Yeah, Oregon is Awesome.

These bad boys will be headed onto the menu shortly.  I love living in a place where people just stop by and hand you giant, freshly foraged porcini mushrooms.  That’s an America I want to live in.

In some recent LUC news, we had a marvelous dinner with Evesham Wood; 4 courses paired with a selection of their wines.  It was one of our better dinners in my opinion and I am often our harshest critic.  Here’s a pic of the first course. (We got so caught up in the dinner we forgot to take photos of the rest i.e. we forgot)

Spring Hill Baby Arugula, goat cheese, house cured smoked bacon (Afton), and musk melon from Denison's Farm

Man, the markets are exploding right now!  We have such a wide variety of produce coming through our doors right now: berries, tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, green tomatoes, and cherries.  So many awesome things!  It’s the best time of year to be a chef for sure.

So we are officially back from vacation, with one week under our belts.  We are done with time off until Christmas season hits us, so we are all digging in to work hard.  We’ve added some eye candy to LUC in the form of a new projector.  For practical purposes it can be used in presentations for groups the buy out the restaurant.  But for the most part we’ve enjoyed playing old black and white movies with the sound off.  It really adds some romance to the space.  Ian Johnson, one of the co-owners of LUC, has a film degree from USC and is currently curating the LUC movie queue on netflix.

We have some great events coming up.  We will be attempting to participate in our first off site event at the Bite of Benton.  Because I am our only cook, it becomes difficult to do off site events.  But the structure of the Bite seems to work for us, and we are going to work hard to put out some tasty, tasty food.  Also, I’ll be cooking breakfast August 19th out at Afton Field Farms for their event weekend with Joel Salatin.  Joel is a farmer from Virginia, whom Tyler Jones apprenticed with.  He has written many books on sustainable agriculture and give talks around the country.  It’s an honor to have him out here in Corvallis and be involved in the event!

So, I have said in the past that I am against using our local philosophy as a direct marketing tool: I don’t keep it a secret, but I’m not a fan of yelling it from the roof tops.  I feel like this cheapens the goal.  If you are a fan of local food, you’ll see me in my Luc t-shirt at the markets, chatting with Doug at Denison’s, Julia at MyPharm, etc etc.  The point is that…something inside me doesn’t feel right about it, because it when becomes a marketing angle, it seems to lose it’s soul.  We use local products because we view it as the only way to cook.  It pumps money into our local economy and gives us a chance to get closer to our daily meals.  Plus, it makes our food taste better with out even breaking a sweat. Thistle has proven to many that this model of restaurant can flourish beyond an abstract idea.  They have parlayed their success at Thistle into two new business ventures: Oak and Ivy, and Community Plate.  All three restaurants show that partnering with farmers in the community can work on every level of restaurant: fine dining, casual, and even a sports pub.

While I don’t like to use local food as a marketing angle, I will say that our farmers and ranchers deserve their due.   All I’ve managed to do is buy their delicious offerings and fix them up in a straight forward manner.  I believe that restaurants can operate sourcing most to all of their ingredients from local (and I mean LOCAL) sources with it still being very financially sustainable.  People like quality food, and that is something you can’t cover up when using inferior products.  I believe the keys to it are that the chef has to be willing to work hard, the restaurant has to be small, and the waitstaff has to be well informed.  At Luc, we kept ourselves small on purpose.  It allows us to stay within the production of the farms in our area.  Eric didn’t open his new restaurants until he had his infrastructure in place.  These things, well, they cost you money.  But if you are dedicated to using local ingredients, there are small sacrifices to be made.

So, in a sort of non sequitur, here is exactly who we get our meat and produce from.  We use Bob’s red mill for our grains, and use local producers for things that don’t grown here (mainly coffee).  I’m just putting this list here because, well, it should be somewhere!

Chicken: Afton Field Farms, Corvallis

Duck: Rain Shadow El Rancho, Scio

Beef: McK Ranch, Dallas

Pork: Sweet Briar Farms, Eugene, and Afton Field Farms

Lamb: Anderson Ranches, Brownsville

Rabbit: MyPharm, Corvallis

Produce: Deep Roots Farm, (Corvallis), Denison’s Farm (Corvallis), Gathering Together Farm (Philomath), and many other stands at the markets through the seasons.

We also get eggs from a variety of local farms through an egg brokerage known as Egg It On.  They are on a specific diet and have a gorgeous fatty, orange yolk.

I’m sure I leaving many out.  We get goat cheese from Nancy Chandler at Alesa Acres Farm and buy locally made cheeses from other when we can.

This makes a nice lead in for next blog topic.  If you notice, all of our main proteins come from single ranches that lie within a 30 mile radius of our town.  What this means is that we don’t buy from brokerage ranches when we can avoid it.  What’s the difference?  We finally discuss it next time!

Awhile back I promised you all a break down of motivations for  sourcing local food versus buying from the big industrial combine.  As you know, we buy all of our meats and produce from local farms and ranchers.  But as I hinted at in my post was that sourcing locally can also be fraught with peril.  There are businesses and farms that have branded themselves well enough, that people don’t question the locality of their products.  I promise that I will flesh this out with examples in my next post, and we’ll get this argument started!

In the mean time, I’d like to keep you all abreast of the goings on here at Luc.  One big change: liquor is officially on it’s way!  Yes that’s right, Luc will soon have a bar, complete with a brand spanking new, comfy, lounge-y banquette across from the bar.  We’re working on our list of cocktails, which , in the spirit of our restaurant, will be a small, handcrafted list of specially chosen cocktails.  These will probably contain zero fruit juice, fruit infusions, and will most likely represent classic cocktails done with an eye to detail.  We expect no more than three ingredients in each, a list topping out at 8 drinks, and some pretty serious omissions (sorry mojito and old fashioned).  Our philosophy is that there are many bars in town that specialize in those types of cocktails, and they do them very well!  We, as always, want to bring something else to the table.  We hope you find something new to fall in love with!

Lastly, we had a fantastic wine dinner with the good folks at Gilbert Cellars on June 7th, hosted with Avalon Wine and C&G distributing.  We had our good friends Earl Crammer-Brown (C&G) and Marcus Looze (Avalon) lending a hand, and I think a good time was had by all.  We were even graced by Justin Nuefeld, the wine maker at Gilbert.  Here’s some pictures!

Foie gras terrine, apricot jam, rye toasts

Roast of Beef Tenderloin, Purple Potato Gratin, Escarole and Spinach Salad, Cherry Balsamic reduction

Seared Albacore, Orange sesame jus, tobiko, micros

with house bacon, white beans, dijon, radish greens.

Yeah, I gotta get back to this blog world.  Before I make any promises, I’ll try to get a flurry of shorter posts out here.

Luc is currently on vacation.  This is completely new to me and for most restaurants, but we realized that we needed it.  We’ve all been going full speed since opening the place in May 2010, and now we are quickly approaching our one year anniversary.  Since we are run by an entire staff  of 6 people, we were never going to get a break unless we just stopped and took one.  The kitchen is really (really!) run by Lawrence and myself 5 days a week. We have no back up plan and no sick/vacation coverage people.  It’s really a poor plan   But we both love the work (well, I do) and I can’t really imagine being elsewhere.  But it does drain ones creative batteries, and the week off could not have come at a better time.  WE had a killer Valentines Day Weekend, notching our highest sales in a week EVER! And the response we got from 90% of our customers was an amazing,  “Enjoy your vacation, we’ll see you next week.”  Thank yo all so much for the overwhelming support.

I’d also like to welcome back Baguette sandwiches!  I’ve missed you guys, and your tasty bahn mihs.  So tasty and affordable,  the town is grateful to have you back.

On the horizon, our YCAP dinner hosted by Thistle and paired with Eyrie Vineyards is fast approaching on April 17th.  Menu  planning is under way and we’ll soon be knee deep in meetings to pair wine with our food.  Should be a great time, and supports a great cause.

I’m going to hold off on my discussion of what makes local local, and the difference between buying a brand and buying from a farm until later.  I think I’ll have a bit more time to flesh that out this week!  In the mean time, Adrienne is enjoying her vacation with her man Doug in COSTA RICA, and I am remodelling my kitchen with my lady love Kristina.  While our kitchen lacks the tropical warmth and consistent surf breaks of Costa Rica, the project is long over due and will make me just as happy when its done….right?

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!