Rick Bayless Profile
Rick Bayless on Sustainable Agriculture and the Restaurant Business
(originally written for the Corporation for the Northern Rockies)
When Rick Bayless opened the Frontera Grill, one of the first things he did was go to the wholesale market looking for the beautiful strawberries that he’d seen offered at roadside stands outside the city. “You won’t see those here,” he was told. “We don’t carry those.” It was 1987 and the local strawberries were considered too fragile and too difficult to handle by the local wholesalers. They weren’t interested. In fact, Rick, who was determined to source as much of his restaurant with local meat and produce, found that the only way to do it was to go out there himself and hunt down the farmers who were producing the quality products he wanted.
It was difficult at first. At the time, there were very few Farmer’s Markets in Chicago, and there was a historic animosity between farmers and chefs that took Bayless a while to overcome. Farmers didn’t trust that chefs would buy from them on a reliable basis, nor did they trust that they’d be paid the price they’d agreed upon. Bayless recalls that it took him a whole season to convince one of his purveyors that he was a reliable customer. One by one, Bayless had to convince farmers that he really did want their produce. To overcome their doubts he started contracting ahead of time, promising to buy an entire season’s worth of produce, and as word spread that Frontera Grill really did want local products, and that they’d pay for them, Bayless found that he was building the kind of network that so many fine dining restaurants have come to rely on, a network of people who really care about food. His purveyors, Rick says bring in their vegetables “… like their little babies. It’s certainly not just a commodity to them.”
He was aided by a resurgence in boutique farming in the Chicago area. As more and more people became interested in growing organic produce and raising organic livestock, Bayless found that not only was the quality of his provisions increasing, but that the “the relationship between farmer and produce rubs off with the cooks – they know how hard these people worked and it really means something. Both farmers and chefs are so hardworking.”
Rick and his wife Deann have two restaurants in Chicago, the Frontera Grill, which they opened in 1987, followed in 1989 by what was one of the first fine-dining restaurants in the country specializing in Mexican cuisine, Topolobampo. Both restaurants have been enormously successful, have gained national attention, and have garnered any number of awards. As has Rick, who was chosen “Best New Chef of 1988” by Food and Wine magazine; voted “Best American Chef: Midwest” in 1991 by the James Beard Foundation; and who won both the Beard Foundation’s National Chef of the Year award and the International Association of Culinary Professionals Chef of the Year award in 1995. As well, in 1998 Rick was chosen as the Beard Foundation’s Humanitarian of the Year.
Not only do Rick and Deann run two fine restaurants, a full-time job by any standard, but in 1995, they started Frontera Foods, a specialty-food company which distributes authentically-prepared Mexican products in supermarkets and gourmet stores. When not running his restaurants, scoping out local purveyors, or building a specialty-food company, Rick somehow finds the time to research and write award-winning cookbooks and host cooking programs for PBS. No casual cookbook author, Rick and his wife Deann, dedicated over six years to culinary research in Mexico, culminating in 1987 with the publication of his now-classic Authentic Mexican: Regional Cooking from the Heart of Mexico (sadly, it’s out of print); in 1996 he published Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen, and in 2004, he released Rick and Lanie’s Excellent Kitchen Adventures: Recipes and Stories, a book about cooking with his daughter that he hopes will encourage parents to cook with their kids.
Rick’s work ethic and concern for community values extends to his charitable work. He serves on the Board of Directors for Chefs Collaborative, which supports environmentally sound agricultural practices, and he’s active in Share Our Strength, the nation’s largest hunger advocacy organization. In 2003, Rick established the Frontera Farmer Foundationto promote small, sustainable Midwestern farms serving the Chicago area, by providing them with capital development grants. Rick believes that small local farms, which often struggle financially, are more likely to promote biodiversity by planting a wide range of produce and to operate using organic practices. As well, because they take an artisanal approach to agriculture these farmers insure the highest quality food while they add immeasurably to the fabric of their local rural communities.
When asked about why he expends so much effort seeking out and supporting organic farmers in his region, Rick admits that although he’s concerned about the environment and our food supply, for him “it’s really the care that the small organic farms take that’s most seductive to me – in the end it’s about the flavor.” Since he began seeking out local produce in the late 1980s, Rick’s found and developed enough purveyors that during the growing season, he can source about 90% of his restaurants’ needs with local products. Not only that, but he’s discovered that even during the legendary Chicago winters he can supply about 40% of the restaurants needs with local produce, mostly greens like spinach and pea shoots, many of which are being grown by farmers using the kinds of hoophouse and row cover techniques that the Frontera Foundation has been instrumental in helping to fund.
Along with buying locally, Rick insists that restauranteurs and cooks need to start thinking about old-fashioned ideas like preserving local produce to be used out of season. Rick swears that through the judicious use of his freezers, he can rely on local produce for much of the year. In a given summer the restaurants will put away fifteen- to seventeen-thousand pounds of tomatoes, and they also freeze other seasonal produce including tomatillos, strawberries and even lime juice for those months of the year when his purveyor in Southern California can’t supply them with fresh limes. He admits that freezer space can be a real limiting factor. For a long time the restaurant relied on a row of home freezers in basement – eventually they put in a walk-in, and this past year, Bayless says, they invested in a real Cryovac machine to replace the “ramped up home vacuum sealer” they’d been using up until then.
Rick’s dedication to buying food from “real people” means that even those items he can’t get from local sources are still contracted “from a real person” – he gets his limes, for instance, from a biodynamic farm in San Diego county and he contracts to have coffee grown by a fair trade co-op in Mexico. It’s then shipped north and roasted in the restaurant. Rick sells this same coffee in grocery and specialty stores around the country as part of his Frontera Foods specialty line.
Because of his yearning to do business with “real people,” Rick has wound up as a sort of steward to a whole group of small farmers in the Chicago and southern Wisconsin area. Take, for example, the story of how Rick came to get his chickens. The chicken producer was originally a pork producer. The problem was that the restaurant had two pork producers, and they liked them both, so they convinced one of them to go into chickens. The farmer had raised chickens as a kid, so said he’d give it a try. “At first,” Rick says, “the size was irregular, and the birds were kind of tough.” But Rick told the chicken producer that the restaurant would hang in there until he figured out the chicken business. Rick says this relationship took some creativity on the restaurant side as well – they loved the taste of these chickens, but one of the things that made them taste good was that they’d had a real life. This meant that they were always going to be chickens that were a little tougher than the average American diner was used to. Eventually they discovered that if they brined the breasts before grilling, they wound up with “… the best chicken in the whole wide world.”
When asked about the common perception that sustainably-ranched meat products are inconsistent in quality, Rick’s response is that just as he was with his chicken producer, you have to be patient with and you have to commit to your suppliers. “You have to consider yourself a partner with your purveyors,” he says. “ You have to develop an interdependent relationship between your suppliers, not just treat them like they’re interchangeable.” Fifteen years ago, when Rick started working with the woman who supplies his lamb, it was exactly this patience and commitment that made the relationship a success. They spent the first two years figuring out how to raise the kind of lamb the restaurants needed. “ It took her a long time,” Rick says. “But now the lamb is perfect and consistent and gorgeous – so good that we bone out the leg muscles and everyone thinks they’re prime cuts.”
As for the common complaint that sustainably-ranched meat products are too expensive, Rick says, “you have to know how to cook. The job of the cooking schools is to teach how to utilize other cuts. I mean,“ he continues, “anyone can sauté off a lamb chop.” Balance is the key, he says. With careful portion control, and creative cooking techniques that use the entire animal, you can control your costs and run at per-plate rate that is comparable to the national average. For instance, when Ricks’ pork producer brings them the loin, they cut the ribs off at the restaurant and use them for a separate dish later. Rick also does some creative bartering – he splits the cost of lamb with a fellow restauranteur. Bayless keeps the legs and shoulders, and the more expensive cuts go to the other restaurant. That way they can both use local organic lamb instead of a commodity product.
Although it’s not a product local to the Chicago area, Rick uses Montana Natural beefwhich he likes for it’s quality, and because he has access to information about the sources – he uses Coleman beef when he can’t get Montana Natural but doesn’t like that with Coleman he can’t get any information about the ranchers. When asked about the debate between which is better, grass-fed or “green finish” beef, Rick replies that he “can’t stand that it’s a conflict.” For Bayless, as always, it comes down to having a relationship with the ranchers, and finding beef with the best flavor. They’re just different from one another, he says. “Nutritionally, grass fed beef is great, but again it comes down to knowing how to cook. I can cook it so it tastes really good.” He notes that in Chicago, where steakhouses are popular, many of them are starting to offer a choice between grass fed, green finish, and conventional steaks. “It’s great,” Rick says, “because they’re educating the consumers that it’s like different flavors.”
Bayless has also benefited from the urban gardening movement, and buys a lot of his produce from people who are building gardens right inside the city. “There’s this group called The Resource Center” he says. “They go out and find open lots, often they’re pieces of property that have been sold but won’t be developed for a couple of years, and they go and put in gardens. For a while, they had a big garden at Cabrini Green.” (A notorious Chicago housing project which is in the process of being torn down.)
Rick’s commitment to sustainability extends not only to his sourcing, but to how he handles his restaurant waste. A couple of years ago, Rick and his team discovered that although the commercial waste collection company they’d contracted with claimed to be recycling, in reality they were just dumping all the separated waste in the landfill. Fed up, the Frontera team decided they were just going to do it, they were going to find a way to recycle. Turns out that the Resource Center folks who were pioneering urban gardening, were also pioneering a commercial recycling program. Now the two restaurants recycle all of their post-consumer food waste, as well as glass, cardboard and plastic.
What really comes through when talking to Rick is how his commitment to sustainability isn’t limited to any one part of his business. It’s part and parcel of the creative, engaged approach he brings to everything he does, whether it’s building relationships with his purveyors, building exciting, vibrant restaurants where people can learn how much more varied and interesting Mexican food is than they might have thought, to his cookbooks and television shows. He says that forging the kinds of relationships he has with his purveyors “Is so much more interesting. It makes me a better chef. I have to learn how to cook everything. That’s why I got into this.” This is someone who wants not just to cook beautiful food in his restaurants, but who wants to foster relationships between real people and real food; who wants to bring people together, whether it’s American diners and our neighbors to the south, or farmers and chefs. It’s clear that this is a chef whose drive and creativity are making a real difference in the food industry as we know it.