Growers and Grocers

There is something romantic about the concept of sustainable restaurants, which are restaurants that use fresh local produce – in some cases from their own farms onsite – to create daily menus for patrons. I guess the romanticism lies in the idea of food going from vine to table on the same day, as it does in many cases.

The Seattle Times’ Carol Pucci recently highlighted Fairburn Farm culinary retreat and guesthouse in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where local produce is chosen in the afternoon and transformed into an amazing dinner.

It’s three hours before chef Mara Jernigan’s guests are to sit down to dinner at her Fairburn Farm culinary retreat and guesthouse, and she’s literally picking the ingredients for the meal as she walks through a neighbor’s garden as casually as she might browse the aisles of a supermarket.

“How are the zucchini flowers?” she asks Armande Daugenet, a sturdy French woman dressed in shorts and work shirt. Daugenet runs Cali Farm in the Cowichan Valley, an agricultural area 45 minutes north of Victoria, where rural wineries and artisan food producers are attracting tourists more interested in sipping champagne than English tea.

Daugenet bends down and clips a few yellow blossoms. Jernigan inspects them as she mentally composes her appetizer. She’s thinking about frying the flowers in a light tempura batter and stuffing them with goat cheese and lemon thyme.

Into her basket go fat fava beans. She takes scissors from her pocket, snips some cilantro and asks about the beets. Daugenet pulls a half-dozen out of the ground, and Jernigan thinks out loud about how she’ll combine them with the quail eggs she bought on impulse an hour earlier from a Czech man who runs his delivery truck on used olive oil.

Back at Fairburn Farm, where Jernigan, 43, is the inn’s chef and manager, a half-dozen overnight guests await dinner. She trades her red jacket for chef’s whites and heads for the kitchen where she starts cooking the duck breasts she bought earlier in the afternoon from another local farmer. A half-hour later, she makes a last-minute run through her garden for pea shoots, radishes, raspberries and herbs.

This sort of farm to table experience is another market for local farmers to sell their produce and thus earn money so that they can keep farming. For consumers, it provides an extra fresh eating experience.

According to a Massachusetts newspaper, The Republican, the idea of eating locally started an area wide event, “Fresh, Local and On the Menu.”

Organized by Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, a non-profit organization located in South Deerfield, the day is designed to raise awareness of local farms and their harvests, and the restaurants that support them. Many of the restaurateurs participating in the event say it emphasizes their own philosophies about food: if it’s locally produced, it tastes better.

In states like North Carolina and New Hampshire there are similar initiatives to help farmers connect their produce with local restaurants.

Here are a few of the sustainable restaurants I’ve located on the web:

The Farm Restaurant - Port Austin, Michigan
They cook using herbs and produce from their garden. A cooking school is also held there.

Summer Jo’s - Grants Pass, Oregon
In their words:

From farm to table, we present a lovingly crafted menu featuring the organic produce grown here with the finest quality meats and seafoods skillfully prepared in our from-scratch open kitchen. These innovative dishes use herbs from our gardens and local wine to create a distinctive Rogue Valley cuisine. The menu changes with the seasons, and there are always specials.

Joe Huber Family Farm Restaurant - Starlight, Indiana
Produce from their farm is used in the restaurant when in season.

Hershey Farm Restaurant - Strasburg, Pennsylvania
Their vegetable gardens supply the restaurant with seasonal produce for a good portion of the year.

Shelbourne Farms, The Inn Restaurant - Shelburne, Vermont
This Inn sits on Lake Champlain in Vermont and uses seasonal produce from their own gardens and local farms in their restaurant.