At FarmBar in Tulsa, chef de cuisine Caleb Mohr has spent the past year and a half turning eight-course collaboration dinners into a showcase for both Oklahoma farmers and some of the country's most decorated chefs. The restaurant at 1740 S. Boston Ave. built what it calls Tulsa's first dedicated, regularly scheduled chef collaboration series run by a single restaurant, and this year's lineup pulled in visiting talent ranging from a Chicago Michelin-star winner to an Indigenous culinary icon.
Mohr took over as FarmBar's chef de cuisine in March 2025, a role that has him overseeing purchasing, labor and menu execution while developing dishes alongside the kitchen team, according to TulsaPeople Magazine. He and his team, which includes cooks Sarah Malum, Amara Gray, Nick Atkinson and Christian Wieczorek, select the visiting chefs for each dinner and cook alongside them once they arrive. FarmBar has described its philosophy simply as wanting guests to feel welcomed, seen, at home, safe, fed and loved, per the magazine's reporting.
His path to FarmBar's kitchen didn't start with a knife. Mohr enrolled at the University of Central Oklahoma in 2014 to study biomedical engineering before leaving and beginning culinary school at Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology in Okmulgee in 2018, graduating that December, according to Oklahoma State University. He also spent time working in retail before committing to the kitchen full time, per TulsaPeople's account.
A Michelin Detour Through Rural France
After OSUIT, Mohr trained under chef Amélie Darvas at Äponem l'Auberge du Presbytère in Vailhan, France, a Michelin-starred restaurant built inside a 17th-century presbytery and known for hyper-local, vegetable-forward cooking. Oklahoma State University reports that Äponem earned its Michelin star within six months of opening in 2018. Mohr joined FarmBar in March 2023, bringing that training with him before stepping into the chef de cuisine role two years later.
That international pedigree now shapes a dinner series designed around what FarmBar has called an exchange of ideas rooted in Oklahoma agriculture. The restaurant sources 90 to 95 percent of its ingredients locally, per TulsaPeople, a figure that lines up with Oklahoma's agricultural scale — the state counts more than 70,300 farms across 32.9 million acres, with 91% of beef operations individually family-owned, according to the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture. The state's certified organic farm count also jumped 79% between 2017 and 2022, rising from 29 to 52 operations, per the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture cited by Farm Flavor.
National Names Cook Beside Local Talent
The guest list has ranged widely in scale and origin. FarmBar hosted Jake Potashnick of Chicago's Feld, a restaurant that earned a Michelin Star in late 2025 before Potashnick went on to win the 2026 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes that June. The restaurant also welcomed Potawatomi chef Loretta Barrett Oden, described by TulsaPeople as an Indigenous chef and advocate, whose cookbook Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine was published in 2023 and who serves as consulting chef for Thirty Nine Restaurant at Oklahoma City's First Americans Museum.
Other dinners stayed closer to home. FarmBar hosted Bradley Dry, a Tulsa-based Cherokee chef and forager, along with Erik Fabrizius and Garrett Lewis of Tulsa's Old Dog and chef Jesse Gomez from Oklahoma City. Joel Bein and Amanda Simcoe of The Meat and Cheese Show, the Route 66 cheese shop and supper club the pair opened in late 2021, are set to present a special meal at FarmBar on Tuesday. Mohr told TulsaPeople that fall collaborations will lean toward more local Tulsa chefs and will feel less formal and more laid-back for guests than earlier dinners in the series.
Growing the Menu, Course by Course
FarmBar has already expanded a guest's meal from five courses to 10 over the run of the series, though collaboration dinners typically land around eight courses. As the 2026 season wound down, Mohr said he's looking ahead to autumn ingredients including Arkansas figs, Georgia candy roaster squash and chestnuts, and he hopes to cure Texas olives for use in a dirty martini. At home, his own cooking runs simpler — chicken kiev and slow-cooked comfort food, he told the magazine.
The collaboration series arrives as FarmBar's national profile keeps climbing. The restaurant, founded in 2020 by Lisa Becklund and Linda Ford — who also run regional Italian spot il Seme, specialty grocery Cow & Cabbage, and the original Living Kitchen Farm & Bar in Depew — was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Restaurant in January 2026, according to Tulsa Flyer. That nod built on Becklund's 2025 finalist status for Outstanding Chef and earlier semifinalist nominations in 2020 and 2023. Ford handles logistics for the chef collaboration dinners, freeing Mohr and his kitchen to focus on the food itself.
FarmBar isn't alone in putting Tulsa on the national culinary map. Country Bird Bakery's Cat Cox won the 2025 James Beard Award for Best Pastry Chef, and Becklund and Ford's il Seme picked up its own Best Chef semifinalist nomination in 2024, according to Experience Tulsa. For Mohr, the collaboration dinners are less about chasing accolades than about the exchange itself — cooking, as TulsaPeople described it, with care for farmers, fellow cooks and guests alike.
