Farm-to-table...really?
It is indeed laudable when a hotel chef or restaurateur claims preference for local, fresh products, even possibly when it comes from their own garden or nearby farm. However, I am a bit wary when someone goes overboard with the "farm to table" hype. Despite the fact that farm-to-table establishments boast the use of “local produce whenever possible,” the truth is that this ambiguous statement can be grossly misleading. In some cases, it’s a downright lie.
Undeniably, there is always a powerful incentive to tell a story. We all want that story - it's a big part of why we go out to eat. If a restaurant can spin you that story about that lamb chop that lived a happy and divine life on the farm, from the beginning to its very last minute…that's wonderful. Not so wonderful is when they are actually serving you chops from sheep commercially raised in controlled pens.
It is sometimes tragic-comic when hotels heavily advertise their “own garden” that in reality turns out to be tiny plot of soil in a smog-filled city center to service more than 100 rooms. Even that is somewhat forgivable. However, when they try to convince us diners with a pinch of fact and heaps of fiction of how much they love growing their own veggies – that’s stretching belief. What gets my goat is when I hear about a solitary beehive on the rooftop of a 200-room hotel, an organic garden as big as a billiard table or when the hotel proudly announces the yearly harvest of a dozen head of cabbages.
After misuse by so many people, there now appears to be a lot of farm-to-table fatigue among chefs and that’s no surprise. The phrase has made its presence everywhere and in many places simultaneously that it has, frankly speaking; become boring! Seeing differently, the farm-to-table description is a misnomer. Correct me if I’m wrong, but, doesn’t all food originate out of a farm or garden even if the food is eventually processed along the way in a huge corporate facility? It’s simply no longer that inspiring.
What’s exciting though, is the growing trend of alfresco dinners in the gardens and farmyards that produced their ingredients. Take ’Food Circle’ at sublime Comporta, Portugal for instance; for this hotel’s most intimate, immersive dining experience, 12 guests - a mix of international visitors and Portuguese regulars, gather around a counter in an open-air pavilion deep within the hotel’s 16,000-square-foot organic garden, every night – between each summer until early-autumn.
The Chef and his team create a different tasting menu each day, based on which of the garden’s 300 varieties of vegetables and herbs are at their peak, as well as sustainably caught fish and pasture-fed meats from trusted local suppliers. They use only ancestral cooking methods, and fire plays a leading role.
It’s the flipside of the farm to table term. Call it “table to farm” if one may…and that’s food for thought!
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex-Hotelier.
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