East Bay Chefs Talk About Sourcing
This article is scheduled to appear in the January issue of "Edible East Bay Magazine."When it comes time to order essential products at the average, conventional, mainstream restaurant, the chef or the manager generally turns to one of the industry’s large food service distributors to fulfill all of his restaurant’s needs. Companies like Aramark, US Foods, and Sysco have built their respective empires by delivering a wide range of products that meet as many of their customer’s needs as possible. Thus, the chef in question could call Sysco and procure nearly everything that he requires, from frying pans to canned goods, from and aprons to produce, from mops to meats, from urinal cakes to frozen tiramisu, from tableware to oils, vinegars, and sauces. Not only is this service convenient, these products are also competitively priced.
This scenario, where a firm’s needs are met with a great deal of convenience and at an acceptable price, is a businessperson’s dream. However, this dream comes with its own share of consequences. The streamlining of the food service distribution industry has come largely at the expense of flavor and freshness. Sure, the chef can get the food quickly and easily, but the ingredients are both lifeless and soulless.
Through this system, chefs in Portland, Maine can access the same food as chefs in Portland, Oregon. Since the machine is built for long-range distribution, the products that propel it must be able to retain their shape and attributes while moving through various modes of transportation. As a result, the machine doesn’t deal with delicate varieties of produce or sensitive types of cheese or herbs.
Thus, despite the fact that the United States has a great deal of both ethnic and agricultural diversity, its cuisine has become highly homogenous. Restaurants in far-flung locales like Key West, Florida and Seattle, Washington can feature identical menus, often using the same ingredients, or even serve the same pre-cooked meals.
Here in the Bay Area, there is a much different tradition of sourcing at play. Stop into the kitchen at Chez Panisse, Café Fanny, Picante, or Pizzeria Gioia in North Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto to see a series of chefs who source their products according to a much different set of criteria. One of the golden means of this philosophy, which has its roots at Chez Panisse, is to buy flavorful food as close to one’s restaurant as possible.
On Hopkins Street, one block up the hill from Monterey Market, you can find pizza by the slice at Pizzeria Gioia. I first ate at Pizzeria Gioia shortly after it opened in 2004. Chef Will Gioia crafts his pizza from high quality, local products. I must admit that I was disarmed by the quality of his pizza because I had a bias against by-the-slice pizza for some reason. However, my first slice from Gioia’s was outrageously delicious and, many return trips later, I have yet to be disappointed.
Gioia and I were recently standing on the sidewalk in front of the Pizzeria discussing the chef’s sourcing strategies when we were politely interrupted by an approaching stranger. “Mr. Paparazzi,” the stranger intoned, “if you are writing a story about Will, please don’t forget to mention me: I hold the record for the most reuses of a pizza box at Pizzeria Gioia.” The stranger was Paul Goettlich, a New York native and longtime Berkeley resident, and an unabashed pizza purist, who has used the same pizza box to bring home 32 of Gioia’s cheese pies.
Goettlich is the living embodiment of both New York City and Berkeley. He is both an environmental activist and a pizza fanatic. He is not afraid to share his opinions, which are often firmly held. “Will’s pies are the best west of New York City because he only uses the best ingredients.” The message was as poignant as it was well timed. Good pizza is, at its heart exceedingly simple. Gioia’s pizza reflects many of the tenants of the progressive food movement in the East Bay: buy quality ingredients, strive to find the best flavors possible, buy local as much as possible, and strive to form productive, symbiotic, long-term relationships with your suppliers.
“As a working chef,” Gioia states, “it all comes down to quality, flavor, and the integrity and the sustainability of my source. I get the best product that I can afford from the best people I can find. I use Giusto organic flour from South San Francisco, and Fatted Calf meats from Berkeley wherever possible. In terms of my cheeses, I buy Grande mozzarella and ricotta from Wisconsin because it is the best quality product that I can get. It is twice the price of traditional pizza cheese but it is easily four times better.” Gioia sells his slices for between $2.50 and $3.00, a reasonable price indeed for pizza of this quality. He is somewhat constrained by his prices, however. “I have to use a higher-end, industrial pepperoni that I get from Los Angeles,” Gioia explains, “I would love to be able to buy an artisan one, but I would have to charge $5 a slice for that and that just won’t work.”
At Café Fanny, Chef Kara Dombrofsky, the General Manager, counts herself fortunate to have access to the freshest local products imaginable.
Café Fanny offers breakfast and lunch and is situated between Acme Bread Company and Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant on San Pablo Avenue, in Berkeley. The most common ingredient on the menu, the bread, comes from Acme while the wines come from Kermit Lynch. Most of the other ingredients used at Café Fanny come from a network of local farmers or from the local farmer’s markets.
“Our primary focus is on sourcing the freshest, best tasting ingredients from the best local farmers that we can find,” Dombrofsky explains. “As the organic movement has become increasingly corporate, we have increased our focus on sourcing locally as much as possible because we know what we are getting and we know who is growing it.” However, the menu requires some ingredients that may be out of season locally. “We have to maintain the signature items on our menu,” explains James Maser, one of Café Fanny’s owners, “so we have suppliers who can get us our staple ingredients year-round.” Maser’s primary focus these days when it comes to sourcing ingredients is on finding the best possible flavors. “It really doesn’t matter how the produce was grown or how the ingredient was produced if it doesn’t taste good,” he explains, “our customers want to eat food that tastes great.”
This philosophy resonates strongly throughout Maser’s other restaurant, Picante Cocina Mexicana, a culinary gem located on 6th Street near Gilman Street. Essentially, Maser needs certain flavors to remain true to his vision for Picante; a celebration of real Mexican cuisine. I spent the past five years working on a farm in Tehama County where I was exposed to authentic Mexican food, subsisting primarily on tortilla-based meals. To me the tortilla is everything in Mexican cuisine and the thing that really floored me at Picante was the excellence of their handmade tortillas. Usually, corn tortillas have a mealy texture and are somewhat tough. Picante’s, however, are supple and smooth.
I mentioned this to Maser and he explained that the variety of corn used in the tortilla is integral to its flavor and quality. “That may sound obvious,” he stated, “but most industrial tortillas in this country are made using the wrong varieties of corn. We have our corn grown in New Mexico because we can’t get the varieties we want any closer to home. A few other key ingredients come from Mexico, like hot chocolate, chiles, spices and herbs, but most everything else is sourced locally.”
The local sourcing movement is generally credited to Chez Panisse, the pantheon of California cuisine located on Shattuck Avenue between Cedar and Vine Streets. Thus, one would expect that 30 years of practice might have removed all of the obstacles from the process. However, Cal Peternell, chef at the Chez Panisse Café, explains that there are inherent challenges to this method. However, it is not without its difficulties. “There is a reason why most restaurants buy from the big distributors,” he explains, “ordering from individual farmers takes a great deal of time. I spend one day a week ordering and talking to farmers, but it is one of the best parts of my job.”
One of the most logistically challenging products for Peternell to source these days is meat. “We only buy grass-fed and we prefer to buy organic. We used to buy all of our meat from the Niman Ranch but we like to buy directly from the farmer as much as possible and their current model precludes us from doing that. These days we have to buy our beef by the half cow, butchering it ourselves. The biggest challenge that this poses is finding a use for all of the lesser cuts since cows are not made entirely of prime cuts.”
Thus, after building his menus in order to use as much of the cow as possible, Peternell distributes the lesser cuts, usually in ground form, to other restaurants in the local area. “During baseball season, we can usually sell a good deal of the ground beef to Traci Des Jardines at the Acme Chophouse at Pac Bell Park. If there is any meat left over, our chefs usually buy it to use at home; everybody loves a good, clean burger.” Despite the occasional inconvenience posed by sourcing directly from local farmers, Peternell is adamant that Chez Panisse’s sourcing philosophy makes all the difference for both the chefs and the customers. “We love the fact that we get to create all of our cuisine from these incredibly fresh, local ingredients,” he exclaims, “that makes our jobs some much more fulfilling then if we were working with institutional product.”
For all of the chefs that I interviewed, locally sourced food allows them to exhibit flavors and textures that their customers may never before have experienced. This act of discovery is not only a formative experience for the customer, it is also an enriching one for the chef. Although there has been an explosion of franchise restaurants in the past two decades, there has also been a strong reaction to the homogenized food that chain restaurants offer by both customers and chefs. Increasing numbers of chefs want to exhibit the unique flavors of local and seasonal cuisine and an increasing number of Americans are being turned on to flavor by chefs who have taken the time to build relationships with local farmers. The future for these farmer-chef collaborations is bright and will serve as a beacon to those who have yet to experience true flavor.
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 10:06 PM
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