CHEF PROFILES | MISSOURI
How Chef Philip Day Built Root in Augusta—and Made Time for Dinner
The two-time Beard semifinalist built Root Food + Wine from farm suppers, Missouri game, French technique, and a decision to be home for his children.
By Eric Barton | Aug. 28, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Before Philip Day learned French sauces or ran restaurant kitchens, he was a small boy trying to help his grandmother decorate wedding cakes.
Grandma Ruth was a formidable home cook, known in the family for fried chicken and casseroles, but desserts were her specialty. She ran a side business baking wedding cakes, and Day found his way into the work whenever she permitted it. “I was probably more in the way than I was helping,” he says, “but it never seemed to bother her.”
Decades later, Day has built a career by returning to those beginnings. At Root Food + Wine, his intimate restaurant in Augusta, Missouri, he cooks the food of the Midwest with the precision he learned in some of St. Louis’ best kitchens. Since opening in 2021, Root has been named Sauce Magazine’s best new restaurant, and Day has twice reached the James Beard Awards semifinalist list for Best Chef: Midwest, in 2024 and 2026. The recognition has made Root a destination, but its success begins with something less easily measured: The restaurant feels unmistakably like the person who created it.
Day with wife Jamie, Waylon, and Elsie
Day grew up just outside St. Louis and went to the Wentzville School District. Weekends often meant trips north to see his grandparents. His father bought hunting property near Bevier, and Day spent much of his childhood there fishing and chasing game.
Those years still appear on his menus. Venison, quail, pheasant, trout, and Missouri produce help define the menu at Root. They form a cuisine built from Day’s own geography. He picked up the technique to express it during two decades in professional kitchens, including at Niche, Café de France, and The Rack House, where he served as executive chef. One of his most important mentors was the late Marcel Keraval, the Brittany-born chef behind Café de France, which spent more than two decades as a fine-dining bastion in St. Louis.
Keraval taught Day butchery, pastry, fish fabrication, menu development, and the disciplined preparation behind classical French cooking. He also taught him that “the sauce is the gasoline of the kitchen.” The larger lesson, however, was to cook from an honest sense of place.
“One of the biggest things that Marcel taught me was to be authentic, be who you are in your cuisine,” Day says. Keraval proudly served the oysters, lobster, and scallops that recalled Brittany. “So this is why at Root, we focus on midwest cuisine with game meats and local produce because it represents me, just as Marcel did at Cafe de France.”
By March 2020, Day was executive chef of The Rack House and Tompkins. The work demanded the familiar long hours, leaving little time with his wife, Jamie, and their young children, Waylon and Elsie. Then the pandemic closed the restaurants and, for once, Day was home.
The interruption clarified what he had been missing. He wanted to remain a chef, but he also wanted dinner with his family and a seat at his children’s sporting events.
During that uncertain year, friends Ryan and Darlene Smith invited him to cook dinners at Lucky Dog Farm, their organic farm in Wentzville. Day had already used their produce at The Rack House and Tompkins. Serving tasting menus in the field allowed him to put the farm at the center of the meal—and proved that diners would follow him there. More dinners followed at Randal Oaks in Augusta.
A restaurant was never the plan. Then a former coffee shop inside an old house on Walnut Street became available. Day and Jamie had no business plan, little financial backing, and spectacularly bad timing. They took it anyway.
“We built our own tables, painted the entire inside ourselves, did and continue to do our own yard work, and started with the bare minimum,” he says.
They also opened Root only three days a week, preserving the family life the shutdown had allowed Day to discover. Five years later, the restaurant remains on that schedule. The Days have now purchased the building.
Day hopes his children understand that the accolades arrived after years of work, patience, and sacrifice. He wants them to chase ambitions of their own, whether those lead to professional baseball, Olympic gymnastics, or a particular college.
Mostly, he wants them to remember what happened in that little house in Augusta, where their father built the tables, cooked the food of the woods and fields he knew as a boy, and finally made a restaurant fit the life he wanted. Day says, “I want both my children to be able to say, “‘My dad did it. So can I.’”
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