Most restaurants in the Bay area follow a simple formula for stocking their coolers. Every few days they call a number and leave a recorded order for their produce needs. It might be with a local produce wholesaler, or even more likely with one of the major wholesale restaurant suppliers like Sysco. The order will be checked over when it arrives the next day, but the provenance of the produce is often much less important to the average chef than price or quality.
The focus on local produce — and menus that are driven by the bounty of the season — is still a novel idea in Tampa Bay restaurants, even though it's far from a new phenomenon in the US. Alice Waters, and many other lesser-known chefs, showed how to do it back in the 1970s, and chefs around the world have relied on local farms for centuries. For Ferrell Alvarez, executive chef at Cafe Dufrain, it's become a guiding principle.
"It's about, like everything else, what I preach to my cooks every day, as corny as it sounds," says Alvarez. "I truly believe in this philosophy — if you put in the effort and you're committed to doing it, you can succeed." Even for Alvarez, however, it took some time to bring the dream to fruition.
Alvarez keeps a daily journal in which he writes down ideas about cooking and restaurants every night. He still has a piece of paper he tucked into the journal six years ago, from a brainstorming session when he worked with Marty Blitz at Mise en Place. "It was a brand new menu with only local ingredients," he explains, his voice rising in obvious excitement. "This has always been a passion of mine."
When he moved to Cafe Dufrain in 2009, Alvarez had a local-foods focus in the back of his mind, but didn't have the time to pursue it. First you have to find the right growers, then you have to arrange to pick up the product — every week, often multiple times. Local farms usually don't deliver.
That's where many chefs are trapped, when the day-to-day of prepping and working the line keeps them from the serious work of seeking out new ingredients, even if they want to.
"Last year I got my kitchen to the point where I wanted it and was able to get out of the kitchen more often," says Alvarez. He started combing the Internet, including Craigslist, to identify local producers he might be able to work with. That's how he found Urban Oasis.
Urban Oasis is a hydroponic farm in the middle of Tampa, on Linebaugh Avenue near Dale Mabry. Husband-and-wife team David and Cathy Hume grow a wide variety of produce for their Friday and Saturday market, but don't see too many chefs. Besides Alvarez, that is.
"Currently, I'm the only chef working with them exclusively," he says. "That gets me a lot of things: collard greens, lettuces, scallions, radishes, tomatoes, herbs." The Humes will also plant things for Alvarez that he requests, and have even started to plan shading strategies and new systems for crops they can grow during the sun-drenched summer months, one of the biggest challenges to year-round local produce here in Florida. The farm is normally closed from mid-June through mid-August, but they're willing to make an exception for Alvarez.
"I'm picking my vegetables on Monday and customers are eating things on Monday night that came out of the dirt that day," says Alvarez. "That's amazing."
Although Alvarez feels that "local" food should come from no more than 60 miles away, he had to make an exception for meat. He orders Mangalitsa swine, grass-fed Wagyu beef, heritage turkeys and more from Pasture Prime Family Farm in Summerfield, Florida, about 100 miles up I-75.
When he needs something he can't find from Urban Oasis or Pasture Prime, he has a list of other sources from around the Bay area and down into Manatee County to fill in the gaps. "At this point, 90 percent of my ingredients are local," Alvarez says.
Despite his dedication and passion for sourcing local foods, he doesn't blame other chefs who can't find the time. He praises Greg Baker of The Refinery, "who really humps his butt to do it," and acknowledges that some chefs try to order local produce from the big guys, whose definition of local is the entire state of Florida. "But if that's what it takes to get it going," he says, "then I'm not pretentious. Cool man, so be it."
And for him, the extra work is worth it. "The tomatoes I get — I feel like I'm the professor, I have a natural passion for it — if you go to Urban Oasis market on Friday and Saturday and buy their tomatoes in season," says Alvarez, "they blow away everything else, no matter where you're buying from."
Buying local also helps the Tampa Bay economy, and keeps him on his toes as a chef. "I write my menu seasonally, to what's available, not just what we want to serve," he explains. "Just take really good products and apply a lot of love."
This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2011.