Geoff Hauschild

Andrea Shackelford was the chef of a neighborhood Italian restaurant when she and the owner decided to open a new place—a place where she’d cook using produce they’d grow themselves. The one catch: Shackelford had to learn how to pull it off. Having just a backyard vegetable garden on her farming résumé, she enrolled in a 12-week master gardener program. In 2015, she and Restaurateur Rick Wells sowed a half-acre farm in Lucas to supply her new restaurant, Harvest Seasonal Kitchen in McKinney.

Erin Lettera: How did you develop Refined Hospitality Concepts? Robert Hall: I have a partner, a local real estate icon. He loves hospitality. Ten years ago we had a conversation about restaurants, hospitality, catering, and the future of brick and mortars and where we thought they would go. With all the new online technologies and everything, it seemed like a shift from chef-named concepts to bigger concepts.