Devra Gartenstein's Blog, page 2

Building a Kitchen

We've been hard at work outfitting a new space for Patty Pan. Some of the work involves hands-on building, sanding, texturizing, painting, and installing. Other phases involve standing around and scratching our heads, ruminating, brainstorming and problem solving.

I've built kitchens before, and it's always been a lonely and stressful endeavor. I'm not especially handy and I don't know much about building materials so the process has always required making decisions involving large sums of money that I didn't really have, basing those decisions on scant information and insufficient experience.

It's so different building this kitchen as a coop. Between us we have construction experience, artistic sensibilities, networks to scavenge building materials, and plenty of camaraderie. We're sharing the burden and excitement of making decisions, the frustration of snags and the glory of breakthroughs.

When I built my first tiny kitchen in Fremont, I hired a friend of a friend to build a custom walk-in cooler in an odd-size space off the main kitchen. We submitted a drawing to the building department and they took six weeks to look it over before sending it back with the concerns about the format of the drawing, but no real issue with our actual proposal for the walk-in. We redrew the plans and resubmitted them, paying additional fees and delaying the project several weeks.

When I built the Lucky Palate kitchen on Queen Anne, I paid a professional $1000 to draft a layout drawing and help with contracting logistics. He presented the price tag as a good deal and he may have been telling the truth: compared to the revenue from drafting a floor plan for a full service restaurant, my project must have been barely worth his while. Still, $1000 was a lot of money to me.

This time around we bought cad software and drew up the plan ourselves. There was a steep learning curve but we learned new skills and the health department accepted the drawing the first time around. We've had similar experiences with everything from relocating light switches to moving heavy equipment.

It feels strange to say, but this time around we may actually be having fun.

Hiatus

Haven't been posting for a bit, but I just wanted to let you guys know that we're enjoying our cooperative business model, and we have some exciting things brewing.



Back soon.

Economy of Scale

 I've been working with folks at the University of Washington to create a Humble Feast event on campus. We've got a group of about 25 students planning to prepare a tasty, affordable meal and serve it to a community of students interested in sensible food choices and local food economies. We'll be using the kitchen and dining room at the Husky Den, the eating establishment in the student union building.


The meal is supposed to be an educational event, showing some strategies for keeping costs low while using good ingredients. This poses an interesting challenge for me: I use creative purchasing arrangements to buy food in bulk for Patty Pan and I'll use many of these same ideas to buy ingredients for the dinner, but it's not always simple to translate these strategies so they're useful for students.



Patty Pan's purchasing model is based on buying leftovers directly from farmers at the end of each market day. This works for us as a business: we're insiders and we do everything we can to give back to the farmers whose surplus we're buying, from feeding them quickly when they're hungry to bringing back their waxed boxes. But many farmers I know become downright surly when customers try to buy produce cheaply at the end of a market day. (One farmer even answers affirmatively when customers ask for end-of-day deals, and then inflates the price as he calculates: a cluelessness surcharge, if you will.)



Why are farmers offended when customers ask for discounts late in the day? It's no secret that the food is perishable and may end up as compost or food bank donations. They're surly partly because they feel that the practice is unfair to the loyal customers who pay full price throughout the day. In addition, the act of asking for any discount--at least in this culture--implies that you don't feel the product is worth its original price, and folks who spend all of their summer daylight hours trying to keep their farms healthy and solvent resent the insinuation that their produce isn't worth the amount they typically charge.



Most farmers I know say they can grow a lot more than they can sell, but unless they stretched themselves too thin vending at too many markets or increased sales by lowering their prices, they wouldn't be able to sell the additional produce. Lowering prices would be counterproductive because it would involve investing even more time and labor to earn the same amount of money.



Some of this surplus is a necessary, built in part of the food and agricultural systems as we know them, both on a small and a large scale. Most customers want food that's cosmetically appealing, rather than wilted or full of bug holes. A farmer never knows exactly what's going to sell--or even exactly what's going to grow abundantly--so they hedge their bets and grow a range of options, leaving the less successful beds unpicked.



There must be a way to bridge the gap and use some of this wasted food to help folks who want to eat well but can't afford it, while also offering farmers a financially viable business proposition. I think the answer lies in finding the sweet spot where it's worth it for a farmer to part with these leftovers for a lower price bringing in some extra income without cutting into regular farm revenue. It also helps to approach the issue with sensitivity and respect.



For the UW Humble Feast dinner, we're organizing a gleaning outing to the university farm. We'll be paying the farm to let us come pick. There's a bed of chard slated to be plowed under: the don't have the labor to pick it or a customer who would buy it but it's lovely chard, and we're going to use it all.



I love the idea of paying to glean, and I wonder what other kinds of applications it could have.



By the way, if you want a good deal at the end of a market day, show that you're a loyal customer, don't ask outright, and don't expect it.

Nettle Soup Allergy Relief

I'm not usually prone to allergies, but I hear they can hit you at any time, and apparently yesterday was the day.



I've been buying stinging nettles from Foraged and Found Edibles at the Ballard and U District markets: they're an early glimpse of spring and while I wouldn't quite say I like the way the taste, my body feels like it needs them. Typically I make nettle pesto by steaming the greens until they're soft and the heat neutralizes their sting, and then I whiz them in the food processor with some goat cheese. That's it. I spread the pesto on crackers or toss it with pasta. Then I add honey to the steaming liquid and enjoy some nettle tea.



When the allergies struck yesterday I wanted something more heavy duty, something that would allow me to eat the entire half-pound bag in a single sitting and set my system back on track. I decided to make a soup, but the larder was mostly bare and the only ingredient that seemed suitable for a nettle soup was a half cup of miso.



I steamed the greens in a big pot, in about a quart of water, and then I removed the nettles, pureed them until they were silky, and whisked the miso into the steaming liquid remaining in the pot. Then I mixed the pureed nettles back into the miso broth. That's it. Two ingredients.



The soup was tasty and rich, and I ate it all. I found myself trying to think of other ingredients that would have enhanced this flavor, but it just didn't need anything else.



I'm also happy to report that this morning I woke up feeling considerably better.

Becoming an Owner

Last Spring when Dev hired me, I became the newest member of the Patty Pan team. I felt lucky to find a group of people who shared my values about food and work and who were so much fun to be around. In late Fall, when Dev proposed turning the business into an employee-owned cooperative, I felt honored that I was asked to be a part of it. I would be able to dedicate a percentage of my working hours each week toward owning shares in the business. No monetary investment up front. All sweat equity. It seemed too good to be true.

On January 1, 2013, when Patty Pan Grill officially became Patty Pan Grill Cooperative, it didn't seem right that there was no fanfare. No unveiling ceremony. No document in the mail. No ribbon cutting. It is a strange feeling to change from being the employee of a business to becoming a partial owner. Gradually, along with the excitement and starry-eyed dreams, I started to feel the weight of responsibility. Having spent most of my working life as an employee, I realized how different it was going to feel to be a part of owning and directing my place of employment - exciting, empowering, but scary.

The transition from sole proprietorship to a cooperative is bound to be interesting and challenging at times. We have all depended on Dev as our fearless leader and she has been incredibly fair, open and accessible. However, now we will have the opportunity and responsibility of weighing in on decisions. Voicing our opinions must not only reflect our own self-interest, but the health of the Cooperative as a whole. Thinking of the all the aspects of our business, from relationships with vendors to annual reports to rolling tamales is overwhelming. Fears creep in about my own inadequacies and what my new role will demand.



It is a big experiment. The only way I'm going to have enough courage to take the necessary steps is to make the transition real by celebrating it. If fanfare feels needed, I’m going to have to make it happen! Accordingly, later this month we will have a party for ourselves. Probably won’t be spending a lot of company funds on booze, though. When you start to be personally responsible for the bottom line, your perspective shifts a bit.












"i must become the action of my fate"  must become the action of my fate" --June Jordan

Becoming a Cooperative

Six years ago I came up with a five-year plan for my future,  right around the time my lovely landlords in Ballard sold the building I was leasing to some not-so-lovely landlords. I was going to take five years to learn some marketable skills and then sell the Patty Pan and do something less physically demanding.



A few years went by and I realized that I didn't want to sell my business. I love what I do: working outdoors, hanging out with farmers,  bartering for amazing ingredients, and getting folks excited about eating vegetables. I love market culture and I love being self employed. I've also seen businesses under new ownership go downhill and I didn't want to see that happen to Patty Pan. I care about it too much.



But the summer season can be grueling and I'm not getting any younger.



Patty Pan has fabulous employees, folks who come back year after year even though the work is seasonal and tiring. I don't know if you've ever been served by them, but folks are always telling me how pleasant and committed they are.



A few years ago I started talking to a couple of key employees about sharing ownership of the business but the time just wasn't right. This year, the time felt right. The business is making a profit and it's become grown above and beyond anything I could have created myself, in part because we've built a shared knowledge base and we have enough collective experience to keep getting better at what we do.



So we've become an employee-owned cooperative, as of the first of the year. It's been quite a journey. Every cooperative is different: most cooperatives start out as cooperatives, with a group coming together and deciding they want to build something together. Patty Pan started out as a sole proprietorship, and we've had to figure out how to share responsibility and revenue in ways that were fair to everyone. The arrangement had to offer enough to members to make them want to join, and it had to offer me enough to make me want to share.



We crafted a set of bylaws that cover everything from how we'll share equity, to how we'll distribute profits, to how we'll make different types of decisions, to how we'll kick out someone who is stealing. It's been quite a journey. I'm feeling happy, but a bit disoriented. I know I'm disoriented when I can't figure out what I want to eat.

How Patty Pan Upgraded Our Ingredients, Retained Our Low Prices, and Maintained Our Impressive Food Cost Percentages

Patty Pan tried an experiment this past summer. We began using better cheese, better corn masa, better corn, better beans, and better tomatoes. (Our quesadilla vegetables and our meat were already high quality and didn't need to be upgraded.)



But we didn't want to raise our prices. We pride ourselves on low prices and it felt important to continue offering a good value. Times are still hard.



We approached the question as a creative problem-solving exercise, analyzing the cost of each of our menu items and looking for ways to tinker. Here's an example: I've noticed for years that most of my staff used too much cheese when they made quesadillas.



Of course we didn't want to skimp on cheese, but when you use too much cheese it oozes out the sides, gets all over your spatula, and generally creates a sticky, unpleasant quesadilla-making experience. Over the course of making hundreds of thousands of quesadillas, I've found that it's easier to keep the cheese an inch from the edge of the tortilla. It spreads so the result is sufficiently cheesey, and you end up using a lot less cheese.



I'd tried to communicate this to my staff on various occasions, but somehow it didn't click and in the end it felt sensible to just pick my battles. But when we started using more expensive cheese, it became more urgent to get this point across.



We use twelve-inch tortillas. I asked a math whiz friend to calculate the area of an eleven-inch circle relative to the area of a twelve-inch circle. It turns out that an eleven-inch circle is thirty seven percent smaller that a twelve-inch circle. Thirty seven percent. So, armed with this information, I set out to make my point again. This time it clicked, my employees began keeping the cheese away from the tortilla edges, and we were able use higher quality, more expensive cheese without spending extra money on cheese.



We also revised our menus, putting the items with the best food cost percentages closest to the top. Folks tend to order more of items that are listed higher up on the menu. It cost a chunk of money to reprint five sets of menus, but it was a good investment and had the desired result: folks ordered more of those higher margin items.



Actually, we did raise one price: the kid's quesadilla. We raised it because we introduced a couple of varieties of kid's tamales and we wanted to get the parents on board with encouraging the kids to eat tamales rather than quesadillas. We figured we could achieve this by offering the kid's tamales for a lower price than the kid's quesadillas.



We think our kid's tamales are better products than our kid's quesadillas. They use better ingredients and they're much easier for us to heat and serve. They're also a better gateway product, one that is more likely to encourage kids to eventually try our adult tamales. There's a much smaller step between eating a small tamale with beans and a big tamale with beans than between eating a small white quesadilla with just cheese and eating a big red quesadilla stuffed with cheese and vegetables.



Now the numbers are all in, and we were excited to discover that our food cost percentage didn't change at all compared with last year, even though we upgraded our ingredients and, for all practical purposes, didn't raise our prices.



So here's the lesson: Don't believe any business that tells you it has no choice other than to raise its prices to cover increasing costs. Of course, there really are some situations when a business has no choice other than to raise its prices to cover increasing costs. But there are also so many ways to tinker with numbers and marketing strategies and find alternative approaches to make it all work.



In the end, we're limited only by our imaginations.

Buzz Words

Until this year, I've resisted using buzz words to market Patty Pan's products. I'm talking about those convenient short hand terms that consumers use to make quick decisions about whether they want to buy. When customers asked whether all of the ingredients were organic I used to answer, "Anyone who tells you that all of their ingredients are organic is lying." (Really? Organic salt?) Or sometimes I'd respond that I think organic certification is a racket.



I really do think that organic certification is a bit of a racket. Small-scale farmers spend far too much money and time on fees, paperwork, and explaining the nuances of farming to inspectors who don't know how to farm. And agribusiness had too large of a hand in crafting the regulations, so they don't include important considerations such as whether a particular farmer's practices actually nurture the soil and build a healthy integrated ecosystem rather than simply avoiding chemical fertlizers and pesticides.



But a customer who asks whether a business uses all organic ingredients doesn't want to hear a cynical critique of the organic regulatory process. It sounds evasive and dishonest even though it may be the most honest response. But I can be a slow learner and it sometimes take a while to figure out this kind of thing, especially when it comes to marketing.



So this year Patty Pan shifted gears. We began communicating more proudly about the quality ingredients that we use and we began upgrading the handful of mainstream ingredients that seemed like sensible choices when we first started out. And we made a sign proclaiming it to the world. (We call it "the buzz word sign.")



We had an outrageous market season. Sales were off the charts, morale was high, and we felt more love than ever from our clientele. I think the buzz words played a big role. The weather helped, too. We're excited about the future.

Humble Feast at Skelly and the Bean

photo by Bean Fairbanks



Until last week, the Humble Feast was a vision in search of an audience and a home. For years I've wanted to hold a series of monthly dinners serving affordable food focused on local ingredients, an alternative to the events that showcase local chefs and producers creating fancy, pricey menus.



Folks told me that they thought it was a great idea but I found it to be a tough sell. We held a dozen dinners last year but, aside from a handful of regulars, turnout was disappointing. I lost money. It was also hard on my morale to put my heart and soul into this endeavor and to have so few people show up.



So after last October's dinners, I put the Humble Feast on hold. I'd originally planned to just stop for November and December, when folks were busy with the holidays, but January and February came and went and I still dragged my feet about scheduling another dinner.





At last October's event, three women who had devotedly attended the dinners accidentally paid us twice. I offered to refund their money, but they said they'd rather apply to sum to an upcoming dinner. They got in touch with me last month and asked when I'd be starting up again, so I decided to act on an idea that had been germinating for a while.



Skelly and the Bean is a relatively new Capitol Hill restaurant whose offerings, like my own, are based on market ingredients. Zephyr, the owner and mastermind, launched the business with funding from the neighborhood and community. She sold shares that involved prepaying for upcoming meals, and she enlisted supporters to come sand floors and paint walls.



On Monday and Tuesday nights, the restaurant hosts incubator dinners, opportunities for local chefs to host pop-up restaurants. I thought this might be a good fit for my Humble Feast dinners, and a venue that could help me solve some of the biggest obstacles I'd encountered when I held the dinners last year. I wouldn't have to rent a space and wouldn't have to haul the dishes back to my kitchen and wash them the next day. There was a marketing infrastructure already in place, and the restaurant would be serving drinks, which can certainly make any meal into a more enjoyable experience.



This time around, I enlisted help with the marketing. In addition to tapping into Zephyr's systems for getting the word out to the media, other folks helped to spread the word through list serves and word of mouth. Something clicked. Synergy happened.We drew a crowd, almost filling the first seating and pushing the limits on seating capacity for the second round, filling every spot in the restaurant as well as every seat out on the deck. We set the restaurant's record for turnout.



We also ran out of food before the last few people were fed. Zephyr whipped up some supplementary fare using whatever she had on hand. Most people were quite happy, but several weren't pleased. I think it came down to customer expectations: folks who turned out to enjoy a community dinner were willing to overlook rough spots, while people who were expecting a dining experience were less forgiving.



One tricky element was the fact that the restaurant made their money from the event by selling drinks while we made it by selling food. The restaurant crew didn't want to let people up to the buffet until everyone had placed a drink order, and the process took a long time because the place was packed. And then everyone came up at once, so the line was long and progress was slow.



We'll work out those kinks. Needless to say, we'll hold another dinner. I'm thinking we should schedule them seasonally rather than monthly, so they're somewhat regular yet there's plenty of down time in between. We're also talking about having two seatings two nights in a row, and I think that's a great idea which will ease some of the pressure if we continue to draw crowds.



The idea of affordable local foods buffets also seemed to resonate with folks who work with nonprofits. I've had several people contact me since the dinner wanting to host similar types of events for occasions or organizations.



I'm not sure what lesson to draw, other than the fact that it sometimes takes just the right combination of elements to make a venture succeed. I once read an interview with the guy who pioneered the Silk soymilk brand. He said that he knew that he had a solid idea, so if it wasn't working then he must be doing something wrong. I felt the same way about the Humble Feast. And I'm thrilled that we seem to finally be starting to get it right.http://pattypangrill.com/dinners.php

Authenticity

Lately I've been struggling with the idea of "authentic" food. I'm a Jewish girl from Brooklyn who makes a living selling tamales and quesadillas. My tamales use olive oil instead of lard. Recently we even switched to non-GMO masa and parchment paper "husks," in an effort to steer clear of ingredients that most of our customers wouldn't want to feed to their children, if they stopped and really thought about it.



At a handful of markets my business faces competition from a vendor with genuine roots in Mexico. They prepare a menu that is considerably more authentic than mine in the sense that they understand the flavors, recipes, culture, and cooking techniques in ways that I never will. They serve large, inexpensive portions, using primarily industrial ingredients.



Competition is a strange animal. Even when you respect your competitors, you look for ways to set yourself apart from them, and give customers a good reason to buy your product rather than theirs. In my case, I'm looking to set my business apart by choosing my ingredients carefully. But I can't help feeling a bit disingenuous as I struggle for ways to communicate that I'm using "better" corn than the folks who come from the land where corn was first cultivated, whose ancestors built a vibrant and sophisticated mythology based on the sanctity of corn.



On the other hand, the cheap corn that's available in this country--the corn my competitors use--is largely degraded. It's monocropped on industrial farms using seeds that have been selected more for hardiness than for flavor. According to the Center for Food Safety, 85 percent of the corn grown in this country is now genetically modified. It's a safe bet that any corn or corn products that come from mainstream sources,grew from from these suspect seeds.



So whose food is more authentic? I wouldn't venture to claim that mine is, but the question does make me wonder about our collective infatuation with "authentic" food. We crave flavors and ingredients from distant regions prepared using traditional recipes and techniques, but preparing these dishes commercially almost always takes modification, and the foods inevitably lose something in translation.



At the same time, even so-called traditional foods are always changing. Beef and pork aren't indigenous to Mexico (just as tomatoes aren't indigenous to Italy and potatoes aren't indigenous to Russia).



For now I'm looking at the question this way: I wouldn't go so far as to call my tamales ""authentic". But I'm proud of them nonetheless.