#mad4

Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson Announce loco'l from madfeed.co on Vimeo.

"How can we find the price point, but challenge the status quo?," they ask in the pitch to potential contributors. "The burger—cutting it with grains and the tofu—is finding a way because we don't have the power to get our meat at the same prices that these chains do yet."

The crowd-funding page also includes new information about an advisory board: 

- Chad Robertson, Founder and owner of Tartine Bakery, Bar Tartine

- Rene Redzepi, Chef and Co-owner of NOMA, Founder of MAD

- Scott Kester, Founder and owner of Scott Kester Design

- David Irvin, Principal and Creative Director at Folklor 

- Mark Stech-Novak, Founder and owner of Mark Stech-Novak Restaurant Consultations and Design

If you're interested in donating, there's a range of perks, from getting to try the first loco'l burger ($25) to a street food tour of Los Angeles from Choi ($5,000). 

The IndieGoGo campaign was launched just before the weekend has a funding goal of $150,000. As of this writing, it has raised $8,500. Check it out here.

Soba Master Tatsuru Rai Demonstrates His Craft at MAD Symposium from madfeed.co on Vimeo.

At the age of 19, Tatsuru-san traveled—walked, actually—all the way from Tokyo to Hokkaido and built the structure for the restaurant by himself, with his own bare hands. Here are some pictures from Arielle's visit. We were touched to see mementos from their visit to Copenhagen up on the wall. 

“We had discussed how badly a restaurant was needed here in East Cork but did nothing about it while the children were at home but I remember sitting down in front of the fire one day thinking, ‘What are we going to do with this big house?’ I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life cleaning… So I revived the idea of a restaurant.” 

The idea wasn’t new to Myrtle, as she had always collected and read cooking books and her husband, Ivan Allen, a vegetable farmer, encouraged her to make use of his farm’s produce when feeding the family. She started to take cookery classes at the College of Commerce and became a cookery correspondent at the Irish Farmers Journalfrom 1962.

“I read a lot and always had a lot of cookery books. I studied cooking, always wanting to know how one would produce a potato in a certain way. My parents liked good food, too. They cared a lot and had their own garden. They were also very interested in nutrition. People don’t think about food and nutrition anymore. My mother hadn’t been strong for most of her life, so she was anxious that we had good food so we would remain healthy.” 

Together, Myrtle and Ivan converted the family’s dining room into a restaurant and renamed the space The Yeats Room. They derived the name from the paintings of Irish artist Jack B. Yeats, whose work Myrtle hung in the room. She supposed that they might make up for the food if it was poor.

But the backup plan wouldn’t be necessary—with no more than a simple text advert in the newspaper, diners began to make the pilgrimage to the rural manor house. The Allens built their reputation on a simple philosophy: a menu full of fresh delicious, local food that changed daily. The restaurant earned a Michelin star in 1975 and held it for five years.

The grounds of Ballymaloe

Speaking to the Montreal Gazette, Myrtle explained the philosophy behind the restaurant, and how it influenced the local community, even in its early days:

 “We always had food of the area. It’s a cliché, but that’s the way it has been. We would go to friends for dinner. They weren’t startling cooks, but it was just a good meal. Nothing was outstanding, it was just well-cooked and much appreciated. I remember when I was about 10 years old; I went on holidays out in the country. There were farmers there and I used to go in and have a meal with them. You knew exactly what you were going to get, lovely fresh vegetables from the garden, and potatoes, of course. But you didn’t see that kind of food in a café or restaurant or even other people’s houses for that matter. I particularly remember the farmers, who would always have the local food. Opening up the restaurant started people in the locality thinking about what they had. People used to come to the door with, say, a bucket of blackberries and we would say yes, please, and buy them. We created a bit of a demand around here, which was nice.”

Myrtle’s devotion to local produce was a culinary philosophy far ahead of its time, especially in that region. In the 1970s, she actively discussed the concept of terroir, which had been applied almost exclusively to wine production. She discussed this in the introduction to her 1977 classic, The Ballymaloe Cookbook, writing:

“The butter your sister is sending us is very good,’ I said to my neighbour one day. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that field always made good butter.’ That is long ago and the fragrance is almost forgotten.”

Myrtle would later turn the house’s unused rooms into guest rooms, and transform Ballymaloe House into a hotel. In 1983, Myrtle’s daughter-in-law Darina, a sous-chef at the restaurant, would also start giving cooking courses at the hotel. The Ballymaloe Cookery School was born. Darina has led the school since ’83, also becoming actively involved in the international Slow Food Movement.

Perhaps the brilliance behind Myrtle’s legacy is that today we take her advances for granted. It has gone from minority opinion to accepted culinary ‘fact’. A piece by Joe McNamee in The Irish Examiner addresses the matter:

“Her culinary philosophy, based on using the best of local, seasonal, Irish produce, grown and harvested in a sustainable way, is now so accepted by the mainstream, that it’s difficult to convey the revolutionary impact of her approach when she first opened a restaurant at Ballymaloe.“

The late Irish chef Gerry Galvin built on this by underlining how foreign it was to stress local produce:

“Myrtle served home cooking in a refined environment, using whatever fresh, local foods were available. This is commonplace now, but it was fairly revolutionary then. At the time, anything really good was expected to have been imported. We were still suffering from the notion that anything that was our own was inferior.” 

The Ballymaloe Festival consists mostly of intimate events, like this reading with chef and cookbook author David Tanis

Myrtle’s work remains influential. In 2013, she and her family inaugurated a festival, called the Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine. It is the first ever literary festival in Ireland dedicated to food and wine, and it attracts over 8,000 people to the grounds of Ballymaloe house for a weekend of talks from national and international culinary figures.

And here is an extended documentary on Allen's life and legacy: 

View the excerpt above to see why on the first day of each semester, the first thing all new students at Ballymaloe do is plant a seed. 

More recent posts from MAD:

- Albert Adrìa's Remarkable Rise to the Top

- Jeremiah Tower's "Benchmarks, Not the BMW"

- Yale Professor Paul Freedman on the history of the celebrity chef

- Celebrating 20 years of St. John

- On All the Ways to Write a Recipe

- Thomas Keller answer "What is Cooking?"

- How restaurants can fight climate change

- Jay Rayner: "Being a chef doesn't make you an agent of change"

- Eric Schlosser: "Chefs should get political"

- Chris Cosentino on the perils of food television

- Rising star Tatiana Levha on the pain of opening a restaurant

- Fulvio Pierangelini's talk, "Fulvio in Exile"

- Famed maître d' Silvano Giraldin on the art of the table

- Wylie Dufresne on how you should act in a kitchen

- Soba Master Tatsuru Rai opening MAD4

In the clip, Hellstrom explains how he took a Nutella addict—a man who would eat that and nothing else—and made him see the light. 

More recent posts from MAD:

- Albert Adrìa's Remarkable Rise to the Top

- Jeremiah Tower's "Benchmarks, Not the BMW"

- Yale Professor Paul Freedman on the history of the celebrity chef

- Celebrating 20 years of St. John

- On All the Ways to Write a Recipe

- Thomas Keller answer "What is Cooking?"

- How restaurants can fight climate change

- Jay Rayner: "Being a chef doesn't make you an agent of change"

- Eric Schlosser: "Chefs should get political"

- Chris Cosentino on the perils of food television

- Rising star Tatiana Levha on the pain of opening a restaurant

- Fulvio Pierangelini's talk, "Fulvio in Exile"

- Famed maître d' Silvano Giraldin on the art of the table

- Wylie Dufresne on how you should act in a kitchen

- Soba Master Tatsuru Rai opening MAD4

It seems like a good time to release video of his talk at this year's MAD Symposium. In his presentation, Stars walked the audience through his career, which includes running the kitchen at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse and, of course, serving as the chef of the glitzy and influential Stars. Some would say that Tower was among the first modern-day celebrity chefs.

Watch the footage above to hear how it all went down.

More recent posts from MAD:

- Yale Professor Paul Freedman on the history of the celebrity chef

- Celebrating 20 years of St. John

- On All the Ways to Write a Recipe

- Thomas Keller answer "What is Cooking?"

- How restaurants can fight climate change

- Jay Rayner: "Being a chef doesn't make you an agent of change"

- Eric Schlosser: "Chefs should get political"

- A brief history of food TV and its influence on society

- Chris Cosentino on the perils of food television

- Rising star Tatiana Levha on the pain of opening a restaurant

- Fulvio Pierangelini's talk, "Fulvio in Exile"

- Famed maître d' Silvano Giraldin on the art of the table

- Wylie Dufresne on how you should act in a kitchen

- Soba Master Tatsuru Rai opening MAD4

Since his remarks at MAD, Ying has been bombarded with requests from restaurants who want to get involved. But right now, he cautions that they are still in the exploratory phase—despite the fact that a few notable restaurants have already offset their impact.

Chris Ying and Peter Freed at MAD3: "Knowing Is Half the Battle" from madfeed.co on Vimeo.

Ying and Freed are currently working with Mission Chinese Food in San Francisco to develop the best practices, and by the end of next year, that restaurant will have a zero foodprint. But the process has revealed that this is mostly uncharted territory, and that best practices will likely vary from restaurant to restaurant and region to region. “It’s made us consider little things we never have before, like whether restaurants should be incentivized to buy certain products that will contribute to their offsets,” says Ying.

Perhaps the biggest news from Zero Foodprint came this week, when Myint announced a Kickstarter for an aquaponic greenhouse at the Perennial, a new restaurant in San Francisco “with a farm-to-table ethos, but [that] will also explore the potential for a new “table-to-farm” philosophy that makes better use of resources, including food waste.” The restaurant will collaborate closely with ZFP, and a portion of funds from the Kickstarter campaign will go to the non-profit.

You can donate to Zero Foodprint via their website, and stay on top of future developments by following them on Twitter.