How sourcing locally pays off for independent restaurants

Chef Spike Gjerde, the James Beard Award–winning force behind Baltimore’s pioneering Woodberry Kitchen and the recently opened La Jetée, has spent decades redefining what it means to cook “locally.” A champion of Chesapeake foodways and a leading advocate for regenerative agriculture, he has built his restaurants around direct relationships with farmers, fishers and producers – returning value to the region while shaping a distinctly place-driven cuisine.

In this conversation, Gjerde unpacks the creative power of constraint, the limits of sustainability labels and why real impact comes down to who you choose to support.

—Interview by Kelly Dobkin, edited by Bianca Prieto

As someone deeply invested in Chesapeake foodways, what do you think operators outside the region misunderstand about “local sourcing,” and where do you see the biggest operational or supply chain blind spots?

Mainly, I think people underestimate the possibilities and the value. People always fixate on the limitations: "Oh, but how will you do without this and this?" And then you go to a restaurant where they have absolutely no constraints—they'll buy anything from anywhere—and you're struck by how uninteresting and uninspiring the food is. 

Creativity is looking at what is in front of you and what came before and building from there, not pulling something out of thin air. "How can we serve this fleeting, fresh asparagus in the most exciting way possible?" is a more compelling question than, "Which vegetables should we serve?"

And the ingredients, the food itself, are just so much better. So when you're coming up with a dish, you're building on the juiciest, sweetest tomato you've ever had instead of trying to make a pale, mealy tomato taste good.

La Jetée and Bar Dalí venture more heavily into international cuisines than Woodberry Kitchen. How do you maintain your hyper-local ethos when creating menus for concepts like these?

First, we're choosing cuisines that have a natural overlay with Chesapeake foodways. A lot of Provençal cooking, for example, centers on the abundant fish and shellfish from the Mediterranean, and we're working with the same abundance from the Chesapeake Bay. So bouillabaisse actually makes sense, but we tweak the fish and shellfish used—rockfish instead of sea bass, crab instead of conger eel. Classic, rustic French cuisine is all about simple, fresh vegetables, which is what I've always focused on by sourcing directly from farms here. 

There are some things we have to go further for, which are different for me compared to Woodberry's approach. When we do that, I'm definitely not running to Sysco. Our approach is to find a great producer with regenerative practices and establish a direct connection for that ingredient. For example, we're getting chickpeas for our signature panisse directly from an organic family farm in Montana, and our olives from a local family with a farm in Greece.

It's a work in progress, but one thing it highlights is what drew me to "local" food in the first place: not necessarily the geographic proximity but the direct and economically meaningful relationship with farmers and watermen who are doing the hard work to produce great food and deserve every dollar we can pay, with no middleman involved.

You’ve been an early advocate for regenerative agriculture—are there concrete metrics or KPIs that restaurant groups should be tracking today to measure whether their sourcing practices are actually sustainable?

The short answer is no. No one agrees on what regenerative means, and there are already watered-down certifications that involve using pesticides to enable practices like cover cropping, for example. That's not regenerative in my book. There's a Regenerative Organic Certified label that does set super high standards, but most of the farms I work with don't engage with labels like that.

Again, that's where direct relationships come in. I can't tell you how many times I've been to the Black Butterfly Farm and One Straw Farm to see what they do. One of our top vegetable suppliers at La Jetée and our other restaurants, every week, is Third Way Farm, run by Tommy and Michelle Shireman. Tommy was recently a guest on my live podcast, 'Origins 3.0,' where he described, in great detail, their no-till, regenerative approach.

They didn't get certified organic, but they are going so far beyond—no pesticides, no tillage, building unbelievable amounts of organic matter in their soil, training young farmers to follow their lead. After the conversation, everyone at the event got to eat food from his farm: it was March, the hardest time of year for farmers in the Mid-Atlantic, and he brought spinach, sweet potatoes, ground beef, eggs we made pasta with, etc. The proof was then in the meal, in how delicious and abundant the food was.

Our tracking is: Get to know Tommy and Michelle at that level.

Our metric is: How much money do we send directly to their farm each year? Last year, between La Jetée and Woodberry Kitchen, we sent a little more than $1 million to the farms we work with, and that number is increasing quickly. 

If every restaurant tracked real dollars they spent with human-scaled local farms and makers and then worked to increase that number each year, I can't help but think we'd be on the right track.

The Prep's Take 

Restaurants are a people business, and that extends well beyond the dining room. The relationships Gjerde has built with farmers, fishers and producers are the foundation of everything his restaurants do, creatively, operationally and ethically. Most operators already have access to local producers. The question is whether those relationships are transactional or something more meaningful. Starting with one direct conversation with one farmer or maker in your area is how that shifts.

(Photo credit: Justin Tsucalas)

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The Prep is written by Kelly Dobkin and edited by Bianca Prieto.