Buffalo Rising Online

Apr 1st, 9:47am By Christa Glennie Seychew

Tonight, Buffalo First (in conjunction with Slow Food Buffalo and MAP) is hosting a massive brainstorming session in their new office in the Market Arcade Building.

I first heard of this event a few weeks ago when Slow Food's David Setzer called me to see if I knew of any chefs interested in speaking with farmers about sourcing local food. I am very fortunate to have made the acquaintance of a good number of talented local chefs that are passionate about using regional ingredients. Phone calls were made and it wasn't long before we'd unearthed chefs eager to take part in any event that might make serving local food in their restaurant an easier task. Those that aren't available this evening are anxious to hear the tale of the evening's events and to be apprised of the resolutions that may have been found. We were also lucky to recruit some farmers from our CSA profiles last fall, too.

See, buying local isn't as easy as it looks if you're a chef in Buffalo.

Most of Buffalo's fine dining restaurants change their menu two to four times a year in order to take advantage of the season's best produce and to provide their clientèle with seasonally appropriate food. You may love a good braised short rib, but is it really suited to an evening's meal in the full heat of August? So the wise chef moves forward with proteins, produce and preparations that reflect the season.

In WNY (and many other areas of the U.S.), the trouble comes along when that chef seeks to purchase local ingredients. He has to be sure that he can procure quality ingredients with regularity before he can add it to his standard menu. A different restaurant model (like that of the former beloved Coda) may change its menu weekly in order to take advantage of our region's bounty on a moments notice, but most restaurants do not have the stamina or the structure to operate under such trying (though valiant) circumstances. Most often, chefs who seek to utilize local ingredients end up using them in a nightly special, the ingredients themselves having come from the chef's visit to a farmers market.

Some chefs can alleviate this issue by purchasing a share or two from a CSA, but, as my friend and associate Chef JJ Richert of Torches told me, “Quite honestly, I don't have time to play What's in Your Basket every week, I need to know what is available, and I need to be able to get good quantities of things that aren't as easily found. Take for instance ramps (see inset). I want to know where I can get ramps and I want as many as I can get, as often as I can get them.”

Once upon a time, Buffalo chefs would rise at dawn and head down to The Clinton-Bailey Market to buy fresh produce from the many local farmers that sold their wares there. The Clinton-Bailey Market is seeing a resurgence in interest, but it is certainly not as busy as it used to be. Local restaurateurs like Mark Hutchinson (Hutch's) still visit the market regularly and have wisely brokered deals with specific farmers for hard to obtain or specialty items. But this arrangement is less than ideal for many chefs and farmers.

But chefs, especially those that own their own restaurants, never have enough of one thing, and that's time. Consequently, that is often the same issue for farmers. And when you think about the opposite hours that these two groups of dedicated professionals maintain and the distance between an urban restaurant and a rural farm, it's no wonder that there is difficulty in making the connection between the two.

WNY has a lot of other issues when it comes to connecting the producer to the consumer. For decades, unlike our region's forefathers, we've traveled to the corporate supermarket for our home groceries and chefs have ordered in trucks of food that come in from clear across the country. Those connections that once brought food from the farms outside of the city to our grandmother's corner store and to local restaurants have been broken or have dissipated due to lack of use. My peers and I have begun to refer to this as WNY's Broken Food Chain. And it isn't all about produce. There are even bigger issues when it comes to commodities that require processing and/or refrigeration like meat and dairy.

Hopefully tonight's meeting will begin to take us in the right direction, which, at the moment, may actually be backwards. Back to a time when it was easiest and made the most sense to eat what was local, what was in season, what was fresh.

Let's hope that passion, good intentions, and the pursuit of sustainability and good food can come together tonight to form an organized unit with the momentum to drive the changes we need to see in our local food community.




Lead photo depicts farmers before dawn at the Clinton-Bailey Market