DESTIHL has a motto: great food, great beer, great service.

The restaurant and brewery began in Normal, Ill., and opened another location in downtown Champaign at 301 Neil St., on the corner of Neil and Church streets, in early 2011.

Matt Potts, the CEO and Brewmaster of DESTIHL, knew before he opened his first restaurant that he would want to expand.

Potts was inspired after his first home brew in 1995.

“My inspiration was to pair craft beer with truly artisan food,” he said. “With all the big chain restaurants and mass-produced beer surrounding us, I thought the people deserved better.”

Currently, the two restaurants brew more than 50 different styles of beer at each location with almost 20 of them on tap. By brewing in small batches, DESTIHL can rotate beers more frequently.

“We brew more beers for our guests because we have a passion for brewing,” Potts said.

DESTIHL strives to provide its customers with an overall excellent experience, and in the process coined the term of a “gastrobrewpub.” Combining the British term “gastropub,” a high-quality dining pub, with a “brewpub,” a pub that specializes in brewing excellent beer, DESTIHL proudly provides both.

“As a gastrobrewpub, DESTIHL creatively combines and reinvents craft beer and full-flavor dishes from America’s melting pot …. (We have a) mission to fill our gastrobrewpubs with fun, energy and passion for great artisan food and beers,” Potts said.

Paige Babilla, sophomore in Media, enjoys going to DESTIHL with her family when they come down to visit.

“I obviously love it,” she said. “I’ve gone there five or six times.”

She admires the trendy, modern feeling that comes from DESTIHL.

“It’s kind of darker. It has more of a mellow atmosphere with lots of golds and dark browns and blacks,” Babilla said. “It’s very relaxed, but at the same time, you can’t just wear a T-shirt and shorts. It’s a little more trendy, a little more modern.”

When asked her favorite dishes, Babilla knew her answer well.

“Tomato and bread salad, stone-oven pizza … and the fresh berry napoleon for desert,” she said.

She commented on the wide variety of choices at DESTIHL, saying that everyone she brought to the restaurant always found something to enjoy.

Brian Durkin, the manager of DESTIHL’s Champaign location, strives to maintain an atmosphere of both sophistication and fine dining.

“We want to have an upbeat but kind of down-to-earth feeling — kind of a fine-dining feeling but not pompous,” Durkin said.

DESTIHL also has another goal: to stay green and boost the local economy. The restaurant uses as many local businesses as possible and currently has 25 local farms on contract. For each DESTIHL location, the restaurant supports as many local businesses as it can while also incorporating organic products.

“If local businesses are thriving, then you’re thriving,” Durkin said. “If you’re always shipping your money off to New York or wherever … it doesn’t help the community at that point.”

In addition, DESTIHL avoids wasting its food and beer, and in the process makes its dishes all that more interesting.

“We try to incorporate beer as much as we can into the food-making process,” Durkin said. Their creations include classic beer-battered dishes and stranger stuff like stout gravy and ice cream made of stout beer.

DESTIHL also works to put on beer dinners, four-course meals surrounded by a central theme. The last beer dinner’s theme was “Down to Earth” in honor of Earth Day. A staff member then talked about the food and beer the staff crafted especially for the event.

“It’s not stuff that we normally serve on our menu at all,” Durkin said. “The beers are beers that we sometimes serve, but they’re specialty beers made just for the beer dinner, and the food is also specially made.”

Each beer dinner has 16 seats, which sell for $55 each and are usually sold out a month in advance.

“This is the best way for us to show off the marriage of great food and great beer,” Potts said.