Sustainable Tastes

A few nights ago we hit up TASTE Restaurant at the Seattle Art Museum. Now, normally I am not a fan of restaurants attached to things...museums, hotels, stadia, etc. But I'd read an article on TASTE and knew that they focused on locally raised meats, locally grown produce, and sustainably caught fish. They cultivate relationships with farmers and regularly change their menu to reflect the season. All of this led me to give the restaurant a try, despite its slightly intimidating feel. Now we are regulars. The menu is a bit pricey (although certainly comparable to many other downtown restaurants who do not focus on local products) but we have attended the urban suppers ($12!) and had the three course, $30 menu.
But overall we are regulars at happy hour. It's tough, coming from the Eastside, to make it before 6pm, so we take any chance. They have a superb head bartender in Duncan, who insists people taste the wines and liquors and beers. A better tap list would make TASTE hour of happy even better, since 18 oz of beer can be had for $3, but now that they have Flor de Cana, I shan't complain. Bar food is $6 and so we can make a decent meal at a reasonable price. And we always, always get at least one order of rosemary frites.
The rosemary frites are delicious--crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and nice and salty and fragrant. But (coming back to the beginning of the post)on Thursday there was something just a bit...off. They weren't bad, but they weren't mouthwatering. So we mentioned this to Duncan, and he brought us a new order. Although we wanted it to be just a bad batch, it wasn't--the second order still fell flat.
So Duncan sent out Craig Hetherington, Executive Chef. At first we felt bad because, c'mon, they're just fries. But then we realized we are experts on their frites. But what I was most impressed by was not the customer service--even though it goes above and beyond each time, and this was even further beyond--but the fact that Craig was able to explain to me exactly what he believed to be wrong with the potatoes, and the fact that TASTE is a restaurant that enables him to know this.
The potatoes, you see, had not come from Washington. TASTE gets many of their specialty potatoes from Olson Farms, but the russets typically come from a produce distributor. Still they try and source them from within the state, but the distributor had run short of Washington potatoes. These ones just didn't taste the same.
Silly traveling potatoes. Eat local. Support nearby business, particularly ones that know the names of the small farms from which they obtain their produce. Encourage the connections between the rural and urban economies. Be willing to pay a bit more to know exactly where your food originated. The less it travels, the better it tastes.
(Exceptions made for Belgian beer, sriracha, and coffee)