Before reaching the host stand a few feet inside tayst, visitors pass a chalkboard propped on an easel. It doesn’t post the day’s specials, though; instead, it lists Chef Jeremy Barlow’s partners in fulfilling his vision for his restaurant—the local and regional farmers and producers who stock his pantry. On a recent weekend, Mamushi Nature Farm, Benton Hams, DW Farm, Bonnie Blue Farm, Hatcher Family Dairy and Farmer Dave were on the board, their artistry meeting Barlow’s craft on the plates being delivered to tables.
The seed for today’s burgeoning local food movement was planted in 1971 by Alice Waters and her restaurant Chez Panisse in Northern California. She applied her revelatory culinary experiences traveling through France to a single prix fixe menu that changes daily, adhering to seasonal ingredients from a religiously cultivated network of mostly local farmers and ranchers. Diners who regard Chez Panisse an epicurean icon have helped spread the gospel of taking the best available products on the shortest route possible from earth to table, and her philosophy has influenced chefs across the nation.
Though Nashville is in the heart of an agricultural state with a lengthy growing season, the partnership between local farmers and restaurants has come later to the table and has been slower to develop. In the last decade, however, the locavore movement has taken root in the Middle Tennessee region like kudzu on the side of a country road. In 2001, Cindy Wall founded the Nashville Convivium of Slow Food, part of an 80,000-member worldwide “non-profit, eco-gastronomic organization that works to counteract the disappearance of local food traditions.” CSAs—an acronym for Community Supported Agriculture and the name given to the membership-supported farms that sell seasonal “shares” to their harvest—have grown dramatically.
“When we opened in 2004, I’d say about one in 20 customers even knew what a CSA was,” Barlow recalls. “Today, I bet one in two of our customers are members of a CSA.”
The Nashville Farmer’s Market, after a somewhat transitional period when stalls were dominated by re-sellers, is rededicating itself—whaddya know?—to farmers, reserving the front part of the shed for vendors whose inventory comes primarily from their own farms. The region’s oldest Farmer’s Market has been stimulated in part by the emergence of once-weekly markets staged both in Nashville and other nearby counties that allow only local producers. Whole Foods (and before that, Wild Oats) spotlight local produce in their megastores. Pick Tennessee, a program of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, lists in-state-produced sources for everything from freshwater shrimp and caviar to goat cheese, honey and country ham. And last fall, the beautifully illustrated quarterly magazine Local Table debuted and has become a valuable guide to buying, eating and cooking locally, with listings for CSAs, farmers’ markets and farms, spanning 7th generation operations to fledgling startups.
“The average age of the American farmer is 61,” says Barlow, who was raised in Nantucket, passed through Vanderbilt on his way to CIA in New York, then came back to Nashville with his locally grown wife to cook. “But recently that’s starting to dip, as young people looking for a simpler life turn back to the land, to farming. Some of the farmers we buy from still have their day jobs, they’re just getting started. But they’re committed to this.”
Barlow has been courting growers and building relationships with farmers since he started cooking in Nashville about 10 years ago. Not every restaurant he’s worked in has had the same devotion to putting local food on the table. “It’s a lot easier to pick up the phone and place an order with a vendor. But that’s not how I want to do it.”
Since opening tayst in February 2004 with then-partner and front-of-the-house man Dan Morrissey, he admits to being driven, tag-teaming with his sous chef Bob Benson to manage the large network of growers that serve tayst. He’s taken his entire staff to visit the farms they buy from so they can know the people who grow the food they’re cooking and selling. “Farmers say ‘Tell us what you want us to grow and we’ll grow it.’ We say, ‘Just grow it and we’ll use it.’ If you want to cook seasonally and regionally, flexibility is key. You never know what the weather might do and what the day might bring. Up until mid-July this summer, all of our lettuce was local. But then we had that heat wave, and lettuce was done, all we could get locally was arugula. One of the benefits of being independent and fairly small is that in the kitchen, we can turn on a dime.”
The basic structure of the menu—a manageable and inclusive repertoire of first taysts, second (salad) taysts and main taysts—has remained the same over the last four-and-a-half years or so, though hardly predictable. “We started out sort of comfort-y food, then we veered over to space food, now we’re back to more comfort-y. We still do some space food on plates, we just don’t tell people. If I had to describe what we do, I’d call our food ‘playful American.’”
Every season, nearly 100 percent of the menu changes, with one notable exception—their signature beef short rib and foie gras starter. An earthy composition of short rib braised to falling-off-the-bone tenderness in Gewurztraminer topped with a finger of insanely rich goose liver is tempered by a fan of crisped tart green apple. An artisanal cheese plate is also a reliable presence, with four different fromage claiming their own corner of the square plate, centered with sweet pickled onion, olives and other accoutrements...
Tayst is located at 2100 21st Ave. S. Reservations: (615) 383-1953.