Community kitchen When Clea Hantman and her husband Jeff Motch were opening Blind Lady Alehouse in 2009, their business partners thought the Normal Heights brew pub should focus on vegan cuisine. Clea and Jeff wanted more casual fare, and meat on the menu. “Our common ground was a desire to be part of the community,” Clea says. “That brought us together.” Clea and Jeff now run three popular and successful restaurants, all with accessible price points: Blind Lady, Tiger! Tiger! in North Park, and Panama 66 in the courtyard of the <strong>San</strong> <strong>Diego</strong> Museum of Art in Balboa Park. And according to Clea, community remains their focus. The restaurants work almost exclusively with <strong>San</strong> <strong>Diego</strong> based businesses, from a paper goods vendor in Clairemont Mesa, to Catalina Offshore Products for local seafood, to <strong>San</strong> <strong>Diego</strong> Soy Dairy, to Home Kitchen Culture for killer cookies. Working with <strong>San</strong> <strong>Diego</strong> farms, though, is harder. “It’s weird to me, because we have so many farms per capita,” Clea says. “But they’re all kind of doing the same things. It becomes like a true struggle.” Sharon Wilson, the chef at Panama 66, uses lettuce to illustrate the restaurants’ sourcing issues. “I probably need 20 pounds of salad greens a day, year round,” she says. Her farm vendors can’t meet that kind of volume. The same problem exists with potatoes (“We go through a crap-load making French fries”) and bulk items like onions and carrots for stock. So she orders these from Specialty Produce, the <strong>San</strong> <strong>Diego</strong> wholesale and retail supplier. They aren’t necessarily grown within a 100-mile radius (locavores aim to constrain their sourcing within that distance), but, “Specialty is a local business, so that’s our compromise,” Clea explains. Sharon integrates local produce from farmers like Sage Mountain Farm into her specials. “I can’t do my entire menu off the farms, but I try to do a good portion,” she says. On Sundays, she goes through her farmers’ produce lists, talks to her colleague, chef Tim Fuller, at Tiger! Tiger! to see what he’s picked up from the farmers’ markets (Tiger! Tiger! has lower volume, so relies more on local farms), and plans the specials, noting each item’s provenance on the menu. Despite the struggles, “I don’t know why more businesses don’t do it,” Clea says of Panama 66 Green Goddess Salad local ingredients Cauliflower from Polito Farms Roasted beets from Sthely Farms Greens from Mann’s Farm in Salinas practicing localism. “We joke that it’s our marketing plan.” Blind Lady, Tiger! Tiger!, and Panama 66 have become known for their dedication to local, endearing the venues to their communities and turning them into local hubs. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, in fact, Clea decided to take that a step further, founding Agents of Change. “Every month, we invite a local charity or organization to set up tables in the restaurants to promote their cause,” she explains. “And then we donate a portion of our proceeds to them.” Her customers, she says, love it. “They’re learning about local issues and really getting involved.” Clea considers Agents of Change one of the best things she’s ever done. “When we bring these folks in, we’re bringing goodness into our business,” she says. “It makes people feel empowered.” The takeaway? Everyone struggles to stay local, from restauranteurs to chefs to home cooks. Some obstacles are baked into the cake. Some are factors of life—we get busy and lose sight of our intentions. But if the struggle is real, so are the rewards, a tighter-knit community and personal empowerment among them. Localism starts with the desire to do better, and can be as simple as a visit to the farmers’ market, or signing up to help a local organization. Or, in my case, reclaiming those veggie beds from the rabbits. D Amy Finley is a cook and writer living in <strong>San</strong> <strong>Diego</strong>. She is the author of How to Eat a Small Country, a memoir about living with her family on a farm in Burgundy, France. 24 edible <strong>San</strong> <strong>Diego</strong> <strong>January</strong>-<strong>February</strong> <strong>2018</strong>
<strong>January</strong>-<strong>February</strong> <strong>2018</strong> edible <strong>San</strong> <strong>Diego</strong> 25
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