Post by Okwes on Jan 6, 2006 0:45:17 GMT -5
Native Foods Restaurant
1) Interview elders in the area about favorite foods and meals they ate when
they were younger as well as meals they heard about that their grandparents
ate. Ask about what they usually ate in a particular month and what they
ate on particular special occasions.
2) Consider what meals would be appealing to the general public as well as
to the local people. Be sure at least 80% is workable for the general
public.
3) Consider grandparents recipes for things as well as much older recipes.
Consider what we now know about nutrition (Get the help of a native foods
friendly registered dietician who is also a good cook). Work out a version
of a recipe that preserves heritage and health and tastes delicious. Try
not to leave any more than 20% of recipes in versions that increase the risk
of diabetes and cardiovascular problems. Have at least one meal suitable
for vegetarians and vegans, but you need not call attention to that fact.
Decide what percent of your recipes you want to be traditional, what semi
traditional, and ones where you might want to use traditional foods in new
ways or in fusion ways. The fusions you choose could depend on what other
ethnic groups are in your area, and what the predominate ethnic groups are
that visit your area. As a start much of the US when choosing an ethnic
cuisine will go for Italian, Southwest/Mexican, or Chinese, pretty much in
that order. But unless you are in LA or some place like that, don't get so
fusiony that it looks as though you have no focus.
4) Use the info to create a seasonal menu. Study the work of Gary Nabhan or
how Alice Waters does this at her Berkeley, CA restaurant and in her
cookbooks. Consider featuring the food of a different group every month on
a weeknight and Sunday. Match month and group to seasonal foods. For
instance if you want to do a southwest west group, you might choose late
summer or early fall when you can get fresh corn, green beans and tomatoes.
If you want to do a New England area group and do venison and cranberries,
you might do them in November or December.
5) Include short stories about each menu item to bring the history alive for
the diner. Focus on the positive aspects of the story. "This was favorite
buffalo dish which Bluebird made for Two Bears in the week after their
wedding." Rather than "This is the last meal which Bluebird made for Two
Bears the evening before his hunting party was slaughtered in an ambush at
Red Hawk Rock." Though both may be equally true. In the positive case you
are doing some marketing that implies that the dish might give one strength
for the strenuous activities of the post wedding week. Be sure to name
dishes things that the general public can easily pronounce as you want to
avoid people not ordering something because they are embarrassed about
trying to say the name of the dish. So if you put Grandfather Ohitekah
Ohanzee's favorite autumn stew on the menu, call it something like Harvest
Moon Stew and use his name in the description.
6) Consider having 10% of the proceeds from a special dish each week
donated to a particular cause (preservation of NA Arts, Arts Teaching, land,
oral history, household or wilderness skills, genealogy research, collection
of recipes for a cookbook, language preservation, local food production,
heirloom seed saving, and more). This would give you an opportunity in a
paragraph or two to introduce travelers as well as regulars to NA skills and
knowledge that is important to preserve while we still can.
7) Get as much food from local farmers as you can. Especially try to work
out partnerships with local Native American farmers to produce a steady
supply of what you need. See the work of Alice Waters and other Slow Food
Chefs around the world in this regard. See also garden strategies(in books)
by John Jeavons, David Duhon, and Eliot Coleman. To have year round food,
consider preserving in season food to use in off season ways on off shifts
in your restaurant. For instance if your restaurant is a lunch and dinner
place, you could have a canning, preserving, drying shift from 10 pm to 6am
Sunday to Thursday nights during harvest times in your area. You may need
an offsite storage location with rooms of varying temperatures and humidity.
More areas are realizing the importance of local food and many people are
specifically choosing to eat at local nonchain restaurants that source most
of their food locally. Or you could have a local food processor preserve
the food to your specifications. If something really catches on you may be
able to sell that item as a product. See Silver Palate salad dressings and
Rao's pasta sauces as examples. Another advantage to getting local food
systems set up is that your restaurant will be ahead of the game as fuel oil
production declines and it becomes more expensive to ship food long
distances. Plus the local sustainalbly grown food will taste better, and be
higher in nutrition. In addition to local seed resources check Seed Savers
Exchange and Native Seed Search.
8) Use education as a way to increase customers.
a) Have school classes come to your restaurant in the morning for a class
about Native American foods. Then serve them lunch at 11 so they will be
finished by main lunch hours.
b) Connect with or start a Slow Food group in your area. Having some of the
events at your restaurant will bring lots of people and publicity.
c) Offer food for historical reenactment groups as catered meals or a party
room for reenactment dinner and meetings on an otherwise not so busy night
of the week.
d) You may also be able to use contests to increase interest. Have people
submit recipes based around a certain theme or list of ingredients. This
can be for tradtional recipes or for traditional foods used in new ways.
(Have a cookoff or not of the top ones.) Add recipes to the menu as
desired. Create cookbooks. Peter Gail does this really well with his
Dandelion Cookoff.
e) Look carefully at current and upcoming items on the Food Network. What
part of your restaurant fits in with some of their shows? Restaurant
makeover, Rachel Ray's travel, secret life/food history/unwrapped or
9) When doing some of the more exotic dishes, choose to do minorly exotic
dishes to start with. Then slowly work in some more unusual ones once
people begin to trust that whatever you make is going to be good. Also
start out using ingredients that overlap 90% with your other proven menu
items. That way if for some reason, people don't take to a particular dish,
you can use the ingredients easily in the rest of your menu.
10) Be sure to price menu items to cover the cost of the food at the time
you buy it and any additional storage or processing if needed. Be sure the
pricing works for any time you are going to have the food on the menu.
Keeping most of menu seasonal will eliminate many of the pricing issues
though.
11) Check the successful restaurants in your area for lunch pricing
strategies, but consider having 5-10% of menu be items that a person on a
low budget could afford, about 70% at a medium level and about 20% at a high
level. For dinner a 10/50/40 split might be more suitable. It's good that
if you have a business work group or friends that wants to eat out together,
that the person with the struggling student budget can get something to eat
with their friends rather than the whole group having to go to Taco Bell to
accomodate the lowest income person.
12) Plan to use all the parts of all the food that you buy. Some examples:
a) Use onion peel, celery leaves, and meat bones to make stock.
b) If a vegetable is cooked repeatedly in the same water(refrigerating
overnight) for several days, it can make good stock or a base for that sort
of soup. In regular US restuarants this is often how carrot soup and
broccoli cheese soup are created.
c) Invent some new dishes with NA flair if necessary to use up things. For
instance if you are using chickens for other dishes, but don't have a NA
saleable recipe for chicken livers, invent something like Cranberry Pemmican
pate to serve on a mixed appetizer platter.
d) Cook things in ways that allow you to create a second product rather than
trash. For instance to make mashed potatoes, bake and scoop to leave a
cooked intact skin rather than peeling and boiling chunks of potatoes. This
is how restaurants can cleverly sell the skin for more than the potato. And
if you were to used spiced ground buffalo in your potato skin boats, you
could call them Buffalo Skins. (instert big groan here :-) )
e) Look at all the parts, scraps, liquids, peels, etc and ask How could
this be a new product rather than landfill?
13) Try to create a zero waste restaurant. More and more localities are
requiring that businesses and homes significantly reduce waste. In places
where people are working with this, significant numbers of people choose a
restaurant based not only on how good the food is, but if it also has taken
steps to reduce waste.
1) Recycle paper, cardboard, glass, reusable bottles, metal, delievery
containers.
2) With local farmers, try to set up something so there are two sets of
delevery bins. One the product is delivered in. The second you have
emptied and are giving back. Another advantage of local is that often it
can involve no packaging.
3) Order things according to zero trash packaging. For example get dry
beans in a box or tin rather than a plastic bag. Get tea bags without
staples. Try to get things in reusable rather than recycle containers.
4) Rotate compost back to your farmers. Have two containers for each
particpating famer. Put seeds, peels, egg shells, grounds into the compost.
If only part of your food is organic, the compost may only be able to go to
the not officially organic farmers. Not sure on that one.
5) See what is available in your area for meat, cheese, fish, bone, fish
shell composting. This sometimes takes a different process. Some farmers
can bury the fish waste for fertilizer.
6) In some areas the food that people don't eat (from food that went to the
table) can be refrigerated, recooked and fed to pigs. Though there are some
things that people can eat, but pigs can't so this would need to be checked.
7) In some areas the food that wasn't eaten but stayed in the kitchen can go
to soup kitchens or homeless shelters.
8) Used cooking oil can go to people who make biodiesel.
9) Use real dishes and silverware and cloth napkins. Use reusable covered
containers in the kitchen rather than disposable items.
10) Use filtered water for drinking rather than bottled.
11) Use a hot air hand dryer rather than paper towels in bathrooms and
kitchens.
14) Educate your waitstaff so they know about things on the menu. Pay
employees a living wage so you can keep all your good people and they can
live in a dignified manner. Try to create a culture of frugal simplicity
among your employees so that they will be ahead of the curve as more people
come to realize that there is more to life than consumption. Encouraging
them in finding nonmoney ways to enjoy life and in sharing info with each
other. Connect them up with the local freecycle group. Encourage them to
set short and long term life goals of all sorts and to read Your Money or
Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin and The Complete Tightwad Gazette
by Amy Dacyczyn and to adapt the info to their traditional way of life. If
your restaurant is off reservation far enough that employees need housing,
see if another NA family might buy an apartment building nearby with your
employees having first choice of the apartments. See if some older people
who are good at moving between reservation and nonreservation life would
serve as mentors in helping them move toward longer term goals like more
schooling or owning their own house. Look at what else your employees might
need and try and develop connections to good people for those things as well
(doctors, dentists, daycare). Make the health of your employees a high
priority and part of their job requirement.
15) Use space in your restaurant such as walls and a locked glass case near
the cashier to promote NA artists. Some of the space could be devoted to a
particular artist who changes every month. This could include a dinner or
appetizer style artists opening which could generate publicity for both. If
someone is making dinnerware pottery, consider having a special menu item
served in that dish and putting something in the menu about the pottery.
For example "The Rainbow Corn soup bowl in which the Bison and Rainbow Corn
Soup is served along with matching plates and cups is available at the
cashier's counter."
16) Most states have people who help new businesses start up. See what
yours has. Also check with health department and some of your local bug
spray people who service restaurants. They can tell you ways to set up your
restuarant that makes it easier to keep it clean and healthy. They may also
know of buildings with perennial utility or physical problems that you will
want to avoid.
17) Keep asking yourself how you can make your place and your work fun for
you, your customers, and your employees.
Sharon
gordonse@one.net
1) Interview elders in the area about favorite foods and meals they ate when
they were younger as well as meals they heard about that their grandparents
ate. Ask about what they usually ate in a particular month and what they
ate on particular special occasions.
2) Consider what meals would be appealing to the general public as well as
to the local people. Be sure at least 80% is workable for the general
public.
3) Consider grandparents recipes for things as well as much older recipes.
Consider what we now know about nutrition (Get the help of a native foods
friendly registered dietician who is also a good cook). Work out a version
of a recipe that preserves heritage and health and tastes delicious. Try
not to leave any more than 20% of recipes in versions that increase the risk
of diabetes and cardiovascular problems. Have at least one meal suitable
for vegetarians and vegans, but you need not call attention to that fact.
Decide what percent of your recipes you want to be traditional, what semi
traditional, and ones where you might want to use traditional foods in new
ways or in fusion ways. The fusions you choose could depend on what other
ethnic groups are in your area, and what the predominate ethnic groups are
that visit your area. As a start much of the US when choosing an ethnic
cuisine will go for Italian, Southwest/Mexican, or Chinese, pretty much in
that order. But unless you are in LA or some place like that, don't get so
fusiony that it looks as though you have no focus.
4) Use the info to create a seasonal menu. Study the work of Gary Nabhan or
how Alice Waters does this at her Berkeley, CA restaurant and in her
cookbooks. Consider featuring the food of a different group every month on
a weeknight and Sunday. Match month and group to seasonal foods. For
instance if you want to do a southwest west group, you might choose late
summer or early fall when you can get fresh corn, green beans and tomatoes.
If you want to do a New England area group and do venison and cranberries,
you might do them in November or December.
5) Include short stories about each menu item to bring the history alive for
the diner. Focus on the positive aspects of the story. "This was favorite
buffalo dish which Bluebird made for Two Bears in the week after their
wedding." Rather than "This is the last meal which Bluebird made for Two
Bears the evening before his hunting party was slaughtered in an ambush at
Red Hawk Rock." Though both may be equally true. In the positive case you
are doing some marketing that implies that the dish might give one strength
for the strenuous activities of the post wedding week. Be sure to name
dishes things that the general public can easily pronounce as you want to
avoid people not ordering something because they are embarrassed about
trying to say the name of the dish. So if you put Grandfather Ohitekah
Ohanzee's favorite autumn stew on the menu, call it something like Harvest
Moon Stew and use his name in the description.
6) Consider having 10% of the proceeds from a special dish each week
donated to a particular cause (preservation of NA Arts, Arts Teaching, land,
oral history, household or wilderness skills, genealogy research, collection
of recipes for a cookbook, language preservation, local food production,
heirloom seed saving, and more). This would give you an opportunity in a
paragraph or two to introduce travelers as well as regulars to NA skills and
knowledge that is important to preserve while we still can.
7) Get as much food from local farmers as you can. Especially try to work
out partnerships with local Native American farmers to produce a steady
supply of what you need. See the work of Alice Waters and other Slow Food
Chefs around the world in this regard. See also garden strategies(in books)
by John Jeavons, David Duhon, and Eliot Coleman. To have year round food,
consider preserving in season food to use in off season ways on off shifts
in your restaurant. For instance if your restaurant is a lunch and dinner
place, you could have a canning, preserving, drying shift from 10 pm to 6am
Sunday to Thursday nights during harvest times in your area. You may need
an offsite storage location with rooms of varying temperatures and humidity.
More areas are realizing the importance of local food and many people are
specifically choosing to eat at local nonchain restaurants that source most
of their food locally. Or you could have a local food processor preserve
the food to your specifications. If something really catches on you may be
able to sell that item as a product. See Silver Palate salad dressings and
Rao's pasta sauces as examples. Another advantage to getting local food
systems set up is that your restaurant will be ahead of the game as fuel oil
production declines and it becomes more expensive to ship food long
distances. Plus the local sustainalbly grown food will taste better, and be
higher in nutrition. In addition to local seed resources check Seed Savers
Exchange and Native Seed Search.
8) Use education as a way to increase customers.
a) Have school classes come to your restaurant in the morning for a class
about Native American foods. Then serve them lunch at 11 so they will be
finished by main lunch hours.
b) Connect with or start a Slow Food group in your area. Having some of the
events at your restaurant will bring lots of people and publicity.
c) Offer food for historical reenactment groups as catered meals or a party
room for reenactment dinner and meetings on an otherwise not so busy night
of the week.
d) You may also be able to use contests to increase interest. Have people
submit recipes based around a certain theme or list of ingredients. This
can be for tradtional recipes or for traditional foods used in new ways.
(Have a cookoff or not of the top ones.) Add recipes to the menu as
desired. Create cookbooks. Peter Gail does this really well with his
Dandelion Cookoff.
e) Look carefully at current and upcoming items on the Food Network. What
part of your restaurant fits in with some of their shows? Restaurant
makeover, Rachel Ray's travel, secret life/food history/unwrapped or
9) When doing some of the more exotic dishes, choose to do minorly exotic
dishes to start with. Then slowly work in some more unusual ones once
people begin to trust that whatever you make is going to be good. Also
start out using ingredients that overlap 90% with your other proven menu
items. That way if for some reason, people don't take to a particular dish,
you can use the ingredients easily in the rest of your menu.
10) Be sure to price menu items to cover the cost of the food at the time
you buy it and any additional storage or processing if needed. Be sure the
pricing works for any time you are going to have the food on the menu.
Keeping most of menu seasonal will eliminate many of the pricing issues
though.
11) Check the successful restaurants in your area for lunch pricing
strategies, but consider having 5-10% of menu be items that a person on a
low budget could afford, about 70% at a medium level and about 20% at a high
level. For dinner a 10/50/40 split might be more suitable. It's good that
if you have a business work group or friends that wants to eat out together,
that the person with the struggling student budget can get something to eat
with their friends rather than the whole group having to go to Taco Bell to
accomodate the lowest income person.
12) Plan to use all the parts of all the food that you buy. Some examples:
a) Use onion peel, celery leaves, and meat bones to make stock.
b) If a vegetable is cooked repeatedly in the same water(refrigerating
overnight) for several days, it can make good stock or a base for that sort
of soup. In regular US restuarants this is often how carrot soup and
broccoli cheese soup are created.
c) Invent some new dishes with NA flair if necessary to use up things. For
instance if you are using chickens for other dishes, but don't have a NA
saleable recipe for chicken livers, invent something like Cranberry Pemmican
pate to serve on a mixed appetizer platter.
d) Cook things in ways that allow you to create a second product rather than
trash. For instance to make mashed potatoes, bake and scoop to leave a
cooked intact skin rather than peeling and boiling chunks of potatoes. This
is how restaurants can cleverly sell the skin for more than the potato. And
if you were to used spiced ground buffalo in your potato skin boats, you
could call them Buffalo Skins. (instert big groan here :-) )
e) Look at all the parts, scraps, liquids, peels, etc and ask How could
this be a new product rather than landfill?
13) Try to create a zero waste restaurant. More and more localities are
requiring that businesses and homes significantly reduce waste. In places
where people are working with this, significant numbers of people choose a
restaurant based not only on how good the food is, but if it also has taken
steps to reduce waste.
1) Recycle paper, cardboard, glass, reusable bottles, metal, delievery
containers.
2) With local farmers, try to set up something so there are two sets of
delevery bins. One the product is delivered in. The second you have
emptied and are giving back. Another advantage of local is that often it
can involve no packaging.
3) Order things according to zero trash packaging. For example get dry
beans in a box or tin rather than a plastic bag. Get tea bags without
staples. Try to get things in reusable rather than recycle containers.
4) Rotate compost back to your farmers. Have two containers for each
particpating famer. Put seeds, peels, egg shells, grounds into the compost.
If only part of your food is organic, the compost may only be able to go to
the not officially organic farmers. Not sure on that one.
5) See what is available in your area for meat, cheese, fish, bone, fish
shell composting. This sometimes takes a different process. Some farmers
can bury the fish waste for fertilizer.
6) In some areas the food that people don't eat (from food that went to the
table) can be refrigerated, recooked and fed to pigs. Though there are some
things that people can eat, but pigs can't so this would need to be checked.
7) In some areas the food that wasn't eaten but stayed in the kitchen can go
to soup kitchens or homeless shelters.
8) Used cooking oil can go to people who make biodiesel.
9) Use real dishes and silverware and cloth napkins. Use reusable covered
containers in the kitchen rather than disposable items.
10) Use filtered water for drinking rather than bottled.
11) Use a hot air hand dryer rather than paper towels in bathrooms and
kitchens.
14) Educate your waitstaff so they know about things on the menu. Pay
employees a living wage so you can keep all your good people and they can
live in a dignified manner. Try to create a culture of frugal simplicity
among your employees so that they will be ahead of the curve as more people
come to realize that there is more to life than consumption. Encouraging
them in finding nonmoney ways to enjoy life and in sharing info with each
other. Connect them up with the local freecycle group. Encourage them to
set short and long term life goals of all sorts and to read Your Money or
Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin and The Complete Tightwad Gazette
by Amy Dacyczyn and to adapt the info to their traditional way of life. If
your restaurant is off reservation far enough that employees need housing,
see if another NA family might buy an apartment building nearby with your
employees having first choice of the apartments. See if some older people
who are good at moving between reservation and nonreservation life would
serve as mentors in helping them move toward longer term goals like more
schooling or owning their own house. Look at what else your employees might
need and try and develop connections to good people for those things as well
(doctors, dentists, daycare). Make the health of your employees a high
priority and part of their job requirement.
15) Use space in your restaurant such as walls and a locked glass case near
the cashier to promote NA artists. Some of the space could be devoted to a
particular artist who changes every month. This could include a dinner or
appetizer style artists opening which could generate publicity for both. If
someone is making dinnerware pottery, consider having a special menu item
served in that dish and putting something in the menu about the pottery.
For example "The Rainbow Corn soup bowl in which the Bison and Rainbow Corn
Soup is served along with matching plates and cups is available at the
cashier's counter."
16) Most states have people who help new businesses start up. See what
yours has. Also check with health department and some of your local bug
spray people who service restaurants. They can tell you ways to set up your
restuarant that makes it easier to keep it clean and healthy. They may also
know of buildings with perennial utility or physical problems that you will
want to avoid.
17) Keep asking yourself how you can make your place and your work fun for
you, your customers, and your employees.
Sharon
gordonse@one.net