Keeping up with the Joneses - Industry Spotlight - The Chef's Garden specialty farm

Art Culinaire, Spring, 2002

Q: Why is that?

A: We've got eighty families we're supporting; there is a price to this. These are snap beans right here; we plant about an acre each week and there are eleven varieties, one of which is a baby haricot vert. It takes three men one-and-half hours to pick one pound. We are in different rows picking different varieties every day. We harvest per order and we don't inventory more than a day. We forecast what our needs are for the next day and we'll harvest that. Something that's extremely labor intensive we'll harvest a day ahead. Our goal is to have it on the plate in twenty-four hours.

Q: How did you build your client base?

A: Most of our clients are recommended by word of mouth. We never intended to be any restaurant's sole source of produce. We want them to have their own local purveyor that they can rely on for staple items. Our niche is helping them put the icing on the cake.

Q: Who is your ideal customer?

A: We have a model that we've come up with over the years; there are certain characteristics we look for: the size of the restaurant, menu, style of service. Some of the best restaurants in this country are less than one hundred seats. You understand; there are tiers of restaurants, levels of restaurants in this business. We are dealing with that upper tier. You can tell very early on the folks who don't have an appreciation for heirloom vegetables and won't be using them in a way that Chef Trotter and others are using them. We want everyone to have positive experiences. Some chefs, like Chef Trotter, are willing to have us send a 'mystery box' of produce. Essentially this is a box of the best of the day, no matter what it is. Chef Trotter, who estimates that two-thirds of his customers never look at a menu, knows his dinner guests will appreciate the experience. We want chefs to make money using our product.

Q: How do you instill in your employees a desire to meet the chefs' expectations?

A: We try to place employees according to interest and achievement. You know, most of our people are locals; our harvest guys are Artist Becky Colon Dickenson's rendering of The Culinary Vegetable Institute migrants. We do not frequent these dining establishments. So, the end result of what we do is really something that was hard for us to envision. I think Chef Trotter understood that; he really is about education and training his people. He offered his facilities as an extension to us to train our people-some of them had never eaten any place but fast-food restaurants. For them to sit down at Charlie Trotter's was a real experience. We watched the sous chefs prepare the meal while Chef Trotter explained what products were being used on each plate. As we ate each dish, Chef Trotter explained the flavors that each component contributed.

The Chef's Garden clientele is loyal. "No one in the country is doing anything like it, not even close," enthuses long time client Chef Christopher Hastings of the Hot and Hot Fish Club. "Every year when I come here, they've always reinvented some little wheel; they're upgrading, tweaking this, tweaking that." For this reason, Hastings is a tireless supporter of The Chef's Garden's most recent undertaking: The Culinary Vegetable Institute. This state-ofthe-art facility hopes to entice chefs away from their own kitchens for a visit to the working and breathing fields of Huron, Ohio. Equipped with an experimental kitchen, prep space, library, and communal dining room, and plenty of acres to browse, The Culinary Vegetable Institute will welcome its first visiting chefs in the Fall 2002.