Seeking Out Local Ingredients

For the past several months I have focused my thoughts and my cooking sessions almost exclusively on what my local stomping grounds can supply the restaurant. I've worked and reworked my opening menu to use what produce, grains, legumes, fish, meats and cheese I can predictably procure within a five hundred mile radius from Oct through Dec. I'm cutting myself some slack here. According to Joan Dye Gussow, author of This Organic Life, to create a Locavore menu for the restaurant, I should be using what the earth and seas provide within a leisurely day's drive from New York City's Lower East Side. What we're trying to do at Broadway East is create the most energy efficient restaurant, use the least amount of carbon in the process, support our local agriculture, and still turn a profit.

Questions rattle through my North Fork Cab Franc soaked brain -- like can I get Jay at Dines Farms to slaughter an heirloom pig for us and schlep it to Polam in Greenpoint where it will be smoked, ground seasoned and stuffed into certified organic hog casings? How about NY State wheat that I can have ground and baked into bialys at Kossars for my bread basket or sauerkraut pickled for me at Guss' with the local organic cabbage that we shred or who in Little Italy will take fresh milk from grass fed bio-dynamically raised cows and curdle it into fresh creamy mozzarella and ricotta? And my god, how am I going to "cook" my Montauk Fluke Seviche without lemon or limes? Can the juice of indigenous berries, unripe grapes, crabapples, rose hips, sorrel and vinegars replace my dependence on Florida citrus?

I am positively churning with ideas here, stretching and dreaming up a whole new way of doing business and serving delicious foods to our great New York community. How can we do more with less? Wait, am I nuts? Hello -- where do nuts come from anyway? Don't answer that.

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Peter Berley Flexitarian Chef Peter Berley writes about satisfying the demands of staunch vegetarians and passionate meat lovers at the same dinner table.

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