by Holly Hughes
The Purist’s Dilemma
Local has achieved a status unthinkable to many of its earliest adherents, a fact that causes some of them, such as civil-rights warriors or women’s-rights advocates, to wax nostalgic over their progress even as they lament that local doesn’t mean as much as it once did.
When she opened Cashion’s Eat Place in 1995, Ann Cashion says, she took her cues in the kitchen from what her purveyors had on hand, buying whole animals and butchering them herself. The off-cuts were troubling to diners; they wanted the chops. They were dismayed at paying top dollar for something they considered scraps, and they couldn’t understand her capriciousness—why she kept yanking the chops from the menu.
Cashion is a supporter of Bev Eggleston, who has so often been described as patron saint of the local-food movement that he himself invokes the term, albeit mockingly, in conversation. Eggleston was featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and there are seemingly as many mentions of his name on menus in Washington as there are beet-and-goat-cheese salads. As recently as five years ago, EcoFriendly Foods, Eggleston’s company, sold only whole animals to chefs, but because of growing demand, he recently made parts available to his 50 or so clients from Virginia to New York, having decided “we can’t live by our ideals as this point.”
He explains: “I’m not as eco-friendly as I would like to be. I wouldn’t even call us sustainable—I’d call us resourceful.” He uses the analogy of a relationship, citing the compromises necessary to keep a connection going, and says compromise is a reality for many of his clients, too.
Many chefs want to “do the right thing,” Eggleston says, but they’re under pressure from their bosses who “want to fly the flag of local,” yet they bristle at the increase in food costs. Under those conditions, it’s easier to “just buy the parts and never even consider the whole animal and what it can do for you.”
Cashion suggests this is simply the new reality. The new local. And though it represents progress on the one hand—more high-quality products are on menus than ever before, and that, she says, “improves life for everyone”—on the other hand she thinks something is definitely missing.
What is that?
She pauses for a long moment, then launches into an elegant and impassioned statement of the local ideal, of the give-and-take between chef and farmer, the sense of mutual dependence, the idea that a chef might allow herself to be inspired by the products that arrive at the back door each day, that what hits the table later that night is inconceivable without the input and inspiration of the farmer. Patrick O’Connell, chef at the Inn at Little Washington, a sumptuous respite in the Virginia hinterlands, is even more pointed in lamenting what has been lost.
He attributes the popularity of local to our almost insatiable hunger, in this plastic, commodified culture, for something real and authentic, uncorrupted by corporations. It is, he says, a sad sign of what the past few decades have wrought. The job of the restaurant is to recognize this spiritual hunger. To feed souls as well as stomachs.
“First it was give me something good to eat,” he says. “Then it was give me something good to eat and entertain me. Then it was give me something good to eat and take me somewhere I’ve never been. Now it’s prove to me that there is some hope left in the world. Give me a respite from the misery of this world. Let this meal be a sanctuary.”
I tell him that sounds like an awful lot to ask of anything, let alone a restaurant.
It is a lot to ask, he says, but isn’t this very notion of going beyond embedded in the promise of local, the idea of connecting diners to something larger than themselves? Situating them in time and place? Delivering them to the spiritual?
It seems to pain him, I say, that more chefs and restaurateurs don’t regard local with his level of existential seriousness.
“The kind of buzzy stuff that’s going on now, I find it kind of tedious and kind of depressing, to be quite honest,” he says. “It’s contributing to the loss of a sense of place rather than accentuating a sense of place if every restaurant in Washington, DC, has lamb from the Shenandoah.”
There follows a lengthy disquisition about chefs who mistake putting out high-quality ingredients on a plate for cooking—“the elevation of those ingredients, through learned technique, into something superlative.”
He interrupts himself to say he isn’t arguing that the current iteration of local isn’t “a good idea for the entire culture and deserving of support.”
No?
He sighs. “No. But part of the tragedy of American culture is that we cheapen everything.”
A Glimpse of the Future, Part One
The man who, perhaps more than any other, makes me want to believe in the potential of local is Michael Babin. As founder of the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, Babin presides over ten restaurants including Evening Star Cafe, Vermilion, Birch & Barley, ChurchKey, and the new Bluejacket.
The most prominent name in Babin’s growing stable is Tony Chittum, the former chef at Vermilion (he’s now at the soon-to-reopen Iron Gate Inn, in Dupont Circle) whom many regard as the most passionate, committed supporter of local in our area.
Prior to Chittum’s arrival in 2007, Vermilion was a middling restaurant with no discernible focus. Chittum gave it an identity, establishing it as a showcase of the best products from the Chesapeake and the Shenandoah. And while local and artisanal might have become trendy, Chittum’s simple, soulful dishes were most assuredly not.
Whether Chittum’s arrival spurred Babin to embrace local to the extent he eventually did or Babin would have drifted in that direction anyway is hard to know. But few restaurateurs are more involved in local than he is, and Babin often cites Chittum as inspiration.
One morning last summer, I drove out with Babin to tour a pet project of his, the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food & Agriculture, a nonprofit operation that manages a small farm near Mount Vernon. It hadn’t rained in two weeks, and the crops looked desiccated in the triple-digit heat. Something called “farm camp” was in session; grade-schoolers were learning about crop rotation and—in what sounded like a parody of an urbanite’s idea of camp—making pesto.
Arcadia isn’t a new idea. Clyde’s Restaurant Group runs a farm in Loudoun County. EatWell operates one in La Plata, Maryland. But Arcadia is different, if only because Babin envisions it as something more than a steady source of fresh, local ingredients for his restaurants.
“The farm isn’t here to feed the restaurants,” he told me. “The restaurants exist to support the farm.” Babin is boyish and intense and has the manner of a perpetual grad student, curious and alert to new ideas. A big-city restaurant owner with his own farm on a historic piece of property is a ready-made storyline for a TV show or magazine spread, but it was clear to me that Farm as Symbol held little interest for him.
Thinking he might aid the cause of local by making it more accessible, Babin bought a school bus last year, refitted it with coolers, and had it painted green. The Mobile Market rolled out in May. The bus is loaded up every morning with vegetables and fruits from Arcadia and makes stops five days a week in nine neighborhoods in DC, Maryland, and Virginia that are considered food deserts, lacking the grocery stores and markets of more affluent neighborhoods. Babin called it a “crying need.”
What was preoccupying him when I met him was the idea of a large “food hub,” a distribution center that would enable more farmers to get their products to more restaurants, and to do so more efficiently. There are more than a dozen of these hubs in Virginia and a few in Maryland. Babin has begun thinking of creating a vast network out of them.
The more forward-thinking members of the movement regard this next-step networking as essential to making good on the enormous promise of local.
Bev Eggleston hopes they’ll work toward what he calls “a parallel food system.”
“We don’t think we can take down Big Agriculture,” Eggleston says. “We used to be that naive; we used to think that was possi
ble. But an alternative transportation system—you can use the analogy of the Beltway. We want to take the pressure off the Beltway, all that traffic. So you have mass transit, you have rail, you have bikes. When farmers are really organized and collaborate, that’s what you want. It’s not about local; it’s about regional and logistical ability. Local isn’t moving fast enough for where we need to go. We’re moving toward the idea of systems that work versus where things came from.”
A food hub, Babin told me, would go some way toward fulfilling that hope. It might even, he said, help bring local out of the realm of the privileged few.
We were standing on a sloping patch of grass that overlooked one end of the property; he gazed beyond a ridge of trees toward a 130-acre stretch of land that he hoped at some point to buy and convert to farmland. I said he didn’t sound like a restaurateur or a businessman; he sounded like a social worker who, having achieved a breakthrough with one client, takes on an entire neighborhood.
“People think local is the answer,” he said. “It’s really the beginning of the answer.”
A Glimpse of the Future, Part Two
Mention the word “local” and the image that most often leaps to mind is a farmers market stocked with ripe produce. Or a chef stomping through a farm to pick his own vegetables and herbs for that night’s dinner. It most assuredly isn’t a diner, especially not a diner with 15 locations—a chain, the seeming antithesis of the movement toward artisanal, fresh, and organic.
A decade ago, I never imagined I’d one day tout the virtues of Silver Diner, let alone hold it up as a symbol of Doing the Right Thing. But times have changed. More to the point: Silver Diner has changed.
From June to July last year, I visited the Greenbelt location of Silver Diner four times for dinner. Among the ten-plus meals I eat out every week, these didn’t stand out as particularly memorable—they weren’t Culinary Experiences—but I was struck by how much better they were than they needed to be. They were certainly better than what I remembered of the chain some years back, before cofounder Ype Von Hengst overhauled the operation in 2010.
He began sourcing eggs and milk from Amish country—Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He switched to grass-fed, hormone-free beef and nitrate-free sausage and even added local, dry-aged bison from Monkton, Maryland. Local wines aren’t fixtures on menus at many three- and four-star restaurants, yet Silver Diner carries four. There are local beers, too. The last of my four meals included two soft-shell crabs from Crisfield, Maryland, that had been battered and fried and served with a chunky tomato-and-basil salad.
Why make such sweeping changes when no one expects a diner to be anything but a diner? Why attempt such an about-face when there’s no necessity?
Von Hengst disagrees. He’s vehement. There is a necessity. An urgent necessity.
“I want us to be in business for another 25 years,” Von Hengst says. “This is not a fad, this local. Everyone’s going to have to get with the program. This is how we’re all eating now.”
In the first year of his revamp, when he eliminated 35 percent of his old menu, Silver Diner spent an extra million dollars on food, and Von Hengst worried that it might take a few years to attract the customers he needed to sustain the new model. He has since raised prices slightly to cover the higher costs, and his customer base has grown. Local accounted for 10 percent of the menu two years ago but today makes up 30 percent. That might not sound like much, but it’s right around average for restaurants that advertise their commitment to local. Von Hengst believes he can bring that up to 40 or 50 percent in five years.
He hopes to work directly with more small farms, to get their products trucked to a central location—an idea not so different from Babin’s notion of a food hub. The farmers spend so much of their time farming that they often don’t have enough time to spend selling, Von Hengst says. Better that than the other way around, but if there’s a centralized source for them and if more restaurants and communities could be exposed to their products. . . .
Here he stops and shares what he hopes is a not-so-crazy dream.
“Bear with me a moment, okay?” All we need to do is connect and organize, he says, and we can turn the local dream into a broader reality. The greatest lesson his work with regional purveyors has taught him is that he wields a power he didn’t realize he possessed—a single purchasing decision from Silver Diner, with its volume, can have an enormous effect on the market. Now, suppose other chains—Applebee’s, Chili’s, T.G.I. Friday’s—were to take his example and replicate it on a national scale.
“The Inn at Little Washington and other restaurants that get their good stuff brought to them at the back door every day—that’s great,” Von Hengst says. “But fine dining is only a small segment of our world—a special class of restaurant that can only be reached by a few. Now, imagine the chains getting in on this with all the people they reach every day and all the volume they do in their buying. Can you imagine the impact?”
The triumph of an idea in this country, Patrick O’Connell says, is the mass adoption of that idea—and its inevitable dilution as it’s reinterpreted and bastardized. The corporatization that Von Hengst invites me to ponder is the extension of this principle to the extreme. In a sense, the idea of Silver Diner multiplied by tens and even hundreds stands for the nullification of local as many in the movement like to see it, as a celebration of the authentic, the artisanal, the uncorrupted.
I’m not surprised to discover that Silver Diner itself counts few fans among the movement, though I thought some might be more supportive. Tom Meyer of Clyde’s Restaurant Group, who is far from a purist, likens Silver Diner’s version of local to “putting Tiffany lamps on the salad bar.” It makes the salad bar look nicer, but it forever ruins your image of Tiffany lamps.
That crack is more revealing of the movement’s advocates than it is of Silver Diner.
You can say the local movement is about distinctions. You can also say it’s about us versus them. You can say it’s about spiritual connection. You can also say it’s about signifiers of status. You can say it’s about doing the right thing. You can say it’s about business as usual. You can say there have been great gains in four decades. You can say there remain deep divisions in the food world—divisions the local movement and its advocates were supposed to have paved over. Have and have-not. Foodie and food philistine. Vibrant neighborhoods full of resources and food deserts with precious few outlets for even fresh food.
There’s no romance about what Von Hengst is doing. There is realism, however imperfect or impure. A sense—perhaps nascent at this point, but real—of the truly transformative. A glimpse of a future in which local makes good, at last, on its immense latent promise.
If I am to believe—and I want to believe, I do—it will be in this imperfect realism, grounded in the problems of our world and not in a romantic quest for perfection and purity.
A Critical Palate
CONFRONTING A MASTERPIECE
By Matt Goulding
From Roads and Kingdoms
A former food editor of Men’s Health and co-author of the mega-hit Eat This Not That nutrition guides, Matt Goulding indulges his wanderlust appetites as co-founding editor of the digital magazine Roads and Kingdoms, a journal of exotic travel, food, political reporting, and music.
In a mild state of delirium three months ago, I woke up early, opened up three browsers in each of two computers and an iPad, and began furiously clicking. The screens stalled and sputtered and the spinning wheel of death did its foreboding dance of rainbow doom until it felt like the entire Internet was buckling at the knees. But then, suddenly, the skies parted, the wheel stopped spinning, and a calendar with a single green square popped up on one of the nine browsers. This tiny speck of color represented the most coveted table in the culinary universe. One more click and it was mine: no phone calls, no emails, no press credentials—pure, unfettered egalitarianism.
And so here we are in Copenhagen, 90 minutes from what last week was n
amed “the best restaurant in the world” for the third year running by San Pellegrino-sponsored Restaurant magazine. (Only elBulli, Spain’s former reigning king, has held the distinction longer.) Exciting, yes, but I’m not buying it for a second. First of all, never trust a food critic. Second of all, never trust a cabal of critics voting on restaurants many have never been to. Momofuku Ssam Bar is a better restaurant than the French Laundry? Not a single Japanese restaurant in the top 25? These are just a few of the embarrassments of the San Pellegrino list.
But that’s not my only source of skepticism. I have read dozens of articles praising Noma’s genius, watched global opinion levitate like Apple stock, poured over the Noma coffee table cookbook religiously (cursing the entire time about it being one of the most beautiful and entirely useless texts ever published). It all seems too loose, too ephemeral, as if dinner were being put out by a workshop full of forest nymphs.
And yet, even I find myself using that too convenient shorthand. “Why Denmark?” people ask. “I’m going to eat at the best restaurant in the world,” I say. It’s too easy, too definitive, too intentionally provocative.
Let’s be clear up front. The world needs lots of things: electric cars, an Israel-Palestine peace accord, another season of Arrested Development. One thing the world does not need is another Noma article. I will be the 567th critic to file an opinion about this restaurant. I’ve started and stopped this paragraph a dozen times, but my fingers keep moving. If you’ve made it this far, I’m sorry for being another voice in the Noma choir. I just can’t help it.
How does one prepare for the best meal in the world? Do you train with buckets of cheap caviar and liquefied foie scraps? Do you risk stomach shrinkage with a full-day fast? Or do you follow the lead of competitive eaters like Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut and Sonya “the Black Widow” Thomas and opt for a strict regimen of cabbage and watermelon, mass without the calories, to keep the stomach limber? Perhaps you simply go about your business and hope you arrive at the table ravenous?