Even the big guys are getting into farm-to-fork.
Once
the province of food activists and culinary cognoscenti with a granola bent,
the locavore movement is gaining ground as a business strategy with larger
restaurants. The term “farm-to-table” used to be attached predominantly to
smaller, chef-driven restaurants where local farmers' freshest determined
the night's menu. Atlanta-based Farm Burger serves locally
sourced, grass-fed beef.
Lately,
seasonal and sustainable food is finding its way to the menus of chain
restaurants. According to Nation's Restaurant News, farm-to-table is one of today's fastest-growing foodservice trends.
And,
while more and more Americans care about the zip code of their food, they want
their so-called “elite meat” at less-elite prices.
Tender
Greens, a fast-casual chain founded in Los Angeles in 2006, has eight
locations, with five more opening in the next year. Each location is devoted to
a certain foodie-level consciousness, offering local-lettuce salads and
biodegradable plastic-ware. Still, even in the heart of Hollywood, only one
item on the menu costs more than $11. Even so, sales at the restaurant's
collective locations were projected to reach $26 million last year.
Paul
Martin's American Grill is another California-based chain whose owners'
business plan called for leveraging the farm-to-table concept in an area where
it's particularly popular. The
upper-tier chain touts local spinach and pasture-raised meats like the Pitman
Family Farms bird, which the restaurant uses in its signature brick-chicken
dish.Paul Martin's works with more than 40 other regional purveyors.
According
to the grill’s PR director, Candice Uyloan, co-founders Paul Fleming and Brian
Bennett saw a need for restaurants serving “classic dishes made with
peak-of-the-season ingredients at accessible prices." Those prices are
approachable on a relative scale — dishes can reach $22 on the upper end of the
menu.
Fleming and Bennett’s gamble on conscious consuming seems to have paid off; the restaurant will open its fifth location this year after just five years of
business.
The
farm-to-table boom isn’t limited to the West Coast. Farm Burger, an Atlanta-based farm-to-table
burger restaurant, is thriving.
Farm
Burger is accessible and boasts an ethic that today's brand of conscious-buying
(and cost-conscious) consumer can get behind. “It taps into something the
general public is looking for more and more these days,” Frangos says. “Not
just in quick-service restaurants, but also in their fine-dining concepts and
throughout.”
Frangos,
who isn't trying to hit a fine-dining market, eschews expensive tablecloths and
fancy flatware so he can devote his capital to buying lettuce from local farms.
“There
are lots more areas where we can shave dollars and be economical and, in turn,
that's just more dollars we can put into the local food system,” he says. “For
us, in each different market, it's about really connecting, building
relationships and incorporating them into our business.”
John
Ko owns The Local Taco, a Tex-Mex restaurant with a local bent and Southern
flair. He opened his first restaurant in Nashville, Tenn., and now owns five
locations throughout the Southeast. Ko sources locally for each of his
restaurants, which means each location has a slightly different menu.
“The
food's not going to be exactly the same, but I want to get away from the chain
restaurant mentality where everything has to be cookie-cutter and you have to
order in bulk everywhere,” he says. “I want every restaurant to feel different,
like it's part of the town.”
Like
Frangos, Ko can't source everything locally, and sometimes his tomatoes aren't
heirloom. “From a business perspective, we can't get everything locally and
still charge $2.75 a taco,” he says.
“But
we try to push the envelope on what we can put in a taco,” Ko says. “If we can
buy something locally or in season, we try to buy from that farmer.”
For
Frangos of Farm Burger, farm-to-table is simply part of his makeup. In the late
'90s, he managed Restaurant Nora, a pioneer of the sustainable food movement on
the East Coast and the first certified organic restaurant in the country.
“It was organic and biodynamic before anyone knew what those terms meant,”
Frangos says.
And
it was well before the rise of farm-to-table as fad.
“Everyone's
definition of farm-to-table can be different,” he says. “(And) there's a lot of
what people are calling 'greenwashing.' It's hot and it's popular, so people
might apply it to what they do, but they might not have the passion for it,” he
says.
Earlier this month, Frangos was the keynote speaker at the 2013 Farmer-Chef Connection
Conference in Portland, where he addressed the faddish-ness of farm-to-table —
and how to keep it real while keeping prices down.
"Everyone
does it and everyone gets it at this point,” Frangos says. “Now, it's about
moving beyond the label and making it more successful.” And making it more successful
these days means making it affordable.
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