wanted to be close to his father and to not work for someone, but to own his own business. This reflection on his life and career was validated when his friend from high school reached out to him. 

This friend – Barry Putzke – was also living in Portland. They stayed connected throughout the years in various ways, including playing fantasy football. Putzke asked Taylor if he would meet with him at Old Chicago to watch some football games and to talk about fantasy football and drink cheap beer. As ironic as it was for Taylor to eat out at a chain restaurant, he thought it would be a fun time. So, with that willing ‘yes’ to joining his friend marked the night that his world would start to change again. 

“It’s kind of funny how it all happened,” Taylor said. “He called me and was like, ‘You want to meet out at Old Chicago?’” 

The two sat together eating nachos and talking about football. Putzke mentioned that he was planning to move back home to Sioux Falls as his wife had just given birth to their child and wanted to settle down closer to family. He then looked at Taylor and offered to be his business partner in starting a restaurant in Sioux Falls. He knew that Taylor encompassed the skills to create food that would be special to that region and believed they could start something together that would be successful. 

“So, [that night] we each had about six beers and that’s when he asked me to do it,” Taylor said. “He collected the idea over Italian nachos and Miller Lights.”

Taylor realized that this partnership offered the chance to do something special in his life and career. With his mother recently passing, he knew he wanted to be closer to his father who was diagnosed with cancer. So, that night he took the chance and decided to leave his life behind in Portland and move back to his roots in South Dakota. 

“My mom passed and my dad, at the time, was also struggling with health and cancer,” Taylor said. “So, I knew that would be the time to move back.”

This dream soon turned into reality, but the hard work of starting a business began.

“I said [to Barry], if we are going to make this work, we are going to need to do a couple more things, or at least something,” Taylor said. “At the time I was 40 and I should be making at least the same as what I was making before moving here.”

The comfortable lifestyle that he had experienced before moving back was no longer. He was just getting by and realized that in deciding to start this business, he risked everything. Nevertheless, Taylor set out to create a restaurant and menu that, if successful, would change the Sioux Falls dining scene. It was a tremendous risk, but Taylor created a continually changing menu based on utilizing local produce that was in season, just like what they did at his externship. 

 “South Dakota is known for its agriculture,” Taylor said. “We partnered with farmers and use fresh produce in our kitchens that we prep. We don’t use Sysco and or anything like that for our ingredients.”

The concept struggled to take off at first. Each month, Taylor experimented with new sandwiches that went through a meticulous testing process before they made their way onto the menu. He was putting in over 100 hours per week as the executive chef, only to be faced with a dearth of customers, including many that failed to grasp what he was attempting to do.

“There’s a reason we use a chalkboard menu at Bread and Circus,” Taylor said. “We are using fresh products and always creating new parts to our menu offering something different all the time.”

Opening the doors to Bread and Circus did not take too long, but winning over the community became a hindrance. The restaurant is in downtown Sioux Falls, where people who eat out often avoid due to the effort of parking and walking. In addition to this, people were not too keen on the symbolism of flags that presented as ‘too progressive.’ This change was starting to uproot old ideas and encourage a change in perspective in the area. 

His food was successful in drawing a young crowd open to change and trying new food and ingredients, but that was not a large enough consumer base to keep the doors open. This lack of customers led to a pay cut which created a tension large enough that Taylor almost quit.

“I remember I could barely pay for a car payment and didn’t have any extra money to just spend,” Taylor said. “I was 40 and I thought I should be better financially than I was before I moved.”

Taylor told Putzke that if this business was going to continue, they needed to start to expand in order to diversify their business and hopefully make additional money from another location and restaurant concept.

“I told him that what we were doing, we needed to change,” Taylor said.

This led to them opening a second restaurant called Pizza Cheeks. This second restaurant began to help with the financial burden. At the same time, Bread and Circus began to get recognition around town and expand its customer base. 

That success soon led to national attention. Guy Fieri, the Food Network TV host of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” showcased Taylor’s restaurant for the South Dakota episode. Fieri enjoyed the food so much that he asked his camera crew to pick up more sandwiches for the flight home. The crew still reaches out to Taylor saying how much they loved his food and appreciated his restaurant. This exposure took his business from a local hotspot to a place where people from across the country come to try his food.

“It was cool to have Guy come to the restaurant,” Taylor said. “It definitely helped get us known more.”

Even though the praise for his restaurants started to gain traction, his innovative methods and progressive nature has presented issues for people who are not willing to adapt and expand their views. 

“We get these nasty comments on social media or just comments from people in general who don’t like change saying that my food isn’t good or asking, ‘who does he think he is just trying to change things,’” Taylor said. “It’s frustrating because they are hating on my food without even giving it a chance, and rather than just minding their own business they just try to tear it down.”

Instead of letting these negative comments hinder his growth, he uses it as motivation to continue his success. 

After opening his first two restaurants, he continued his ambitious drive. Following several requests or comments on how he should cater his food for events, he decided to start a catering company. Taylor named this business En Place Catering, and it now offers food for all types of events ranging from weddings to special events. 

Following En Place Catering’s launch, Taylor had the opportunity to partner in a new business in Pierre, South Dakota, which would be a seasonal bar and grill overlooking the Missouri river. Boat House Bar & Grill launched in the summer of 2022. Its successful launch added a fourth location to his expanding culinary empire.

Taylor has not slowed down in expanding what he has to offer in his culinary expertise. This year, Taylor will open Perch Neighborhood Kitchen. Unlike Pizza Cheeks and Bread and Circus, Pearch will be a sit-down style restaurant with servers taking orders from tables. 

“Pearch is going to be in the middle of a neighborhood,” Taylor said. “This is definitely a unique location.”

Taylor’s success did not happen overnight, nor did it come easy. Rather it entailed a journey of self-detection, drive and hard work. Through it all, Taylor continues to express his unique culinary creativity and skill, and in the process is reshaping the South Dakota foodscape.