ICE’s Culinary Management Instructors are seasoned industry professionals who are still active in the industry, working on their own projects while teaching classes at ICE. With such a wide range of experience between them, we decided to ask Julia Heyer and Vin McCann to take a closer look at the business of running a restaurant and sound off on some of the hottest topics in the restaurant world. Today, they tackle if it is feasible for a restaurant to offer hyper-local and seasonal cuisine.

Julia Heyer
We all hear about seasonal, local and hyper-local cooking. (Hyper-local in NYC always makes me wonder why I would want this. Where did the vegetable come from? The small patch of grass between the sidewalk and Second Avenue? Why would that be something guests would covet?)

Be that as it may, hyper-local, seasonal and fresh is certainly a trend and this week Restaurant Management Magazine online wrote about taking it to the next level.

Now, Vin, we have given our share of opinions about proclaimed experts — be they mixologists, food writers or PR mavens. It is another “expert opinion” that renders parts of the article problematic and caused my eyebrows to approach my upper hairline. A proclaimed finance expert with restaurant experience claims that “true freshness” requires clearing out of all produce and vegetables at the end of each night. Every night! Say what? More…

Yesterday, Farmer Lee Jones came to ICE to speak about his artisanal, sustainable farm, The Chef’s Garden. The Jones family farm near Huron, Ohio works exclusively with chefs and provides some of the most sought after vegetables and herbs in the industry. To arrive at ICE on time, he had to leave the farm at 3:30 am, joking, “The roosters weren’t even crowing yet.”

The Jones family has always been passionate about farming. When they were unable to keep up with sky-high interest rates in the late ‘70s, almost everything they had was lost. All that remained was 6 acres and a leaky old farmhouse. The family rallied and started over. Jones said, “We were forced to reflect and rethink how we were going to survive.” Through the farmers’ markets they met a French chef working in Cincinnati. She started asking for more types of produce and emphasizing flavor. Just five years into starting over, the family was forced to make a decision about what direction they would go in: sticking to farmers’ markets or working with chefs. Though most of the family felt that the majority of the their business came from farmers’ markets and the chefs ate up more effort than they were worth, Jones’s father decided that chefs were headed in the right direction and they would work exclusively with them.

Using a chef-driven approach, The Chef’s Garden has become wildly successful. The farm now works with well-respected chefs such as Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller and Alain Ducasse. Farmer Lee Jones is so well known in the food world that he has become famous for his blue denim overalls and red bowtie (he even wears his farm-friendly outfit to black tie events). The farm is able to supply produce to Disney World and ships to a hotel in Hong Kong twice a week. More…