Sustainable Food

Amidst the chain restaurants, the ethnic food extravaganza, the corner diner and the upscale organic eateries, there's another restaurant emerging, and it caters to those who love to eat local food. Restaurants for locavores are a new trend that is time-tested.

Once, the food we ate was mostly local, and serving local food from local farmers was simply logical. It was what was there. However, as the food available to us expanded, restaurants featured new and exotic dishes, providing an experience that we might not get at home. Now many of these foods have become part of our everyday eating. The banana split, the mandarin orange: all of these foods are standard imports. We've forgotten what our local food is, and we've forgotten how good it tastes.

No more. In local food restaurants, local is the main attraction on the menu. This might be preserved foods, meat, or cheese in the winter, fresh greens and fruits in the summer.  While these restaurants aren't strictly local, they exist to cater to the emerging locavore market, to inspire others to try local food, and to provide just plain good cooking, local style.

Think of a local food restaurant as your grandmother's kitchen, times ten. It's a place where it's possible to rediscover the simple delights of fresh-baked bread - if grain is local to your area. However, like all restaurants, the local food restaurant also exists to delight with strange and wonderful and downright inspiring concoctions. The best part is that instead of exotic imported ingredients that need to be sourced from arcane specialty stores, these restaurants feature ingredients that grow in your neighborhood. You can make this food too, and you can make it better than anyone in any other region of the world, because this food lives here.

Local food restaurants support local farmers. Many of them have symbiotic relationships with community supported agriculture ventures and farmers' markets, and some of them have their own restaurant garden plots. They're an important and reemerging part of a thriving local economy, in which we rediscover our palate for local fruits and vegetables and other delights. Local food restaurants have the ability to reshape our palates and inspire our cooking. Instead of feeling intimidated and even put off by what is available locally, these restaurants make us eager to try the produce of our own communities.