How Not To Spend Friday
Steve and I are off to get our King County Food Handler’s Permit today in order to do serve up a surprise coffee taste testing at tomorrow’s Harvest Fair being put on by Seattle Tilth. It’s running 10am to 5pm and located at Meridian Park, behind the Good Shepherd Center (4649 Sunnyside Ave N) in Wallingford.
In the meantime, I’ve been calling restaurants non-stop to try and build a flyer of restaurants that support organic, locally grown, sustainable and/or seasonal produce/proteins. I have to say once more that calling restaurants is not fun. Anything other than the words, “I’d like to make a reservation…” will immediately cause the wagons to circle about 50% of the time and shut you out. The other 30% of the time I am getting through, I get to play phone tag or leave voice mails.
The one interesting thing I have learned however, is that the head/Executive Chefs apparently do take near complete control of sourcing, as I am almost always told to talk to the chef to get my questions on sourcing answered. Not having worked in an actual restaurant, it’s nice to know that the chef does get the biggest say on what they get to use. That said, I have been mainly calling contemporary style restaurants thus far, given that the chances of Red Robin using organic lettuce or your local teriyaki joint using free range chicken is slim to none.
Anyhow, enough of a break. Back to work, work, work.
Related posts:
Hi,
I’ve been browsing around your website/blog and just wanted to drop you a line about this post: I agree %100. I work for a small food and farming non-profit, Cascade Harvest Coalition, and I’ve had fun days trying to call restaurants to ask sourcing questions. It’s nearly impossible unless you already have your foot in the door (i.e. know the chef personally). Good luck dealing with Google. They’re the new Microsoft.
Comment by Mark — January 6, 2009 @ 6:26 pm