Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at how sustainability has become a rapidly growing movement within the food world. Chefs at the forefront of this trend are introducing their patrons to local farms, fresh ingredients, and innovative dishes while farmers are educating chefs and consumers about where their food comes from and what it takes to grow the food served. Their practices and personal customer approaches provide a bigger impact to the community at large, hoping to create a better and more sustainable future for all.
If it takes a village to feed and raise a child, it takes an eco-village to feed her sustainably. And if there were one person you'd want to be helming that kitchen, it would be a Michael Casate Castillo.
Casate's the chef at El Romero, the organic vegetarian restaurant at the heart of the Cuban eco-village Las Terrazas, a planned green community in Pinar del Rio province in the far west of the island and about an hour or two's drive from the capital of Havana. Casate is about as local to the area as you can get: His grandparents lived in a tiny village in the mountains called Hell's Creek, where they farmed corn, sweet potatoes, and taro. It was, unsurprisingly for a place called Hell's Creek, a hardscrabble existence. So when, in the late 1960s, the government decided to reforest the area and undo centuries of environmental damage from rampant tree cutting and a French coffee plantation, the local villagers relocated to a new model village, Las Terrazas, built around the philosophy of environmental sustainability. Casate's grandparents left their farm and joined the new village, with his grandfather becoming a bus driver for the community. "They handed in their lands in the mountains for a house with better facilities," Casate says. "They were close to man and civilization, and they had electricity."
Two generations later, Casate had finished his military service and discovered that he had a gift for cooking, and he wanted to use it to serve the people of his village and their guests, by preparing healthy, organic, and ecologically responsible meals at El Romero.
The restaurant is entirely vegetarian and macrobiotic, relying on the organically grown vegetables and fruits from its garden near the Las Terrazas hotel. One of the most popular plates is the Super Romero, a baked eggplant-seitan steak cooked with vegetables in wine sauce. Another is the No. 72, which features yam medallions marinated in an onion-garlic mixture. But the most memorable is arguably the solar salad, a medley of El Romero garden vegetables cooked in the solar oven, an umbrella-shaped, mirrored contraption that stands outside the El Romero entrance. Out back, customers sip from cocktails on a balcony overlooking the lake central to the village, made with orange, pineapple, and yerba buena and prickly pear cactus grown yards away. It's a unique experience for Cubans, who are used to a meat-based diet and must less tranquil surroundings. "I love the tempura," says Anais Tamayo, who lives in a village not far away from Las Terrazas and now works as a guide for the site.
Foreign customers are equally enchanted. Guillermo Ballestrino was visiting Las Terrazas from Paris, and sat down with his family to a lunch of salad and vegetable pie flavored with beans and honey. He'd read about the restaurant in France. "It's what we French call 'balanced food'–there's authenticity in the flavor, and you don't get more of one taste than the other," he says.
The critical component, Casate says, is the ingredients and the manner in which they're grown. By using organic fertilizer and natural, traditional techniques to manage pests rather than chemical fertilizers and pesticides, their veggies, fruits, and herbs come out of the ground and off the tree with fuller flavor and better texture–enjoyed like they were in the Cuban countryside generations ago, before battery farming.
The customers have noticed. "In the supermarkets at home, the carrots taste like water. The industrialization has caused us to lose the real flavor of the food in Europe. And here? You find the real deal, the authentic flavor of the carrot," Ballestrino says. "That's the most important thing, first finding the flavor, the real flavor, of the carrot. The one we had in our memories, before the chemicals and the battery farming."
Ballestrino takes a whiff of the scant remains on his plate, takes a gander out of the window, and takes in the village of Las Terrazas, a scattering of blue-white houses spiraling around a green bowl descending to a small boat-filled lake. There's no vantage on the El Romero garden here, but the Frenchman doesn't seem to mind–all the evidence he needs is in his belly now: "Being in a place like this, where you can taste the rocky soil in the flavor of the carrot, it makes you think the garden here is in very good hands," Ballestrino says.