Hi everyone! I hope you are having a wonderful new year and you are successfully recovering from the holidays. Or at least, your livers are. Life in Luc land has been grand, and life at home has been equally sweet. Settling into a routine with Atti, and thought I’d take advantage of a late night snooze on his part to bring you a new blog entry!
I’ve been thinking a lot about our restaurant, and our philosophy. Luc is a restaurant that follows an older approach that is thankfully becoming a trend in a lot of places. That is, we make everything by hand, and use local fresh produce, meats, eggs, and grains almost exclusively. And in that approach there are many things that come up; issues that we all have to choose sides of the fence on. Do I use single farms and farmers, or is it ok to go with a broker from time to time that represents groups of local farms? Is it ok to buy garlic in the winter when the farms stop producing it? How do I cook with out garlic!?!?! So I thought I’d let you in on my thought process.
One of the questions I get is, why don’t you guys advertise your local, sustainable model more aggressively? Or at all? At Strega, we used to put the names of the farmers and ranchers on the menu and I liked this because it gave many small producers some much needed advertising. But over time, my mind has waffled a lot on this idea. I have grown to really hate the politics of advertising and marketing! I don’t like using the local products as a ploy to get people to eat here. Many restaurants will use a few local products to try to angle in on that market. I could tell you stories of places that buy once from a farmer, slap a name on the menu and switch it to a cheaper product two weeks later. But I’m not here to stir up bad blood. We all make choices. At Luc, we use local products because we don’t see any other way to cook. And I hope that comes through in the food and feel of the restaurant. It seems manipulative to me, because few restaurants (save our friends in McMinville) can lay claim to being “all local” or “100% sustainable.”
The other issue is that not everyone eats at your restaurant because of your philosophy! So folks just heard you were good, and want to check you out. It’s an issue when you choose to stick with local foods, because it means you many have to get rid of some very popular menu items. Salads, greens, fish, meats, and chicken all go out of season. (The free range chickens don’t handle the rainy weather very well.) So we get customers in the dead of winter wondering why there isn’t a green salad on the menu, or chicken, or halibut. The easy answer is that they are all out of season, and the products we could get to replace them would be really inferior. Why is there a dearth of vegetarian options? Not a lot of vegetables are growing right now. But this can also help you to identify restaurants that aren’t selling you what they say they are. Fresh green salad on the menu in January? That’s probably from California, Mexico, or Arizona. Those are the choices that all businesses and restaurants have to make. In the mean time, we just want to keep making food that we want to eat, and hope that enough people trust us not to lead them astray.
As for us, I would like to thank the farms we’ve used through our first year of business. We love the work you do and you make us look good. You know who you are! If your interested in knowing, please come to the markets (winter and summer). Winter market starts on January 15th, and chances are excellent you’ll see me there. In the next entry, I’ll talk about the difference between buying direct and using a broker. The difference is all….financial! Or is it? Stay tuned!
amen brother