Restaurants | The Real Foodie

March 20, 2015

A Nourishing Traditions Dinner with Sally Fallon

Marco Canora and Sally Fallon

I had the honour of sitting next to Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, over dinner last week at Hearth Restaurant in New York City. Chef Marco Canora, who has become a celebrity with his take out broth window, Brodo, hosted the dinner which was made entirely according to the principles of the Weston A. Price Foundation, as illustrated in Sally Fallon’s cookbook, Nourishing Traditions.

Sally Fallon has a devout following all over the world since she started the Weston A. Price Foundation, a dietary philosophy, based on the teachings of Weston A. Price. Weston Price was a dentist who traveled the world in the 1920s and ’30s, studying the diets of indigenous tribes and found that they had perfect bone structure and no tooth decay or disease. I first read her cookbook Nourishing Traditions eight years ago and I have been on the Weston Price diet ever since. Sally Fallon has changed my life and the life of so many others by improving their health, so this was a very special and rare opportunity to talk to her.

The table was beautifully set on a long table in the private dining room and lit by candles. The dinner was five courses, each accompanied by a different wine. Sally stood at the beginning of each course to make a speech, the theme being reduction sauces, followed by Marco explaining each course. The first course was a tasting of each of Brodo’s bone broths: grass-fed beef with ginger, Pennsylvania Amish organic chicken and Hearth broth; a combination of their chicken, beef and turkey. The second course was a trio of root vegetables, wild salmon eggs, Finger Lakes farm cream, chicories and a beet kvass vinaigrette. The third course was a sprouted grain risotto (lentils, red fife wheat berries, red quinoa) cooked in Hearth broth with wild mushrooms, cabbage and grated Spring Brook Reading raw cow’s milk cheese. The fourth course was a seared calves liver, bone marrow, soft scrambled eggs and alliums cooked in a Bordelaise sauce. Marco pointed out that the liver was from a rare veal from Vermont, fed only mother’s milk and grass instead of powdered milk. The fifth and final course was a selection of three raw milk cow cheeses, served with hazelnuts, sliced pears and honey. The blue and cheddar cheeses were from Sally Fallon and her husband Geoffrey Morell’s own organic bio-dynamic farm, Bowen Farm.

I have been to many great restaurants in my life and I would say this was one of the best, if not the best dinners I have ever had. It was unique in that it was not only cooked to perfection but also using ingredients of the highest quality. This rare combination was what made the dinner so memorable. Once you are on a real food diet and are used to the superior taste of real food ingredients sourced from grass-fed animals and organic farms, there is no comparison to conventional food, even when it is cooked by well known chefs. It is this combination that has made Marco Canora’s Hearth Restaurant such a success.

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March 9, 2015

Brodo, New York City

My mother used to make broth from chicken bones when I was a child and used it as a base for her many soups and other recipes. She would especially give it to us when we were sick and always had a bowl of it in the freezer. She told me my great-grandmother who was born in Devon, England, in 1870, used to drink a cup of beef tea (broth made from boneless meat) every day. She used to say it was a cure-all and give it to my grandmother when she was sick. I have been making bone broth regularly myself, ever since reading about it in Nourishing Traditions (the cookbook that changed my life) and adopting a real food diet eight years ago. I usually make it from chicken bones but if I have leftover beef, duck, marrow or lamb bones I will add them. Oxtail also makes a very rich, gelatinous broth. Every time I roast a pastured chicken, I freeze the bones and when my freezer is overflowing with various containers of bones, I will boil them in my 16 quart stock pot with filtered water and four tablespoons of vinegar for twenty-four hours, according to the recipe in Nourishing Traditions. Sometimes I will also add fresh uncooked chicken parts to make it more gelatinous and nutritious. Then I sift it and store it in glass mason jars and use it to make soups, lentils, beans, vegetables, meat sauce or I just drink a cup on its own. My freezer is always fully stocked with jars of bone broth.

I was amazed to learn recently that this real food staple has taken off amongst the fashion crowd in New York City. Along with the opening of Brodo–a take out window serving nothing but bone broth–and a number of butchers and home delivery services also selling it, bone broth is being recommended not only by nutritionists and health coaches but also by beauticians and personal trainers for its many health benefits and skin boosting properties.

Brodo (Italian for broth), opened last November as an addition to chef Marco Canora’s East Village restaurant, Hearth, serving bone broth from 100 percent grass-fed beef, organic pastured chicken and organic turkey. Canora says he can’t keep up with the demand. So when I was in New York for my father’s birthday, I had to go and check it out. Sure enough there was a queue of people waiting to buy their cup of broth. They had three different types: beef; chicken and a combination of beef, chicken and turkey. You can also get a healthy add-in such as freshly grated turmeric, beet kvass or bone marrow. I ordered the beef broth which was deliciously rich in colour and taste with a hint of fresh ginger. It certainly warmed me up on such a cold winter’s day and I felt well nourished.

I was impressed with Marco Canora’s brilliant idea of a take out window, popularising a healthy cup of bone broth over of a cup of coffee. As the real food movement grows, I hope we will be seeing more of these broth bars and fewer places like Starbucks.

Sally Fallon, the author of Nourishing Traditions and founder of The Weston A. Price Foundation, has come out with a new book devoted to bone broth: Nourishing Broth.

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January 2, 2014

Young Coconut Smoothie

At around the same time as I read the Body Ecology Diet in 2007, where I learned about making fermented coconut pudding (by blending coconut meat with coconut water and adding a culture), I was introduced to blended coconut water and coconut meat smoothies by Melvin, the legendary juice man who used to work at my local health food store in New York City, Lifethyme Market and has now gone on to open two of his own juice bars. Melvin also introduced me to the idea of adding greens to the coconut, such as kale, chard and collard greens, so I would get my greens and healthy fat (to absorb the vitamins), all in one. It also tasted divine.

Ever since then, young coconut smoothies, either pure or mixed with greens, have been a part of my regular health routine. When I started weaning my daughter, puréed coconut meat was one of the first foods I gave her and she loved it. Sometimes I buy my own coconuts and make smoothies at home, or if I am in a rush I will buy a smoothie at one of my local juice bars. Now that I live in Miami where coconuts grow (!) I buy coconuts from my guys, Kokonut Kreationz at Glaser Farmers’ Market, or I will buy a coconut smoothie from Jugo Fresh. When I am in Jamaica, a local man named Lindsay delivers coconuts to us (the gorgeous yellow dwarf variety coconuts pictured above) or I get them delivered from Pantrepant Farm or buy them at a roadside fruit stall. In New York I go to Juice Press or Organic Avenue where they make and bottle coconut smoothies and call it ‘coconut milk’. Wherever I am, I’m never without my coconut smoothie.

How to make young coconut smoothie:

Select a fresh young coconut. If you don’t live in a tropical climate where coconuts grow, you can buy 100 percent certified organic packaged young Thai coconut meat and bottled water from Exotic Superfoods. Though not as fresh, they are the only certified organic young coconut meat source in the U.S and Thai coconuts are more flavourful. Do not buy the Thai coconuts you find in health food stores which have the husk shaved down to a white cone shape as they are sprayed with fungicide, dipped in preservatives and are up to 2 months old. They are far from fresh or nutritious.

Chip the top away, turning the coconut to cut all around the top, using a cleaver or machete until you make a small hole through the hard inner shell. Pour the water into a blender. Slice the coconut in half and scoop out the soft meat with a spoon. Put the meat in a blender and blend the meat and the water until it forms a smooth consistency.

Note: There is a difference between young and mature coconuts. The young ones are green or yellow, they contain a lot of water and the meat is soft and able to easily be scooped out with a spoon. The mature ones are brown and dry, have little water and the meat is hard and difficult to remove. It needs to be cut out with a special curved knife. The mature coconut meat produces a rich oily cream called coconut milk by grating the meat and squeezing out the cream with a cheese cloth. There are two juice bars in Miami that use mature coconuts to make milk: Milk Gone Nuts and Athens Juice Bar.

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November 9, 2013

True Loaf Bakery, Miami Beach

Walking back from Jugo Fresh, I came across this bakery which had been opened just three days. I was drawn inside after seeing a stack of bags of organic King Arthur Flour in the window. The owner, Tomas, was giving away samples of his cherry pecan bread with made to order peanut butter by Big Spoon Roasters. It was delicious and I could really taste the difference compared to the bleached, bromated flour of conventional bread, of which after being on a real food diet I can taste the bleach. Tomas told me his breads are all naturally leavened sourdough breads and that he uses organic flour, making True Loaf Bakery the only organic bakery in Miami (Zak the Baker who also uses organic flour and natural leaven, will soon be opening a shop in Wynwood). His breads include walnut, whole wheat, country loaf, multi grain, whole wheat with flax, sunflower and cherry pecan. Sourdough leavening is the traditional practice of preparing grains which removes the phytates and enzyme inhibitors, making them more nutritious and digestible.

True Loaf Bakery also makes croissants, chocolate croissants, ham and cheese croissants, madeleines and brioche with pastry cream and creme fraiche, however, a conventional butter is used for these, Plugra, which is made from cows that are treated with rBST hormones and fed GMO soy and corn, so I wouldn’t recommend them if you’re on a real food diet. Although True Loaf Bakery isn’t one hundred percent organic it is hopeful to see traditional food shops like this one opening in Miami and perhaps this will be the start of many more.

True Loaf Bakery is so new there isn’t yet a listing for it or a website. It is located at 1894 Bay Road in Miami Beach.

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August 8, 2013

Station, East Quogue, N.Y.

Over the years that I have been coming to Southampton there has always been a lousy selection of restaurants to choose from, none of which serve real food. It was always my dream to open my own health cafe in this town as it is in such dire need of a healthy place to grab a quick lunch or take out; and it would probably make a fortune due to the increasing crowds that come here each summer. In my former less healthy days I used to get sandwiches at the local delis but there was never anywhere to get a delicious organic salad, which even then I craved. Of the more formal restaurants that we would go to have dinner, Sant Ambroeus, Red Bar, Savanna’s and more recently, Tuto Il Giorni were a step above the local burger or seafood joints; Sant Ambroeus serving tasty Italian panini during the day, but all of them still using conventional ingredients. There used to be an organic market and cafe called Annie‘s but it didn’t last more than one summer. Then came Organic Avenue selling raw vegan snacks, pressed organic juices and smoothies but they also shut down after a couple of years, this year selling just a few juices inside the clothing store Theory.

Now finally the world is catching onto real food and there are a few farm-to-table restaurants that have opened in the past year in and around the Hamptons. There is also a new organic pressed juice bar in Southampton which opened this summer called Juice Press and a restaurant on the highway, Cafe Crust, which sells grass fed burgers, hormone free pizzas and organic salads. My husband and I decided to give one of the farm-to-table restaurants, Station, in East Quogue a try and we were surprisingly impressed. The outside is beautifully landscaped with wild flowers. The food is delicious, simple, healthy and a perfect example of farm-to-table. Opened during Memorial day weekend, everything served is either grown or landed locally. They work with local farms, including Invincible Summer Farms, Early Girl Farm and Mecox Bay Dairy. We have gone back several times since. Now we finally have a restaurant that we can keep going back to and feel good after.

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May 27, 2013

Canteen, London

‘It’s amazing to think how far London has come as an eating town since [the early nineties], and the progress restaurants have made is nowhere exemplified better than at Canteen.’ Giles Coren, London 2010.

I had been wanting to go to Canteen for a while because I have their cookbook, Great British Food which came up in my search online for popular cookbooks last year. I love traditional British food and the recipes bring me right back to my childhood. We had lunch at the restaurant in Spitalfields and I was not disappointed. The food was excellent; it was by far the best restaurant we had been to in London and we returned two more times throughout our trip. This was confirmed to me by my stepfather: a true old fashioned gentleman who has spent most of his life wining and dining at the finest restaurants in the world; and came down from Scotland to meet us at the restaurant in Baker street for dinner. He told me he has never felt better after eating at a restaurant because the ingredients were of such high quality. This is not regular traditional British food like the kind you can find in restaurants all over England, especially pubs, which is loaded with additives and far from what our ancestors ate; this is real traditional British food because it is seasonal, nationally sourced, cooked from scratch (many restaurants buy pre-prepared food), their meat is pasture raised and additive-free, and their fish is sustainable, delivered daily from boats on the south coast. Their menu and design are reminiscent of classic British cafes of the past and their philosophy is honest, casual all day dining at a reasonable price.

Salad of Cashel blue cheese, chicory, pear and hazlenut.

Smoked haddock, spinach and mash.

Baker Street location

Scotch egg

‘Full English’ breakfast

Chicken liver pâté

Packet of colouring pencils and book given to Olivia

Olivia drinking freshly pressed carrot juice

Hot buttered Arbroath smokie, a type of smoked Haddock from the North Sea Coast of Scotland, still smoked using traditional methods dating back to the late 1800s.

Interior at Baker street location.

Braised red cabbage.

Sirloin of beef with Yorkshire pudding

Sausages and mash with onion gravy.

Brochure on each table proudly displaying their food philosophy and practices.

Spitalfields location.

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May 26, 2013

Daylesford, London

Across the street from the Pimlico market, Daylesford is an organic farm shop and cafe selling organic produce, prepared food, and pastured meat, dairy and eggs from their own organic farm in Gloucestershire. They have three locations in London, one in Surrey and one in Tokyo. We had a delicious lunch at the cafe in Pimlico and brunch at the cafe in Notting Hill, which has replaced the old Fresh and Wild market: one of the first organic supermarkets in London where I used to buy my organic food over ten years ago. It is on the trendy Westbourne Grove and is giving the popular conventional brunch hang out, 205 Cafe two doors down, a run for its money.

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April 9, 2013

Yardbird Southern Table and Bar, Miami Beach

I was so excited when this southern style restaurant opened in October 2011 in South Beach, where there was not one restaurant that served real food, I could hardly wait. I waited for months after passing it by each day, still under construction. I could tell it was going to be a farm-to-table restaurant by the style of the graphics they used for their shopfront sign and window posters and though I was being overly optimistic (in hopes of a change in the area), I was miraculously right in the end!

The only other restaurants we would go to before Yardbird Southern Table & Bar opened were Sustain Restaurant which closed in May 2012, Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink or Harry’s Pizzeria (both the same owner) who also get most of their ingredients from local, organic farms, but coming from New York City, this selection was very limited. (We later started going on a weekly basis to BM Organics in Fort Lauderdale which is by far our favourite restaurant of all time and has a standard of food beyond any other restaurant I have been to because they source a hundred percent of their ingredients from local organic or Amish farms in Pennsylvania and strictly adhere to the principles of the Weston A Price Foundation.)

Yardbird Southern Table & Bar have become a huge success; they are busy every night and it is impossible to get a table on a weekend night (unless you are a regular like we are). They fry their pastured chickens in lard (their fries unfortunately in canola oil unless you ask for lard) and the majority of their food comes from local, organic farms. They are not a hundred percent organic (I discovered one time after eating their Adluh stone ground grits that they were GMO and they use conventional mayonnaise for their devilled eggs) but if you choose carefully you can have a real food meal, which is priceless in a town as small as South Beach.

Yardbird Southern Table & Bar was one of the winners of the 2013 Slow Food Miami Snail of Approval.

Update: In May 2012 BM Organics Market closed down. In July 2013 the chef and partner at Yardbird Southern Table & Bar, Jeff McInnis, left and has been replaced by Clay Miller.

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January 9, 2013

Fish Market Manantiales, Punta del Este, Uruguay

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Olivia, my husband and I drove up the coast of Uruguay after staying at my husband’s family’s farm, to spend the weekend in the beach town of Punta del Este. While looking for places to have dinner we came across this seafood restaurant which was by far the best restaurant we had been to in the area of La Barra and we loved it so much we returned the next day for lunch. The food was simple, healthy and delicious! The scene was laid back, bohemian chic and it was always packed. It was all outdoor seating surrounded by white and blue agapanthus, a small pond, green picnic tables under a white wooden slatted roof, an open kitchen; and umbrellas and bench pillows decorated with Roberta Freymann’s Roberta Roller Rabbit line of printed fabrics. I ordered a salad of sliced peaches with cherry tomatoes, mint and parsley and a main course of Abadejo: a pollock like fish, cooked a la plancha which came with an amazing side salad of cherry tomatoes, shaved pieces of red cabbage, fennel, carrots, spring onion, dill, parsley and sesame seeds in a lemon vinaigrette.

The next day we came back for lunch with Olivia and ordered the same fish, which she polished off almost entirely and a cold beetroot soup, which came with a firm scoop of mascarpone and crumbled pistachios on top. We left feeling satisfied and nourished, not full and regretful like I usually do after eating out. I will definitely be going back again on our next trip and would highly recommend it to anyone going to Punta del Este.

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November 3, 2012

Lunch at Yardbird

After two days without power from the after effects of hurricane Sandy which flooded our basement, I thought Olivia needed a more varied diet than just fruit, raw yoghurt, avocado and raw cheese. Although it is important that a large percentage of one’s diet be made up of raw food, which is filled with many enzymes and nutrients that are destroyed through the cooking process, the fats found in pastured meat and minerals in bone broths are essential to health. So we went to one of the few restaurants in Miami that we go to, Yardbird Southern Table and Bar which serves mostly local or organic food (but not one hundred percent—the reason it is not my favourite—check out which is).

Olivia must have been craving some protein and healthy fats because she happily made her way through an entire plate of pastured chicken from White Oak Pastures and she had her first taste of fish roe taken off the top of my deviled eggs, which she enjoyed the look of but made a cringing face once the fishy taste exploded in her mouth. She finished off with some pickled cucumbers, which she loved as always. I felt much better as we went back to our dark and cold apartment, knowing she’d had a more full, varied and nutritious meal.

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