Saturday, March 30, 2024

Menu a regional food road map

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Italy’s Tuscany region is steeped in culinary tradition, reinforced and even stereotyped by the expectations of millions of tourists.
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But one restaurant in Florence is taking a different approach to traditional menu fare while acknowledging and even deferring to the farmers whose produce features. Richard Rennie visited to sample the food, and talk to its managers about how Foody Farm is turning traditional Tuscan cuisine on its head.

When Foody Farm opened its doors a year ago in the Tuscan capital of Florence, its owners had already spent six months developing the restaurant’s unique menu. 

The eclectic selection they came up with captures latest trends in customer eating habits and the move away from heavy main meals. 

Instead, it acknowledges touring taste buds enjoy sampling a broad range of tastes, textures and approaches to traditional cuisine.

That includes incorporating a mix of street food style servings, using different cuts of meat and adding a fun element.

Dishes range from samples of cheeses from three species of animal, slow-cooked chicken and hay-wrapped steaks to old fashioned burgers with regional sausage patties. 

It is an extensive, multipage menu, almost a regional culinary road map that encourages customers to mix and match their meal preferences and ultimately complete their journey with a deeper appreciation of the region’s artisan operators.

But rather than sequester chefs away in the back kitchen to develop the combinations themselves, Foody Farm’s owners stepped out into the Tuscan countryside to talk to the region’s leading farmers who use traditional methods of production and were happy to see their work showcased in often non-traditional food styles.

“Typically, if you set up a restaurant in Italy you start with this catalogue that contains everything Italian and just tick the boxes on what you want to include,” Foody Farm operations manager Luca Salamini said.

“Our question to that was, ‘why put something on the menu someone else has chosen?’ so we went straight to the farmers themselves.”

Despite outsider perceptions the Italian food scene is an artisan, hand-crafted industry comprising multiple small-scale operators the reality is the country’s food industry is often hugely industrialised. Often only a few small family operations survive, making their particular product in the shadow of enormous global operations.

A key requirement for Foody Farm was to respect the limited capacity the chosen artisans had, to be sure they would not overstretch farmers’ ability to offer regular supply of a product and to match it with a dish that would accommodate that. 

The legwork through the Tuscan countryside resulted in a network of about 15 farmers and farmer co-operatives committing to the Foody Farm philosophy. 

For some it was the first time they had ever been personally approached by a restaurant wanting to showcase their particular product.

“The result really was that these farmers, these producer groups wrote the menu.” 

The products include a fascinating mix of meats, cheeses and produce, sometimes served with touching simplicity that ensures the product is the hero of the plate and palate. 

Well up in the forested back blocks of Tuscany Salamini hunted down a farmer whose pigs roamed in the Casentinesi National Park and would come running out of the trees when he sounded a klaxon. 

Their pork is showcased on a sliced cold meat dish with multiple types of salamis on offer.

Salamini said the most difficult to source product was free-range chicken, solved when he came across a family business inCortona that had been running since 1960.

Their special breed features in a sandwich that has it slow cooked, served with scrambled egg and truffles, lettuce, mayo and another farmer’s Maremma bacon with fries. 

Alternately, it comes simply roasted, cooked for 12 hours at only 72C.

“What we wanted to do was to take our diners on a journey from where the food came from. And we wanted to be able to do it at a price they could afford, not what you would pay in a Michelin star type restaurant.”

Foody Farm had tipped over some preconceptions about pricing. 

One top-end restaurant dropped a farmer who had decided to also supply the more egalitarian dining outlet. Typical menu prices easily accommodate both the locals’ and tourists’ budgets.

The opportunity is also there for diners to visit any of the farmers supplying the restaurant.

Salamini says the operators have deliberately avoided hanging the business’ marketing around the descriptor Tuscan, something they believe has become as abused as used.

“Locals took a bit of time to accept us and sometimes have taken a couple of visits to adjust. 

“They are finding just how extensive the menu is and that they can dig deeper into the dishes, exploring the complexity when they return next time.”

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