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“Farm to Table” Foods with Water from Fiji? |
I’ve worked in restaurants since I was fourteen years old so until I left Tra Vigne in 2000 and put my love affair with running a restaurant on hold, I’d never really paid full pop for a restaurant meal. One great benny of working in the biz is getting the bill with the you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours markdown. Going out there as a civilian diner, you feel very different when the bill comes.
I’m fine with paying top-dollar for the damned good food that chefs are making from our amazing Northern California produce. I’m not fine with the water portion of the bill. I’ve found that a table of four to six people can spend upwards of fifty bucks on water during a meal. One hundred dollars on wines from Italy? No problem; if it’s great wine, I don’t even blink. Fifty dollars on water from Fiji? Stop right there. What bothers me most is how far that water has to travel to take second place on the table. I have this image in my mind of a tanker steaming across the ocean filled only with bottles of water, and that image does not sit well.
Before my fellow restaurateurs come at me, let me say, I get it. We need to make money. The costs of running a restaurant these days are prohibitively high, especially for newcomers and especially given the cost of real estate in this area. You have to make your margins where you can. And I also believe there is a place for expensive imported water. During one incredible tasting menu at Bazaar in Los Angeles, Vichy Catalan water was poured instead of wine with one of the courses, and it was spot on: saline, mineral-rich. Mind-blowing.
At Bottega, instead of importing our water, we’ve put in a very good water system. I sleep better at night knowing that we are not supporting a big burn of fuel to ship in water. There are some things I have trouble giving up: Italian wines, some Italian ingredients, Italian shoes but water is one area where I don’t want to squander resources shipping in water from around the globe. Do you agree or do you think there’s a place for an imported water menu in a restaurant? |
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