Debby Cannon, Ph.D., CHE

July/August 2010

There are different parameters for the terms “locally grown” and “locally produced.” Many consider “local” to indicate products that are grown/produced within a radius of 150 miles of the point of consumption. In some situations, the distance is extended. For example, some types of seafood, to be considered “local,” would have to extend either to the Atlantic coast or Gulf of Mexico — extending beyond 250 miles.

The term “organic” is defined and regulated by the u.S. Department of Agriculture (uSDA). Organic foods are products grown without the use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, genetically modified organisms or ionizing radiation. The uSDA also requires organic meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products to be produced from animals free of antibiotics or growth hormones. “Natural” attached to a product, on the other hand, indicates that there were no artificial flavorings, coloring or chemical preservatives and minimal processing.

The uSDA also regulates label standards for organic products. The label “100% organic,” indicates just that: 100% of the ingredients are organic. The sole word, “organic,” indicates that 95% of the ingredients are organic. Organic ingredients listed on the side label of a product indicate that less than 70% of the ingredients are organic. Companies that handle or process organic foods for public consumption are required to be certified by the uSDA through their Organic Seal designation.

View Chef Besh’s video on the home page of RestaurantINFORMER.com

Chef John Besh is passionate about his home state, Louisiana. Read Besh’s editorial on The Atlantic magazines’ web site where he describes using only seafood from Louisiana’s coast for all six of his restaurants and his feelings regarding actions the U.S. government has taken in response to the largest oil spill in American history.

To read more about the impact of the BP oil spill on Louisiana, visit louisianseafoodnews.com, a web site created by the Louisiana seafood promotion board to keep the public up-to-date on news on the oil spill’s impact on Louisiana’s seafood industry.

April 2010

by Christy Simo

Restaurant Forum recently sat down with some of Georgia’s top chefs to get a perspective on how chefs are finding new ways to attract diners while meeting reduced budgets and adapting to today’s technology-obsessed diner. Guests included Micah Willix, executive chef of Ecco; Riccardo Ullio, chef/owner of U Restaurants; Tom Harvey, executive chef of Murphy’s; Ron Horgan, executive chef for the Ansley Golf Club and president of the Atlanta chapter of the American Culinary Federation; Jonathan St. Hilaire, executive pastry chef for Concentrics Restaurants and owner of Bakeshop; and Jaime Adams, executive chef for Veni Vidi Vici. Thank you to Buckhead Beef for hosting the roundtable at their Atlanta culinary center.

What is your favorite item in the kitchen?
Adams: A wood-burning rotisserie. I wouldn’t know what to do without that thing. We cook six to eight ducks and six-eight chickens a day, and a small, whole pig (about 30 pounds) about every 3 days. And we do a lot of lamb. We get this good lamb from Pennsylvania, broken down into its primary cuts. We cook it on the rotisserie, with the legs together, the smaller cuts together.
Willix: I’m a simple person. I like the range. I have a wave-touch range I really love. It’s nice because it’s a continuous top, and you can put two pans on each eye. It’s like a favorite child.
Ullio: I don’t have a very special piece of equipment, but I’ve always been a big fan of a food mill. I think it’s far better for making sauce than a processor. It’s old school, but it’s nice.
Adams: I don’t do any immersion cooking, but I do do all my rotisserie stuff and braises, it’s really good to pack them in the bags and reheat them that way. I like to get them off the spit when they’re nice and hot, particularly when it’s a lamb or pig. It’s great to get them off the spit, press them, and then put it into the bags.

St. Hilaire: [A sous vide machine] is good for fruit too. You can press melon and put it in there. We used to do that with watermelon. You press it and put it in there, and it comes out just a deep red. Then we infuse it with a vanilla-mint syrup. Then we just take it out and grill it and use it as part of a dessert. We cut the cubes up, but also when it shrinks, it’s just this deep rich red color. Some of the other melons do that too. And if you crank it up high enough, you can cook up figs, or anything that you can press down and do a nice block. With the figs, you can cut it up and lay it out, and do a homemade fig Newton. But you need that machine to press it all down.

Diners are holding their dollars closer now, and they want more value. Have you made any adjustments to your menus to accommodate that while also increasing your margins?

Adams: Absolutely. Otherwise you don’t survive. We’ve changed mostly the type of stuff we’ve carried. There’s no more super expensive steaks. Lobster we haven’t had in the building in I don’t know how long, except for Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve. But the expensive fish, things like Halibut and sea bass, I don’t even touch that stuff any more. You’re always looking for lesser-known stuff that’s inexpensive, and then you use your experience to make taste good.
Adams: I sell more trout than just about any fish. It’s fairly mild, and all sorts of people will like it. It just flies out of the restaurant. It’s not on the menu, but I just use it for specials. It’s just the go to. We also do a $29 fixed price menu, three courses, for the last couple of years. We just rotate things in and out of that format for specials. And that’s 50% of our business.
Willix: I think like everybody else, we’re just trying to buy a lot of byproduct stuff. With fish, if it’s a byproduct fish, then we’ll buy that. I try to keep two kinds of fish on the menu at all times. I can usually have two fish that are uncommon, because nobody really has a go-to fish. We sell a lot of cod and a lot of arctic char, things like that. Arctic char is a fish that’s really inexpensive all year round. The same with meats. We don’t sell any luxurious cuts. We try to use everything. Every time we buy something we figure out what we can do with the waste. We either make sausage or meatballs, or make a sauce out of it. We use everything we possibly can. Last year we changed our menu from being composed main plates. We took the whole entrée section and broke that down into a la cart. That actually drove our check average up a little bit because what happened was you take a $29 plate and you break it down and sell the vegetables for $6 and the main dish for $25, you’re making more money off of people who usually order two sides.
Ullio: We really haven’t changed anything, but we’ve never really had that many expensive cuts of meat on the menu. We have a veal chop and we have a rib-eye steak. Those are our two high-dollar items. But we have a lot of pasta. I think we’ve always been a value-driven restaurant anyway. So we have a lot of pasta on the menu and a lot of risotto on the menu. If you’re just going to drink a glass of wine, you can go and eat for under $40. But you can also order the veal chop and order a bottle of wine for $400 at Sotto Sotto. So we really haven’t had too many changes. We don’t do a whole lot to the menu anyway, because any time we do, people seem to get angry. We have a pretty loyal customer following that always wants the same thing, so anytime we change the menu seasonally, we still get a dozen or so people who are like “Where’s this, we came for this!” And I tell them, “We took it off the menu, try this, and they say, No, we want that!” So we haven’t changed hardly anything at all.

You mentioned seasonal – does your menu rotate?
Ullio: It rotates around six, seven times a year, usually twice a season. But we don’t change it a whole lot. Now this time I’m going to keep one of our winter items on because everybody loves it. We sell so much of it and so many people request it that I think I’m going to leave it on. Because I hate to lose any business right now, you know? I think that for me it’s come to the fact that it’s not so much price driven as that you have to keep people happy. I think that people are just much pickier. And you can’t afford to piss anybody off. Now I think it’s much, much more crucial to make everybody happy. When they used to go out four times a week, now they go out once or twice. So now they’re really looking forward to it because they’ve been eating ramen noodles in front of the television the rest of the time if they can’t cook themselves. So when they go out, they’re going to be like “We’re going to go to Sotto Sotto. I love it there. Well get the veal chop, because we really, really like it.” So they go there and they get the veal chop, and maybe it’s overcooked. Before it was like, oh well, it’s overcooked, but the last time I had it, it was really good. But now it really makes a huge difference in their mind that the veal chop was overcooked. They’re going to talk to everybody, they’re going to go on Yelp and say their veal chop was overcooked. People are stressed because of their money, so there’s a much more emphasis towards customer satisfaction.
Harvey: People seem to feel like they have more riding on everything, including their cheeseburger on Tuesday. They’re just putting more emotion into every little thing. I came to Murphy’s five months ago after being at one.midtown kitchen for three years, and at Murphy’s looking at year to year, our check average is up significantly. Our wine education program has gotten so good that our PCAs have risen a lot. So our main focus is being sure we’re keeping our cover counts covered. You can’t always look at sales. One thing Pano taught me while working at Buckhead Life is that when you talk about numbers at Buckhead Life, when they ask you “what did you do last night?”, it’s really not about sales. The cover counts are always the thing. We can always work on check average, as long as people are coming into the restaurant. That’s what we were always worried about. So we’ve been very fortunate that Murphy’s has a very strong brunch business, which helps you a lot in terms of costs. Every frittata you sell drives food costs in a good direction. So we really try to be sure we’re putting more on the plate. We’ve increased portions a little bit if we’ve felt like people were leaving a little bit hungry. And as we’ve given more and more, the alternative cuts become more important. Our No. 1 seller right now remains the brisket. That’s a great thing to have as a No. 1 seller, because you can make money on brisket. It’s hard to make money on grouper. And when you’re No. 2 seller is grouper, right now the moratorium is on it, but those prices climb all year, and who knows what’s going to happen when fuel costs go back up. It was really bad two years ago. But executing the slow cooking has always saved us a lot in every restaurant I’ve worked at. Things like brisket and some of your second cuts – if you do them well, and you get one or two of those into your Top 5, it gives you some room to give away things like nice fish and to not have to go higher. The species like triggerfish and some of the nice stuff coming out of the Carolinas, we’re able to promote to the customers that these fisheries are —rather than grouper and snapper and what’s in the gulf, where we’re trying to come back from decades of overfishing—these fisheries are being run right now so there’s never going to be a sustainability issue. And people are really into that. Just like “farm-to-table” is no longer a novelty. People are thinking about farm-to -able in the grocery store. That wasn’t going on 10 years ago. And sustainability—they’re teaching it to little kids in school, and kids are coming in wanting the sustainable fish. It’s become a part of our life more every day.

Have you seen that in your restaurants as well – are people asking where their produce or meat is coming from?
Horgan: No. I’m at a country club so our demographics are totally different. But we push the full range of menu, from your basic chicken fingers and steamed broccoli for the kids to fillet, and they want prime New York strip. So we have to serve that. But the benefit that we have is they pay every month their dues. So I have a higher food cost I’m sure than anybody here. So that’s where the offset goes for me. I’m always shopping, talking with the fish guys about what’s good, what I need to stay away from, but I’m not being driven that way yet. That’s kind of my feel on that.
Willix: We don’t have a lot of guests who care. I think there’s an elevated level of pride in the service staff and the cooks who know that that’s what they’re doing. And then I think they sell that to guests. Guests aren’t coming in and asking “Is fish sustainable, is this fish organic? We don’t put it on the menu. We kind of leave it up to the servers to promote that if they want to. And it seems like those items that we do put on the menu, they definitely push a lot harder. But I don’t think we have anybody asking for it.
St. Hilaire: Not really. I guess that’s the lucky thing I have. A 50 lb. bag of sugar costs me $14, $16. My price point is completely backwards from restaurants. We use a lot of eggs, sugar, butter. My chocolate I had to change. We were using Varona chocolate, but now we don’t really use Varona, we’re trying some new chocolates from all over the place. There are more and more chocolates coming up that are really, really good. It’s a vicious cycle of the big chocolate companies buying the smaller one, so it kind of helps with the cost a little bit. But I’ve definitely found myself going even away from Cacao Barry to other ones that I think are much better. I spend a good amount on honey because we use it and it’s such a great flavor. I buy a 35-gallon tub from Francos and it’s $250.
Harvey: Really good honey’s worth the money.
St. Hilaire: And it is really good honey. You can tell the difference. Especially if you’re doing a Panna Cotta, it’s right there. But overall, we use the organic flour and we get some stuff out of North Carolina. Right now it’s wintertime for us, so the produce is at a minimum. We’re kind of waiting for springtime so we have all the fresh fruit.

So you do rotate your menu items seasonally?
St. Hilaire: Yea, we change everything. It’s probably changing every day. Our Danishes change every day. We’ve got a nutella croissant on, we’ve had pistachio croissants on, hazelnut, it’s always changing up every day depending on what we want to do. The desserts, the jars, we’re just always changing, every day. I hate seeing the same stuff all the time. Being open now for a few months, people are coming back asking where are the espresso buttercreams, so we’re starting to get that, which is nice. You start to realize what you need to keep on. Our breads have kind of stayed the same, but we’ve forced the envelope making baguettes, parmesan breads, and some other interesting rye breads just to see what people really will enjoy. But price-point wise, I find people are enjoying more bakery-style bread, just great artisanal breads rather than going to the store and buying that crappy baguette. They don’t mind coming in and paying $2 on a fresh baguette.  It’s a better product.
Ullio: It’s more about value than it is price, and value is all about the perception. Harvey: Yea, we don’t sell more specials because the specials are cheaper. We sell more specials because the servers are behind it and it looks great and it tastes great. They know if you can get one on the table, the rest of their section is going to order it. We always call it the domino test at the bar. At lunch at the bar, if you have a good special and one sells at the bar, then four more—our bar is always full at lunch—you see it go right down the bar. If you have a great special, you can sell it to the whole bar.

How has social media such as Twitter and Facebook affected your job?
Willix: You model your restaurant as your home, and you want to bring people in and show them a sense of hospitality. Then they don’t want to tell you what’s wrong or how you can improve your meal or their experience. They just go home and complain about it behind your back. We can’t do anything to improve that (experience) in retrospect. I could have done a lot for you, but you didn’t say “Hey, this is overcooked.” They’d rather go home and complain about it as soon as they can.
Ullio: We use Open Table as a weekly guide to how well the restaurant is on it. Yelp is a much younger demographic, but Open Table is your regular diner, someone who dines out all the time, so we read Open Table religiously. Open Table is actually very useful. The people on Open Table are a lot more fair.
Adams: It’s like the two sides of the Food Network. The Food Network has elevated us all, but it’s also made everybody a critic. Everybody’s an expert.
Ullio: If you filter through it, you can get some general trends.
Harvey: It’s great for us, because when I got to Murphy’s, one thing I wanted to address is that if we’re a busy, lunch sandwich place, our grilled chicken sandwich should be a standout. It should be our signature thing, not sort of an afterthought. So we worked on it and changed the specs for it. And I tell you, when you go onto Open Table and you see two comments in one week that they loved the grilled chicken sandwich, then you know. It gives you something you can show to the cooks and servers to show that we’re gaining ground here. Open Table is probably the most useful because you see it quick. You come out of Valentine’s weekend and by Wednesday you’ve got three or four reviews of people who ate there for Valentine’s Day. And you know if you hit it right. Then we’ll go and put it in our logbook for next year. We watch the websites religiously. Twitter is the one that’s different to me. I always tell my servers, it’s one thing when people have a good enough or a bad enough experience in a restaurant, they’re actually going to go home and take the time to fire up their computer and put a comment down. With Twitter, you don’t even get the cooling-off period. They’ll tweet it at the table, while they’re still there. The feedback is so immediate now. It used to be that just getting to a computer, at least there was some sort of delay there. But now if anything’s wrong, there are people who really are looking forward to getting it out there on Twitter.
St. Hilaire: But sometimes it’s good in a positive way. Sometimes my server will come back and say “they’re tweeting” and I’m like, “tweeting about what?” And he says, “She really likes the chocolate caramel tart.”
Harvey: I’d say the immediacy of Twitter has made it a whole different game. We have a long-term server who handles our Facebook and Twitter stuff. Anybody who runs verbal specials, you’ll hear from customers “This is a great special. Why isn’t it on the menu?” And our new answer to servers is “Tell them to become a follower on Facebook and Twitter and they’ll know when it will be on again.” I’ve had good response, so that’s our automatic answer now. Don’t come into the kitchen and ask me why it’s not on the menu. Don’t come ask me when it’s going to be on again. Tell them to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. You have a constructive answer. I always tell our servers if you really don’t know fine, but our goal is, be prepared enough that you don’t have to leave a guest’s question hanging. Be confident and speak a certain way. It may be a matter of massaging a guest through it, then come ask after service so next time you’ll be more ready. But anytime they have to come off the floor to ask a question, you’re setting up the server. The guest is already thinking, “Oh, the server is not really an expert.”
Adams: We have the servers line up three or four times a week and tell them never leave the table with question. Now if they’re asking for white asparagus and it’s January, go ahead and say no. Do anything but leave the table. Because as soon as you leave that table, you’re giving up some confidence in you. They just want to know if they can switch out the potatoes for the asparagus. Say yes to them. So it’s a big deal.
Harvey: The vast majority of what we get is good feedback. If someone has a bad experience, we’ll try to track them down and invite them back. We just want to invite them back in and turn a bad experience into a new good one.
Horgan: We have internal email that goes to all the members, and they can contact us through that. We’re a captive audience, so it’s a lot more one-on-one communication. If somebody is not happy, they don’t go home, they get comped right then. Thankfully that doesn’t happen too often but sometimes it does.

How do you choose your center of the plate options?
Willix: Most of it depends on what fish looks good that week. Ninety percent of our specials are based on me talking to the fish guy that week. What’s he got that we can get a good enough price on to do a big enough portion and put some nice stuff on the plate with it.
Horgan: I’ll rotate between lamb, veal and pork for our meats, because if I tried to sell lamb every week, they’d just get burned out. I also have a lot of the same clientele. We have 1,400 members, but we don’t have 1,400 clients that come in and eat. I have maybe 150 families who use it regularly – a couple times a week. So when I do a menu, it’s for 3 months. But then the specials, I typically use three fish.
Adams: What I always try to look at when we’re deciding what to put on the plate is if it’s something that people are wanting, and how are we going to package it to make it appealing to people. The people who are paying to come in deserve our skills to make stuff that they’re going to want. We have to package it in a way that’s appealing to the broad public. If we don’t, we’re not doing anything for anybody.
Ullio: You have to run it like a business. It’s all about the numbers, and it’s all about the people coming in and eating, and eating again.
Horgan: And integrity. You can have integrity with the simple things.

How do you think the celebritization of chefs and the popularity of the Food Network has affected your job?
Harvey: Harvey: I can’t believe how interesting people think my job is. I’m just amazed, because to me it’s a commercial art, but it’s a blue-collar profession. It’s a skilled trade. There’s nothing mystical about it. If you’re putting in the hours and doing a good job, you make a product that people want. It’s different because it nourishes you and sustains you, but when you do it your whole life, it just seems remarkable that people think it is. It’s just what I do. And that’s a product of television.
Ullio: I think it has something to do with the fact that the general public can’t cook. In Italy, when you tell people you’re a chef, they’re like, “Oh, ok. That’s great.” Because they can cook. All families cook. Cooking is centered within the family, and most people eat good family meals. So what you have is this big mystique. It’s kind of like being a musician. It’s something that most people can’t do here. In a lot of places, cooking is part of life. Where as here, it’s not. A part of life is opening a TV dinner or opening a box and dumping it in water.
Horgan: It’s just our culture. It’s like farm to table. That’s been going on since the beginning of time. It’s a big thing over the past couple of years and now it’s becoming a way of life again. People are learning how to cook and eat again. But you can earn more money now. If you are willing to put in the time and the effort and get a couple of breaks, then you can get into a position that is worthy to be called a chef.
Adams: The celebricizing of chefs and how that’s affected my life the most is the expectations of the cooks that are coming up the ranks. They get this idea in their head that they’re going to go to culinary school right out of high school. I see these people all the time. They come out of school thinking that they can come out a chef. It’s on TV and it’s glamorous, but they don’t know the first thing about what it takes to get that food on that plate and make that person happy who’s buying it.
Ullio: Look at American culture. America has always been the land of dreams. It’s always been the land of fads and the City of Angels. It’s always been “go to America and the streets are paved with gold.” Yea, but you’re going to have to work to get that gold. Everybody has a dream, and everybody wants to be glamorous. And now the dream has come to the culinary industry. Next thing you know it will be the farmers.
Harvey: There’s no doubt that you have kids that are smart, who 20 years ago their parents would have put their foot down and never allowed them to be in this business, and now it’s respectable. There are people coming into the restaurant business now who would have never before considered it a career choice. That’s a good thing. And it’s not just in the kitchen, but also for the front of the house. You’re getting people who could be more successful in more traditional white-collar business roles who are coming into restaurant management, and that’s a blessing to us. Because you’re only as good as your GM. It’s as simple as that. You think about opening a restaurant as a chef, the first thing you’re thinking is who is going to be the GM of this place? Because you know you gotta have somebody who’s going to run it the right way. That caliber of people being in the business might even be more important than the number of cooks. I’d love to see general managers and restaurant managers get a little bit more famous just because it elevates the number of people and the kind of people who do it.
Adams: I always tell the parents of these kids who come to me thinking about going to culinary school, get them graduated from high school, get them working in a restaurant. The best restaurant they can get into as a puppy out of school—peeling potatoes, washing dishes—get them into that restaurant. Because they’re going to realize one of two things. One, this is the coolest place I’ve ever been. I want to do what that guy’s doing, and if I work really hard I’m going to learn how to cook stuff, but right now I’m happy doing potatoes and the salads. Or you’re going to find “Oh my god, what in the world was I thinking? I will go to college.” A lot of parents come in and say their kid wants to be a chef, and they ask what’s the best school? And I say work in a restaurant right now, and by the time you finish high school, you already know if you want to pursue it.
Ullio: There’s a lot more to the restaurant business than just cooking. There are a lot of people who open a restaurant and they don’t understand anything about finances and they get investors. And guess what, 10 years later, they haven’t made a dime. Because you have a 25% rate of return plus you gave away 70% equity in your business, so you’re just as broke as when you started. And you’ve been working 90 hours a week for 10 years.

Are there any trends that you are seeing or incorporating in your restaurants right now, or something you see that you think is on the verge of being big?
Adams: We’ve been farm to table for 25 years. We find the best ingredients, and we present them to people. Now the carrots and the celery and the onions are not necessarily going to come from the organic farmer, because they cost 50 times as much. But I’ve been using Elysian Fields lamb for 8 years now. We buy good meat and the best fish, and that’s all part of what we do. And now it’s called “farm to table.”
Willix: It’s a marketing ploy. Any good chef has been trying to source the best product. You can’t be a chef unless you source good product. You can’t make good food unless you source good product. So we source good product and we’ve been doing it forever. I think as far as trends go, if you’re trying to find the next trend, and you have a business, then you should just close it. Because finding the next trend means that’s one more thing that’s going to go up then come right back down.

Ullio: I think we’re going back to simplicity. Chefs that have their own farm—that’s something I want to look into. See if we can find some people that are farmers that are willing to partner up with you, and then you can ask them to grow produce for you according to season, and how much we’re going to use according to this and how to split up the acres. If you can spec that out, get what you want, it allows you to control more of your product.

Adams: I think the real trend that’s good for restaurants is just buying a little bit more locally produce wise. There are more people cropping up that are within a 100-mile radius that can provide a lot of stuff. That has a lot of value to us as operators as well as for our guests. Guests love it when we tell them that stuff. They don’t choose to come to our restaurant because of that, but they’ll choose to continue to come back.
Willix: It’s a good business practice too. We’ve cut out pretty much all of the big companies. We do as much local as we can with the smaller guys. It’s just better business. We can do better deals with them. We help them and they can help us. You’re always trying to build relationships with local farmers. I don’t think it’s so much that you can market it but you have a relationship with them. You know where it comes from. Going someplace and seeing how something is handled … you don’t always know where it was before it got to your kitchen. It’s nice to know, to be able to go and figure out what’s going on with that product. How is it being grown? How is it being handled? It’s almost inspiring or motivating to see something come up, and it’s a little bit more pressure on you to do the right thing with it.
Horgan: The only downside I see to the local and the organic is the pricing. I still find that the pricing is a little out of whack. It is getting better. It’s a selling point, but until I’m able to make it a selling point for me, I can put that on my menu and it wouldn’t affect anything.
Ullio: You’d be surprised though. If people knew, if you give it to them, then they’ll like it.
Harvey: One of the more positive things is that over the past couple of years, for us with the locally grown and small farmers, the problem has always been logistics. I used to have eight trucks a day coming down this road, and that’s not really helping the environment. But if the supply chain can get more consolidated, then you can really start to get results. That helps the pricing part too, because it’s not just about how it costs on the invoice. It’s also about how many times a day does this guy have to put his knife down to check in an order. We’re all about using fewer purveyors where we can. [Several companies have] seen this coming, and they’ve done a pretty good job of making it easier for us to use local products without having to rewrite the whole how you’re going to order and how you’re going to receive this stuff. And that’s been very positive to see. Certain companies are doing a great job and are doing it really well. It’s just more cost effective.

Have you seen any change in Georgia’s restaurant industry over the past 10 years, and what do you see in its future?
Adams: It’s gotten a lot more sophisticated in the last 10 years. We’ve become a much more important restaurant market. Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have been sitting around this table. There’s an environment here where people like to eat really well, and the good, ethical and strong operators will survive. They will continue to make great food with great service, and prosper. It’s great to be a part of this market, because it’s grown up so much over the past 20 years. Twenty years ago, there was nothing. The influx of all the people from all over the place has really helped each other get better and better and better. And that’s a great thing.
St. Hilaire: I moved down to Atlanta in 1999. Everyone was still serving big cakes. I had a couple nice meals at a coupleof places, but the pastry was definitely still lagging behind the food. It runs the gamut now, where 10 years ago it didn’t. It was just pie and big chocolate cake and crème brulee. Now you can really be more creative. You can really have fun using herbs and bacon, and spiciness in the ganaches and things like that. It’s definitely gone full circle in a way that’s only gotten better.

The National Restaurant Association surveyed more than 1,800 American Cullinary Federation Chefs determining the hottest food and beverage trends for 2010.  The results show the continued desire to offfer local, sustainable and organic food and beverage.

Restaurant Forum has worked for several years with Georgia Organics, promoting and educating restaurateurs on local, sustainable and organic farm products.  We encourage restaurateurs to contact Georgia Organics to learn how to source from local farmers and learn best-practices.

To see the complete survey results, click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

1.  Locally grown produce
2.  Locally sourced meats and seafood
3.  Sustainability
4.  Bite-size/mini desserts
5.  Locally-produced wine and beer
6.  Nutritionally balanced children’s dishes
7.  Half-portions/smaller portion for a smaller price
8.  Farm/estate-branded ingredients
9.  Gluten-free/food allergy conscious
10.  Sustainable seafood
11.  Superfruits (e.g. acai, goji berry, mangosteen, purslane)
12.  Organic produce
13.  Culinary cocktails (e.g. savory, fresh ingredients)
14.  Micro-distilled/artisan liquor
15.  Nutrition/health
16.  Simplicity/back to basics
17.  Regional ethnic cuisine
18.  Non-traditional fish (e.g. branzino, Arctic char, barramundi)
19.  Newly fabricated cuts of meat (e.g. Denver steak, pork flat iron, Petite Tender)
20. Fruit/vegetable children’s side items

October, 2009

By Jaymi Curley

The alpha and omega of the dining experience, cocktails and desserts, seem to keep selling, even in lean times. For the customer,they represent the fun and decadent side of dining out, but for the restaurant owner, these two profit centers can be a lucrative path to securing both the bottom line and the goodwill of their customers.

Despite the recent squeeze that is being put on the restaurant industry, it seems that diners who are still patronizing restaurants are bent on having what Jonathan St. Hilaire, Head Pastry Chef for the Concentrics Restaurant Group, calls “the full experience,” and are figuring out ways to have their cake and eat it too, even on a smaller budget.

“They may share an appetizer, have the entrée and then share a dessert,” says Chef St. Hilaire. “It’s not so much cutting out anything, just figuring out a way to afford all three courses. People want their chocolate, they want their custard and they want their fruit.”

As such, Chef St. Hilaire is reporting fairly steady traffic in the dessert side of Concentrics’ operations even through the current economic pressures. “[Sales] change more from winter to people getting ready for swimsuit season.”

The costs to the kitchen of bringing a little sweetness to the lives of customers are relatively small when compared with the majority of the food budget.

“I don’t have much loss to take into consideration,” says Chef St. Hilaire. “You might burn something here and there, but at the end of the day we’re talking about pennies. A 50-pound bag of flour is maybe $15. An egg is three cents.” Not all the necessities are to be had for pennies, though, and Chef St. Hilaire reports wholesale chocolate costs that can range from $4 per pound to “$12 per pound for some of the best chocolate.”

Still, Chef St. Hilaire points out that the benefits of an attractive dessert menu cannot be understated. “If I have a plate cost of $1.25 and I am getting, maybe, $6 for a dessert, the rewards
are so much greater.”

Among the more popular dessert trends right now is the use of savory ingredients mixed in with sweet, like using goat cheese in cheesecake, or the popular tart frozen yogurts that have begun to dot the Georgia restaurant scene. A trend Chef St. Hilaire sees as very advantageous, however, is the offering of mini-dessert “tastings,” served in small portion vessels like shot glasses.

He is not alone. The National Restaurant Association’s chef survey “What’s Hot in 2009,” released last October, listed “bitesize/ mini desserts” as the second most popular food trend based on a nationwide poll of more than 1,600 chefs.

For Chef St. Hilaire, it makes sense from both a culinary and a customer service angle.

“People don’t eat the same way anymore. They don’t just expect one flavor note through a whole meal. Dessert tastings let them explore.”

The added incentive of smaller prices for the mini-desserts can also be a big draw for the diner.

“Even coming off a dollar, two dollars from the regular price is reasonable,” says Chef St. Hilaire. “If I was selling a 5-ounce tart, and now I am selling a 3-ounce tart, it’s my way of saying to the customer, ‘I’m going to come up with a way I can keep selling more desserts, but at the same time I’m going to help you save some money and you still get to enjoy them.’”

The farm-to-table food trend, in which chefs strive to use as many local and/or organic ingredients as possible, gets limited play in the pastry kitchen, with Chef St. Hilaire only applying the concept where it will make the most difference in flavor or quality, rather than across the board.

“If I am creating a tart, my flour’s organic, but the butter, the sugar, probably not,” he says.

A score of excellent local fruit would be treated with minimal prep to highlight the quality the chef is paying for.

“I’m not going to stew them or put them in a cobbler with a whole bunch of other flavors. I’ll probably use them on top or macerate them, something that will bring out that flavor for the customer. You have to think about how you are using your ingredients.”

Mixologist Greg Best, a part-owner of Holeman and Finch Public House, also sees this “farm-to-glass” approach as a valuable trend in the restaurant bar trade. Best firmly believes in “using all fresh juices, dispensing with high fructose corn syrups and other chemicals, and making your own grenadine syrup or mint syrup for juleps.”

Though labor intensive, Best believes the jump in quality and flavor provided by fresh local and organic fruits and juices keeps his patrons coming back for more.

Says Best, “I think it has gone a great way to make cocktails visually appealing,” he says. “The customer getting to see those fresh juices squeezed right in front of them adds to the value of the drink they’re going to enjoy.”

Navarro Carr, head mixologist from Beleza Lounge, also sees this approach as a way of connecting to the customer.

“From a storytelling standpoint, knowing something about the types of ingredients you use and specifically where they are from is a win-win.”

Dovetailing with the rise of fresh ingredients as a focal point of the bar trade is a craze for classic cocktails. As the customer takes more of an interest in these drinks, a great mixologist has to make sure that they are a part of his or her repertoire.

“People are into it,” says Best. “They are educating themselves, so bartenders have no choice but to stay on top of that learning curve. You buy books and do a bit of research so that you know how to make, say, that Manhattan in the correct way, or that whiskey sour properly, with egg white.”

Carr says that with these recipes, some of which have been around since the 1800s, along with some creative twists on some traditional bar favorites and “something a little out of the box,” a good bartender will be able to create a bar menu with the broadest appeal to the customer base.

Both Chef St. Hilaire and Carr advise not to underestimate the value of hosting events to help drive traffic and create relationships between the bar or restaurant and its customer base. Chef St. Hilaire recommends courting locals
who are in the know with an invitation to a meet-and-greet for the venue.

At Beleza, Carr and his staff host monthly cocktail classes that have developed a very regular following.

“It’s one of our biggest successes,” says Carr. “On a slow night we can do this cocktail class and attract 25 to 30 people who have purchased the all-inclusive cocktail experience.”

In addition to the benefit of developing a loyal crowd of educated cocktail enthusiasts, the students often stay for additional mingling that develops into meals.

Carr is greatly in favor of hosting events as often as the bar calendar allows. “Things are lean right now,” he says, “and building relationships is crucial.”

With the nonprofit group or individual booker delivering both the audience and usually some sort of marketing for the event, Carr sees these as opportunities that should never be passed up.

“You’re missing out if you let even one of these events slip through your fingers. People get to experience your bar, see your menu, taste your food.” When a good time is had by all, the captive audience of the event night often turns into repeat business.

Best doesn’t necessarily agree. “It’s tricky. Events and sponsorships can be great, but it can hurt you in the long run if you get in the habit of relying on them. You’re not operating on a true scale. [At Holeman and Finch] we don’t book events during normal business hours. I think it may be more important for restaurants who are trying to establish themselves in an area where there is a high volume of restaurant traffic.”

Ultimately, while popularity is going to drive business in a bar or restaurant, both Best and Carr are wary of creating artificial buzz, which can backfire in the long run. “You can manufacture hipness. You pay attention to the current trends in music, on TV. You see what is drawing people to look and apply these trends to your place,” says Best. “But I think that kind of hip can go out of style just as fast as it comes in. A place that is doing something that feels real to the consumer has a way of becoming fashionable whether you intend it to or not.”

“When all the smoke is gone, true relationships, good service, creativity and connecting with the community – that’s the long-term hipness,” says Carr. “That’s the hipness that keeps you in business.”

September, 2009

Not too long ago, D and A Farm in Zebulon, GA, was the go-to place to get highly prized, pasture-raised chicken right here in Georgia.

Dave and Amy Bentoski processed about 3,000 birds a year – not a mountain of birds, but enough to satisfy his farmers’ market customers, who paid around $3.50 a pound, and his wholesale customers who paid around $2.70 or $2.80 a pound.

Georgia is the No. 1 producer of conventional chicken broilers in the country, so there’s plenty of chicken producers out there. But, like other meats, the locavore and free-range organic movement has made pasture- raised poultry a very hot commodity.

Many health-conscience consumers want to avoid the growth supplements that allow conventional producers to raise a chick to a slaughter-size chicken in half the time it takes Mother Nature to do it.

Likewise, many taste-conscience chefs want to serve a bird whose meaty muscles were actually used.

For a while, D and A Farm was one of the few games in town that sold such birds.

That’s a great position to be in, especially if you’re a first generation farm that grew from a front yard garden into a 10-acre certified organic operation in a mere three years, while building up one of the state’s largest community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscription bases in the state.

“We couldn’t even come close to satisfying the demand that was out there,” Dave Bentoski says. “We can raise, conservatively, demand-wise we could quadruple or even quintuple our annual production to 12,000 to 15,000 birds a year, and I don’t think we’d still come close to satisfying demand.”

But last spring, D and A Farm sold its last batch of pasture chickens. Georgia agriculture policies forced Bentoski to drive to Bowling Green, KY, which is a seven-hour trip one way, for processing.

“So, we made the determination to stop doing chickens, as much as we didn’t want to and as much as our customers didn’t want us to,” said Bentoski. “It’s just not sustainable for us anymore.”

Sources for sustainably raised vegetables and red meat – beef, pork and lamb – are readily available to restaurants and consumers and have fueled the increase in sustainable and organic farms, farmers’ markets and CSA programs.

Poultry raised on pasture is a sustainable means of producing chicken, one that does not lend itself to the large-scale volumes typified by conventional producers.

As an add-on product, for small-scale sustainable and organic farms, pasturing uses relatively little farm labor or infrastructure for a high-value product, thereby increasing farm incomes and improving rural economies.

Just as important, chicken manure is an important and valuable byproduct that increases the farm’s soil fertility and improves vegetable production.

Without it, Bentoski has to make some hard adjustments.

“I no longer have the benefit of their [chicken] droppings, and they were great at pecking up everywhere and helping to breakdown pests,” he says. “I’m definitely having to look at my fertility practices again. It’s something I have to account for now in my planning – how do I replace that manure that the chickens put down?”

The heart of the issue here is what roadblocks exist that make it difficult to raise a product for which there is such high demand?

Consumers have been conditioned to expect cheap chicken, but the relatively low price of conventional chicken is made possible by huge economics of scale; conventional processing facilities, for example, can slaughter 400 birds per minute.

The only legal solution currently available to Georgia’s farmers is to transport their chickens to an out-of-state USDA-inspected processing facility, and bring them back into the state for sale. The closest facilities are located in South Carolina and Kentucky. Most farmers find this distance too far to drive due to the cost of fuel and the stress the long trip causes their livestock.

In fact, there are a number of roadblocks for small-scale farmers who want to raise quality chickens in natural ways, most stemming from raw economics and bizarre bureaucratic policies.

Here’s the main problem: Decades ago, the USDA created rules for the safe handling and processing of poultry processing, one of which required an inspector be on site at the processing plant.

But the USDA rule also allowed for exemptions for smaller farmers, allowing them to slaughter and process on farm up to 20,000 birds a year.

However, when the state of Georgia chose to adopt the USDA rules, it struck the smallfarm exemption.

The odd thing about that move is almost half of the country’s states accept the small farm exemption.

“One of the jobs at the Georgia Department of Agriculture is to guarantee food safety, and I understand that,” Bentoski says. “But that argument falls on deaf ears because there’s 20-something other states where it’s perfectly legal to use that [USDA] exemption and process on farm, up to 20,000 birds a year.”

To address the many challenges that stand in the way of a thriving pasture-poultry industry, the Pastured Poultry Working Group formed in 2008 for producers interested in raising pastured poultry to elevate their collective profile with regulators as they work to create processing solutions for small-scale producers.

“Creating a processing solution that’s economically viable and also fits within regulatory guidelines is the current challenge,” says Suzanne Welander, founder of the Pastured Poultry Working Group.

“In addition to overhauling state policy, we also need small business owners to develop the type of facilities that can fill this void,” says Georgia Organics Executive Director Alice Rolls. “It’s an obvious economic development opportunity for an investor to kick-start an industry for which we know the demand is incredibly high. Imagine what a Georgia-based processor dedicated to local, sustainable pasture poultry producers would do for local economies across the state.”

Plus, the economic development tools that state and local governments use to lure manufacturing, processing and other industries to Georgia, such as tax breaks, tax credits and lease backs, could easily be used to enable the formation of a public-private partnership that would lead to the construction of a processing center.

Not only that, but those same economic development tools could be used to incentive the spread of pasture poultry farms – a critical need since pasture poultry farming has been discouraged by state policies.

For now, the state is stuck in a classic “the chicken or the egg” conundrum.

May/June 2009

By Michael Wall, Georgia Organics

Procuring local food is a hot trend in quality restaurants these days, and for good reason.

Many patrons look for local food offerings because they’re interested in many of the social, environmental and economic benefits that eating local food provides.

For restaurant operators, one-on-one relationships with farmers is one of the best ways to attend to quality control, and chefs in the know use as much locally grown food they can get their hands on for the most important reason of all – taste.

In a weeklong (or more) delay from harvest to dinner table, sugars turn to starches, plant cells shrink and produce loses its vitality.

Now, a handful of chefs and restaurant operators have taken local procurement to a whole new level.

Food grown in your own community was probably picked within the past day or two. It’s crisp, sweet and loaded with flavor. Several studies have shown that the average distance food travels from farm to plate is 1,500 miles.

Shipped food is usually chosen for its durability rather than taste. In the modern industrial agricultural system, varieties are chosen for their ability to ripen simultaneously and withstand harvesting equipment, for a tough skin that can survive packing and shipping and for an ability to have a long shelf life in the store. Only a handful of hybrid varieties of each fruit and vegetable meet those rigorous demands, so there is little genetic diversity in the plants grown.

Local food, in contrast, is usually grown in a huge number of varieties to provide a long season of harvest, an array of eye-catching colors and the best flavors. Many varieties are heirlooms, passed down from generation to generation, because they taste good.

Many conscientious chefs care about nutrition, too. A recent study showed that fresh produce loses nutrients quickly. Food that is frozen or canned soon after harvest is actually more nutritious than some “fresh” produce that has been on the truck or supermarket shelf for a week.

Billy and Kristin Allin, the chef and owners of Cakes and Ale in Decatur, are headed into their second year of growing food in their own ½-acre vegetable and herb garden. The size of their garden is much too small to produce all of the restaurant’s needs, but it does provide ingredients for creative specials that keep patrons returning.

It’s also a kind of experiment that fulfills many of their efforts to reduce the restaurant’s carbon footprint – a
worthy goal more and more restaurant operators are striving towards.

“Sustainability and health are related and those are very important things that I’m interested in,” Billy says. “It’s an added bonus that while we are working on those important ideals, we are also improving the taste of our dishes.”

Almost all of the herbs used for seasoning at Cakes and Ale are grown in the attached farm. The Allins are experimenting with crop rotation, and, with the help of hundreds of worms, they turn the food waste from the restaurant into nutrient-rich compost that feeds the farm’s growing vegetables.

This allows the Allins to feed their plants without relying on artificial fertilizers, which are commonly derived from oil and mixed with chemicals that are known carcinogens.

Composting is the most widely used practice for adding nutrients to the soil and combating soil-borne pests and diseases. The time to apply compost is when plants are actively growing, not during late autumn and winter, when long wet spells will wash valuable nutrients deep down into the earth.

Organic gardeners recycle “browns” (leaves, woody mulch, grass clippings, twigs) and “greens” (kitchen scraps, vegetable and fruit peels, coffee grinds, tea leaves, egg shells and torn cardboard) into a compost heap of decaying matter.

Two Urban Licks, Bacchanalia and Floataway Café are some of the other restaurants that are growing for their kitchens.

Summerland Farm, near Cartersville, supplements the excellent dishes produced at Star Provisions, Bacchanalia, Floataway Café and Quinones at Bacchanalia. Chef Anne Stiles Quatrano and Clifford Riley Harrison moved to Summerland 15 years ago to enhance the food quality produced at their beloved restaurants.

Over the past 15 years, the soy bean fields have been nitrogen fixed, cover cropped, turned, fertilized and fenced into 60 acres of pastures, herb gardens, raised bed agriculture and acres of fruit and nut trees – many of which were planted more than 100 years ago.

Harrison oversees the farm with the help of a few restaurant employees who enjoy spending some of their work week in the open air.

The Two Urban Licks garden, about 40 feet by 15 feet in size, is large enough to provide a variety of herbs and many of the seasonal vegetables that go into the chef specials the restaurant is famous for. Garlic, tomatoes and many different types of peppers are just a few of the tasty items that come from its garden. This produce supplements the restaurant’s staples, and is often used in the family meal that’s prepared every night for the staff, which is yet another time-honored custom that keeps the busy world of running a kitchen down to earth, so to speak.

Farmer D offers some tips on going local:

1. Go to the local farmer’s market and meet the farmers. Ask them about their farming practices and philosophy. Usually, the produce will speak for itself about the product’s quality, the way it’s grown and whether it’s organic. (For a list of state, city and county farmer’s markets near you, visit the Marketing Division section of http://agr.georgia.gov.)
2. Find local farmers by contacting Georgia Organics. Its annually updated Local Food Guide, available online at www.georgiaorganics.org, lists farms by region, contact info and what they grow. The Department of Agriculture also has a Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Directory at http://agr.georgia.gov.
3. Talk with your distributors and ask them if they can find organic produce, whether it’s fruit, meat or a specific vegetable, for you.
4. Grow your own. Many restaurants are growing their own food on auxiliary farms in urban areas, but you can start small with growing herbs on the rooftop or micro greens near the kitchen. A side benefit to growing your own is you can get the wait staff involved. They become really knowledgeable and passionate about the food they’re serving if they are involved in growing it.
5. Contract with local farmers and ask them to grow the foods you want to use in your restaurant. Let them know the types of produce you’re interested in using and how much you go through. Farmers will often sign contracts with a restaurant before they get into growing a particular crop. Some farmers form a co-op (one such example is Athens Locally Grown, http://athens.locallygrown.net) to ensure there is enough of a certain product for restaurant use.

To learn more about Farmer D Organics, which supplies seeds, organic plants, tools and advice, visit www.farmerd.com.

April 2009

By Jaymi Curley

As belts tighten across the country and the green movement explodes, the local food movement is gaining ground as a way to both save money and eat better. Consumers are turning toward this trend, and many chefs who have long espoused the philosophy of using fresh, seasonal and local ingredients have found their restaurants attracting a wider audience. But in the wake of the current economic downturn, it can be a delicate balancing act to keep both the customers and the bottom line healthy and well fed. Chef/owner Hector Santiago of the tapas restaurant Pura Vida is one of a collection of Atlanta chefs who are embracing this challenge, channeling a passion to change the way we eat into a thriving culinary concern.

Chef Santiago does use special ingredients imported from places like Peru and Argentina to support his diverse Latin American menu, but he is highly invested in using local goods for much of his work. “It’s really important to me to get local products,” he says, “because of the quality and the freshness of those products.”

While Georgia is a rich agricultural basket, Santiago does encounter some challenges in sourcing organic, locally grown product. “The biggest setback,” he says, “is that the network is not developed really well yet. It’s better now than a few years ago, of course. But that is the biggest problem, the jump from having the product in the farm and bringing it directly to the restaurant, to the chef.” However, Chef Santiago says the way to deal with it is to be on top of it. “I go to the farmer’s market, meet them, see what they grow, work out what they can maybe grow for me that fits my concept. You have to develop a relationship, with you helping the farmers, them helping you.”

Joe Truex, chef/owner of Repast in Atlanta, has fully embraced this challenge, channeling his driving passion to change the way we eat into making his three-yearold business thrive, even in a recession.
“This is definitely a lifestyle choice,” says Chef Truex of his 89-seat fine dining establishment, situated in the heart of Midtown Atlanta, which he owns with his wife, Chef Mihoko Obunai. “This is a way for us to enjoy our lives and contribute to the well- being of others. We sell experiences here – food, wine, ambience, service. Sure, I could open up a 500-seat restaurant next to the Georgia Dome, and make a lot of money. But I want to make money on my own terms, doing what I care about, not just chasing the dollar.”

What Chef Truex cares about most is promoting a mindfulness about what we put into our bodies. Eating seasonally from what is grown locally, he maintains, is the way we are supposed to eat. “Visit Japan, Italy, rural France. Eating locally is a way of life; it’s what they know. It’s what your body understands and what everyone is trying to get back to.” Chef Truex thinks that in this country, “the way we eat is killing us,” and that the costs involved in transforming our diets would be more than made up with a reduction in health care costs.

Working with small-scale farms and growers presents some challenges for Repast’s owner. “One of the biggest difficulties is availability,” says Chef Truex. “Sometimes, small operations, they are just like small business, subject to more fluctuations than larger business. Also, you get your produce right out of the ground as it comes, trimmed or not, in varying sizes. Small farms are limited in their resources to prepare the meats with the cuts you want, too. You might get more uniformity when dealing with a larger processor.” However, the personal relationships he says he develops go a long way toward solving any problems. “What’s great about it is working with growers directly to give me my produce the way I want it, learning more about the product, about the people who grow it, the stories. I couldn’t do that with a large company. I wouldn’t even know who to call.”

Even once the product is in hand, Chef Santiago must still be vigilant about making the most of it. Buying local organic and seasonal goods can be more costly than the more traditional methods of procurement, and in the current economy, every penny counts. Chef Santiago keeps a careful eye on his produce and the bottom line at the same time. “Maintaining the fresh ingredients is all about taking care of them. Like our local tomatoes, for example. We buy local, we place them in a ripening area and check them daily to see which ones are going to get used today.” Chef Santiago also cleverly manages his food costs by employing some very old-fashioned thinking to his modern kitchen. “The way I work is, I cut my costs by making sure I am using everything, every possible part of my ingredients. I get, say, a whole trout; I don’t throw anything away but the guts. If it comes with roe, we use the roe for caviar. The bones we make into stock. We get the most out of the product by making sure nothing goes to waste.” Chef Santiago says he can save between 5% and 8% on his food costs just by conserving.

Despite the added costs of sourcing high quality meat and produce from small local farms, a move that Chef Truex estimates adds approximately 20% to his food budget over more traditional mass-produced goods, he resists the drastic lowering of prices that some restaurant owners have resorted to in this economy to keep customers coming back. “I can’t start just saying everything is 20% off. It dilutes my operating integrity. If I got this hangar steak on the menu for $18, and suddenly I am charging $14 for it, customers are thinking, ‘Well, you must have been overcharging me for it before.’” Chef Truex keeps his fan base loyal, he says, by concentrating on adding value. “I’m running a small plates promotion right now: five different small-plates for $5 each; also, a wine promotion, selling a list of good wines apart from the regular list. I might sell a $50 bottle of wine for $40. I’m going to take a little less money, but [my customer] gets to eat great and drink great. And I am going to sell more that way.”

“It’s tough on the pocket, that’s for sure. It’s more work, it’s more expensive, it’s more everything. But it’s all about social conscience,” says Chef Santiago. “You’re able to serve produce you’re proud of, that is not full of preservatives and hormones. After all, it’s what I eat every day, too.”

April 2009

By Michael Wall and Natasha Mack

Sustainability is one of the hottest buzzwords in America these days. Its presence in economic rhetoric, green marketing, political speech and corporate advertising threatens to dilute its true meaning and render the word itself empty.

Georgia is full of restaurant operators who are part of this massive effort. For starters, the single largest measure a restaurant can take to be gentler on the Earth is to buy from local, sustainable sources. Here’s why: The agricultural industry is responsible for roughly one-third of all greenhouse gas pollution. That puts “farming” on par with the thousands of coal-fired power plants around the world that belch CO2 by the ton, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

But one must use the word “farming” loosely. As the recent peanut scare proved, many food operations more closely resemble industry than farming. Most of the beef, chicken and pork on the market is raised not so much on pastures, but in industrial plants. And large-scale farms on which feed and commodity crops are grown are only able to produce plants because of an arsenal of petroleum-based fertilizers.
Avoiding foods from commercial farms goes a long way toward supporting the type of sustainable society that will leave the planet healthy for future generations.

Buying locally vastly reduces the greenhouse gas emissions that are emitted by shipping conventional foods. On average, food travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork.

It’s impossible to catalog all of the statewide efforts to be greener, but some innovators are leading the restaurant industry down the path toward sustainability.

“I believe a huge part of sustainability is using local products when possible, and working with local farmers supports the local economy,” says Ron Eyester, Executive Chef and owner of Food 101 in Morningside. “I support them and they support the restaurant.”

In addition to cooking with local and organic foods, Pizza Fusion in Buckhead uses hybrid cars for pizza delivery, buys wind energy offsets and offers classes on organic food for children. The restaurant is in a LEED-certified space and is designed to be extremely efficient and environmentally friendly.

Watershed’s Executive Chef, Scott Peacock, is one of a handful of chefs who have taken the race for sustainability to a new level by giving his used fryer grease to a nonprofit that turns it into biodiesel, a fuel that can power any diesel-burning car with little to no greenhouse gas emissions. The operation that converts the grease to fuel, a nonprofit venture called Refuel Biodiesel, also collects grease from Emory University’s cafeterias for free, and in turn supplies the university with biodiesel for its shuttle buses.

“Restaurants may not know it, but they hold the key to fuel sustainability because their used grease is perfect for making a clean-burning alternative fuel,” says Rob Del Bueno, founder of Refuel Biodiesel.

Billy and Kristin Allin, the chef and owner of Cakes and Ale in Decatur, have gone so far as to plant their own 1/2-acre vegetable and herb garden. They are extraordinarily thorough about recycling, and convert another waste stream, leftover food scraps, into a rich fertilizer for their garden, utilizing worms for faster composting. “It’s really about planning, planning to use everything we get out of the garden and using our compost to put the food trash to use on making rich, fertile soil,” Billy says.

Dynamic Dish, operated by David Sweeney, in the Sweet Auburn-Martin Luther King, Jr. historic area of Atlanta, is also in a LEED-certified building. Sweeney drives to farms and farmer’s markets to buy the fresh, local produce he serves, and he returns his compost back to the farmers from whom he buys his food. Each day, he writes the menu on a blackboard, reducing paper waste.

His motivations, like those of other thoughtful Georgia chefs, are linked to seeing beyond today, beyond the shortsightedness that causes industry to pillage the planet and deny the next generation access to a healthy, thriving environment.

Sweeney says, “It sounds strange, but it’s actually possible for you to eat for a better way of life. It’s possible to eat in a way that’s healthier for you and healthier for the natural environment.”

Georgia Organics is a member-supported nonprofit organization working to integrate healthy, sustainable and locally grown food into the lives of all Georgians.