CRESCENT Places: Grits & Groceries (Part 3)
CHARLESTON LOSING JOHNSON & WALES UNIVERSITY
HEIDI: Shame on them for losing that.
When I was in school in Charleston, I think the restaurants were great because they had a great source of qualified, cheap labor with all the students at Johnson and Wales. Because we worked for $25 per day shift pay. You’d work for noon to midnight. You wanted to be there. I think what’s happened is they lost that work force, but Charleston has rebuilt itself as the hottest food area right now thanks to… Thanks to Sean Brock for getting the name out.
JOE: The last 3 James Beard Award winners (Best Chef in the Southeast) have come from Charleston with Sean Brock, the guy that owns FIG (Mike Lata), and the guy from Hominy Grill (Robert Stehling). Basically, that’s the last 3.
HEIDI: Obviously, they’ve rebuilt their work force. Our biggest problem between here and New Orleans is that, in New Orleans, there are so many independent restaurants and they’re good. Here, there are so few independent restaurants. We’re competing with chains and that’s really hard for us because they have the buy-in-bulk power to buy food and keep it at a price that we don’t. So maybe 2 years ago when the prices really got outrageous, our supplier went up 30% on everything. We said, “OK, we’re going to stop buying and only buy local.” Local is 80% of what we buy. It comes within a 100 mile radius of us. We try to buy everything we can from South Carolina first and then we work to the closest state to us to keep as much money in our tax zone as possible. I mean, I need a BMW because it is made in South Carolina. I would love a BWM SUV (Editor’s Note: So would we.). We have about a dozen farmers who grow for us. It took a while for us to convince them we would buy enough for them to grow. They kept showing up with 4 tomatoes or 5 pounds of okra. We use 60 pounds of tomatoes a day. We’re serving from 350-400 people on Saturday. We’re serving 1000 people a week.
BEING ABLE TO BUY LOCAL
HEIDI: We got shrimp from Saudi Arabia one day. Can you imagine that? Shrimp from Saudi Arabia? We don’t use them, but our salesman was trying to sell us shrimp from Saudi Arabia and I was like, “What? Why can’t we have South Carolina shrimp?”
He told us it’s cheaper. And evidently, we (the United States) paid to build the aqua-culture beds there. They’re raising shrimp in the desert with government dollars. That’s my understanding. I haven’t researched that. It’s my understanding, “We’re sorry we bombed you. We’re going to give you an industry, and we’ll buy from you.”
Our menu changes every day, so that gives us the flexibility to work with who’s growing what. Come December, January, February, we have to get very creative with who’s growing what so that we can have local food. It will grow here all year but it is such a small market, we don’t have enough people growing for us. So this year, I’ve committed to 2 small farmers to buy everything they produce through the winter.
I may be giving it away, I may be cooking it, but I’ll buy it so they’ll grow it for me. It’ll be greens, Swiss chard, green-house tomatoes.
We have a guy that grows green-house lettuce and tomatoes. I don’t know what he did before, but he did something very technical before he started this hydroponic lettuce and tomatoes. It’s fabulous and wonderful. It grows in a pod. He has zero waste with it. Everything left over goes to his livestock. He makes this perfect mix of natural fertilizer, I guess is the word, the natural fertilizer tea the lettuce grows it. It’s sweet, it’s perfect and it’s local. He brings it to us 3 days a week when we’re using a lot and 2 days a week in the winter when we’re not using as much.
THE LOCAL AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITY RESPONDS
HEIDI: We had a really hard time, maybe 3 years, of convincing people to grow enough food for us in enough variety. We could get tomatoes, peppers, cabbage and greens, but we have someone growing asparagus and broccoli and Swiss chard. We needed someone to grow more variety for us so for the first 3 years we worked on that. Made a network of people. To know a network of people and actually ask them to plant different plants for us. They were “Oh, wow, people are interested in this. I can sell it.” We just had to introduce them to it. I think it is funny. People think we cook really far out food, but it’s not. We’ve just gotten used to Main Street food — beans, broccoli, spinach, and zucchini. That’s all you see in a restaurant because it is cheap, it lasts a long time, and it grows in Guatemala, so we can get it cheap.
So to get people to grow Jerusalem artichokes… I love Jerusalem artichokes. Nobody knows about them any more. When I was a kid, Jerusalem artichokes grew everywhere. They were peasant food. You pull them up and you can do anything with them you can do with a potato. We made a pickle with them. My granddaddy’s pickle.
WHAT CAN BE DONE WITH SOUTHERN FOOD
HEIDI: It’s just like a purlow, you can put anything in a purlow. Same thing in New Orleans in jambalayas and gumbos. Anything can go in there and make a meal. We’d put out Sunday dinner for friends sometimes and we might have 20 people show up, we might have 200, just depends on how big the pot of rice is. Need more food, make more rice. We’re good to go.
SATURDAY NIGHTS AT SAYLORS
HEIDI: Since there are so many chain restaurants, we try not to eat in a chain restaurant. Sometimes we were wishing we had food from New Orleans or food just the way we want it, so we decided we would just open up on one Saturday night a month. We would sell 100 tickets to it and we would cook whatever we wanted. It’s always a different theme. It’s exactly what we want. May not be what the market wants, not the most trendy food. September we used the “Charleston Receipts” cookbook and recipes that I’ve always loved out of it. We’re doing a meal out of it. We’re trying to do 12 different dishes and the idea is it is not where you just come in, sit down, eat and leave. It is 3 hours. We have music. We put food inside, we put it outside. You have to sit with people you don’t know.
It’s like our own little mini-festival once a month. October is “Cowboy Steak” night. We have a local beef grower that we’ll buy. The last time, we bought a half a cow and had to cut it in quarters. We cooked it on our smoker outside. Just sliced big slabs off of it.
WHERE THEY GO WHEN THEY’RE NOT COOKING
For me, it is sushi. I go to Greenville and eat at Tsunami. That’s what I really want. And the other thing is from New Orleans. We miss the eclectic soul food. We miss the mom-and-pops that aren’t American food. Middle Eastern, Vietnamese, Thai restaurants, so we like to go to the Middle Eastern restaurant in Greenville, the Pita House, we’ll stop in there. It’s really good. The food is really fresh and nice. Here, we have a Mexican restaurant, but it’s not super authentic, but they are our only neighborhood restaurant that buys food and cooks from scratch. Called El Titanic. Yeah, the true guilty pleasure. What’s that good ice cream shop?
JOE: Danny Bell’s
HEIDI: Danny Bell’s. (Looking at Joe, she asks) Is that your guilty pleasure or just pleasure? There’s a place in Honea Path that has no sign that backs up to this taxidermist. There is a sign that says “Either way, you get your goat back.” He has hamburgers, grilled chicken. That’s it. He has a hot dog, but he gets fresh ground meat every day. He has 12 seats and they’re closer than this (motioning to her own dining seats) and they have the best…it’s fresh ground beef. He picks it up from somewhere everyday. When you order, he takes a big handful of beef, slaps it on this grill that he’s been cooking on for 30 years, so it’s well-seasoned. Good hamburger bun. He steams them and warms them up. Good condiments. All year long, he has the most beautiful tomatoes. He’s got a contract with God to get those from somewhere. Perfect hamburger.
Stay Tuned for Part 4 Next Week. Read Part 1 HERE. and Part 2 HERE.
