Welcome toOut 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.
Before Travis and Jody Wright, owners of The Shark on the Harbor, in Ocean City, Maryland, will sit down to talk, they insist that their guests meet the rest of "the family."
The Shark sits right on the harbor in West Ocean City, an incorporated part of the resort town that's far enough away from the glossy hotels and deep-fryer-and-cotton-candy smells of the boardwalk to be the mainstay of the area's locals–all around the restaurant sit commercial fisheries and trawlers and the brine-soaked detritus of a working seaport. The couple walk down the wooden ramp to the gravel lot outside, then lead them to a boat that's tied up to a spot on the dock less than 10 yards away from The Shark. Captain Kerry Harrington and his sons flash a big grin, and it's hugs and handshakes all around.
"Kerry and his boys help himself to the coffee at the bar when he comes in," Jody explains as the two men banter. "They're welcome anytime."
"Kerry'll call me on the cellphone from his boat as soon as it gets close enough to shore and tell me he has so-and-so many pounds of flounder, and do we want it," Travis says. "He knows we always say yes."
Back at the bar of The Shark, the Wrights chat loosely about the regulars who can be counted on to pop in any day of the week. One of them is Lawrence McDonald, the musician-turned-farmer who brings in the organic produce the couple feature prominently in their dishes.
"The first time, Lawrence brought us just bushels and bushels of radishes," Jody says. "We took everything–Travis always takes everything. But at first we were like, 'We can't slice them all on salads. What are we going to do with all these radishes?' So we learned about roasting radishes–they're mellow and sweet, with a great texture. You can put them on a salad, make roasted-radish soup .... Sometimes Travis puts some crabmeat in it."
"People were like, 'Are you out of your mind, serving a radishes-and-crabmeat soup?'" Travis continues. "People thought we were nuts. But then they tried it, and now when it comes on the menu, it just spreads from table to table like wildfire."
Even in the 21st century, with today's enlightened approach to responsibly sourcing food, it can be a challenge running a restaurant that promotes locally sourced organic produce and sustainable seafood in a beach-oriented resort town. The Wrights should know. The Shark's earliest incarnation was right in the epicenter of Ocean City's tourist strip, a 350-seat, multi-story behemoth that turned 1,000 dinners a night and featured a massive aquarium that had be brought in by crane before the walls of the building could be finished. The food? Think generic burgers, shrimp poppers, and eggplant towers. To push through that many plates a night for hordes of tourist families meant relying on food distributors like Sysco, not Wright. "When you're serving 1,000 dinners a night, you can't find farmers who can supply that every night," Travis says.
So to bring the focus back to the food, the Wrights moved away from the resort-town hubbub and went smaller, giving up their 350-seat palace for a modest 90-seat spot on the water that reflected their memories of Ocean City as a mild-mannered fishing village. They also went organic and local in 2011. "We were probably using farm-raised salmon back then," Travis says of the old location. "We axed that right away."
"We reach guests who could appreciate the food we make," Jody says. "I like to eat healthy food we don't feel guilty about eating."
Immediately, they began giving up the trailer-truck deliveries of trucked-in food and made inroads with local farmers like McDonald and fishermen like Harrington.
"We only buy stuff from people we trust, and that's why we change the menu every day," Travis says.
But even though longtime Shark fans loved the new location, the change to organic and sustainable was a harder sell.
"At the beginning, the flavors threw people off enough to the point where they didn't know if they liked it," Jody says. "They wanted iceberg, which we didn't have, but which they'd grown up on. But people gave us some trust and tried it, and it got to the point where they didn't want to get salads anywhere else. They wanted salads grown in dirt, organically created and fertilized, and beautiful and flavorful."
In the kitchen, the cooks are working on taking apart a large rockfish that just came in minutes before, mulling what to turn it into. Maybe a rich, creamy stew? Or a thick, juicy steak on a winter-vegetable puree?"
"Travis is really good about trying to use anything invasive, like blue catfish, which is killing the Potomac right now, or lionfish or snakehead," says Jody (she was appointed by the governor to sit on the state's seafood-marketing board).
And he also works closely with local farmers to figure out what he might feature on his seasonal menus weeks and months in advance.
"We sit down with Lawrence and map out the next year's growing season," he says. "A month ago, we charted out bok choi, napa cabbage, mustard greens, and spinach for the winter time, then we'll sit down again in January and talk about what we're going to do for the summer season."
"These relationships Travis started developing, they help the organic farmers develop their industry, but also make Travis and his team a better team of chefs–you literally have to use what you get," Jody says.
At the bar, Lynn and Rick Krall, retired Berlin, Maryland, residents, are sitting down to "date night" over seafood and glasses of wine. They've been Shark regulars since the restaurant’s original, non-organic, non-locavore location on 46th Street.
"The food was always good, but it got a whole lot better," Rick says of the change in menu. "The ice cream's from Chesapeake Farms, the lobsters came off Captain Kerry's boat, the greens came from Quindocqua this morning. We live in a rural county where they grow everything organic–you don't have to go to Food Lion or Safeway, or getting something flown in from California, and everything's fresher and has more taste and texture to it."
And with that, the Kralls clink wineglasses and dig in to Maryland's bounty.