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Teah Benkoczy helps merge two restaurants into one award-winning eatery
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
FAIRFIELD – Teah Benkoczy co-owns the eatery Due South with her husband, Camp Boswell, one of several restaurant adventures the pair have undertaken.
Due South is located at 102 N. Second St. in Fairfield, which has hosted many restaurants in the past decade. Before Due South, the restaurant at that location was also owned by Benkoczy and Boswell, and was called Broth Lab 641. That was the second restaurant Benkoczy and Boswell started in Fairfield, with the first being Lunchbox Fairfield in the former Binghimon’s Caribbean Kitchen on North Fourth Street.
Benkoczy said she and Boswell decided it was best to merge Lunchbox Fairfield and Broth Lab into a new business with a new direction.
“We wanted to meet the market in a fuller way,” Benkoczy said. “We felt that Broth Lab was maybe a little too niche and maybe didn’t feel accessible to enough people, while with Lunchbox we felt that we were really able to meet the market so we weren’t catering to just one segment. That’s what we want to do, create an environment that the whole community can come and enjoy.”
The couple decided to accent Boswell’s strength and experience in Southern fine dining, and that’s how Due South was born. The restaurant has been a hit, and in April of 2024 it received the award for Restaurant of the Year from the Fairfield Area Chamber of Commerce.
“The food is definitely a level above what you would get at a basic café,” Benkoczy said. “We felt like we needed to capture the feeling of both businesses and what it was growing into as a combined unit, and Due South is what we landed on. We focus on American Southern food, but you see in our menu that there are sprinklings of Southeast Asian cuisine.”
Benkoczy’s role at the restaurant includes managing the front end, managing operations, and taking charge of the social media and marketing, while Boswell is in charge of overseeing the kitchen.
Throughout her career, Benkoczy has had the chance to explore other passions besides restaurants, such as massage therapy and fitness. She’s from Seattle originally, but spent part of her childhood in Fairfield, including a few years in high school. After high school, she started working in a restaurant while focusing on massage therapy in Seattle.
“In hindsight, my first and foremost passion was working with the human body, and that capacity changed over time from massage to fitness,” she said. “Restaurant ownership didn’t come along until my husband and I decided to go into business together, because he has been in the industry for much longer. He’s been a career chef for over 20 years.”
Benkoczy said she likes to help people feel better, and that’s why she got into fitness, starting with teaching classes at the studio Open Space, owned by Meghan Dowd. She started to home in on specifically cycling classes, which she led inside Iowa Dance Collective.
Benkoczy has stepped away from teaching fitness classes because she felt she had lost sight of her own self-care, and today she’s starting a new career path by studying psychology at Indian Hills Community College, and will soon transfer to the University of Iowa. Though she has retired from teaching fitness, she still owns a fitness studio in Asheville, North Carolina. That’s also where the couple started their first restaurant together when they opened Broth Lab there in 2019, but had to close it when the pandemic hit the following year.
When she’s not at the restaurant or studying for classes, Benkoczy likes to spend her free time gardening, knitting and hanging out with her family.
Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com
