The Fickle Market

For many restaurants, sourcing ingredients is little more than finding a food company with a large inventory and a reliable delivery truck driver. When, however, you are buying from many different local farms and artisan producers, all sorts of sourcing hurdles begin to emerge. Anything from crop failure to car failure can threaten the dishes listed on your menu. Market irregularity can be managed, even enjoyed, if customers expect it, but in the context of fine dining, fickle markets are difficult to navigate.

Imagine, for example, crafting on Monday a beautiful dish featuring duck confit, blood oranges and baby Naves (tiny white radishes), only to discover on Tuesday that the baby Naves at Gold River Farm had gone soft and wouldn’t be available until next Monday. Next, imagine that you are not aware of this obstacle until 4:45 on Tuesday evening. Guests will be arriving in one hour, some anxious to enjoy the new “Duck Dish” and you are missing the plate’s key garnish component. Add to this grim picture one final complication: you are Chef de Cuisine and the Chef/Owner is away and unavailable to approve of any last minute adjustments you may be forced to make to his menu. If your heart rate is starting to pick up then you’ve probably grasped the potential severity of “sourcing hurdles.”

It was such a set of circumstances that called upon my athleticism, Tuesday. At 5:15 PM I hurled my “chef shoes” into a locker, threw on my puffy vest and lunged out the restaurant’s back door. Pacing down O’Connell Street with a half hour until Pre-Theater service, I sucked in the cool, fresh air. My eyes swelled with the radiant light of the evening sun. My arms and legs swung freely after hours of concentrated kitchen motions. I was racing for radishes!
Three grocery stores and several street markets later, I phoned Cathal in a panic. Not a single Nave in to be found in the city! I was in Fallon and Byrne, a posh organic market on the south side of the city, staring at baby white turnips and willing them with all my might to suddenly rematerialize as baby white radishes.

In the end we settled for turnips and a subtle change in menu wording. As I lunged back to the north side, I realized I was suddenly grateful for the collective vegetable ignorance of the pedestrian traffic I dodged – these people would hardly recognize a baby Nave radish, let alone be able to distinguish it from a baby turnip! Desperate city-wide vegetable searching is hardly the interdependent image people celebrate when they promote farm-to-table dining. But Tuesday’s radish race certainly forced me to think more seriously about the challenge of creating Michelin star plates with an unpredictable market basket.