Chef Aaron Dionne, one of Joe McGarry's co-collaborators at last year's Eat Local Challenge, makes salt on the beach. Photo courtesy of Bon Appétit

With the new position came increased responsibility as well as a healthy supply of less conventional challenges. For McGarry, one such recent challenge stood out in particular.

Last summer, Bon Appétit held its first Eat Local Challenge, a one-day national event that requires chefs to prepare at least one dish in which every ingredient—including even the most basic, like oils, spices and condiments—has been sourced from within 150 miles. McGarry and his co-workers—ever ready for a challenge—motored out to Pacific City with one thing in mind: salt.

The gung-ho crew gathered equipment—stockpots, firewood, buckets—stocked a cooler full of beer, and made way for the coast. Once at the beach, they got to work collecting and boiling saltwater on a makeshift grill just a few steps from the surf. But after a few hours of watching the pots boil, they were far from shaking salt. What they had was a really strong brine. McGarry said that, as morning turned to night, they realized, “It was going too far, and besides we ran out of beer.”

Not to be deterred, once back in Portland, they poured small amounts of the puckery brine onto sheet pans placed in the warmest areas of their kitchens. Within a day and a half, the brine had dried up and crystallized, and they triumphantly filled their shakers with the hard-won local salt.

McGarry added that much of Bon Appétit’s success over the years has been due, in large part, to an empowering company philosophy. “The fundamental basis and philosophy of Bon Appétit is that the chef is pretty darn important and so they have a lot of leeway. For a contracted food service environment it’s unheard of to give a chef so much creative freedom.”

BON APPETIT
Bon Appétit, which began as a small catering outfit, now boasts annual sales of $400 million with 150 corporate, university and specialty accounts throughout the country. Local accounts include adidas America, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, University of Portland, Reed College and Lewis and Clark College—which was its first account in Oregon in 1990. National clients include Yahoo!, Best Buy, Target Corp., American University and the Art Institute of Chicago.

CEO Fedele Bauccio began his food service career in Portland in 1960, washing dishes for the Saga Corp. while attending the University of Portland. After making his way up the ladder with various food service positions he co-founded Bon Appétit in 1987.

Bon Appétit’s major structural shift toward sustainable food policies came about in the late 1990s, shortly after McGarry transferred to Intel’s Jones Farm Campus.

The change came from the bottom up. Several cooks and chefs at Bon Appétit’s Monterey Bay Aquarium restaurant decided that they should only serve seafood approved by the aquarium’s “Seafood Watch List.” The list encourages sustainable seafood consumption by highlighting seafood that is safe to consume regularly and seafood that should be avoided.

When CEO Bauccio got news of his employees’ forward thinking, he decided to honor the “Seafood Watch List” not only at the Monterey Bay Aquarium but also at every Bon Appétit account across the country. This ethical shift snowballed into countless similar sustainable initiatives for Bon Appétit in the months and years to follow.

Today, Bon Appétit cooks and chefs across the country are schooled in local, sustainable food policy. They don’t abide by rigid menu cycles. Their freezers and shelves are not stocked with out-of-season, frozen and processed foods. Instead, they are encouraged to be creative and resourceful with local, seasonal ingredients.

Company-wide policies favor direct relationships with local farmers, antibiotic-free meat, cage-free chicken eggs, free trade coffee and bovine-growth-hormone-free milk. In the large-scale food service industry, Bon Appétit stands alone.

FROM THE ROOTS UP
McGarry recalled when he began dealing more often with local farmers and less with corporate purveyors. “The first farmer that I started dealing directly with was Charlie Harris out in Gaston from Flamingo Ridge Organics and, you know, I was just kind of getting my feet wet with it. I said, all right, I’ve got 300 bucks. Bring me what you’ve got and we’ll apply it.”

McGarry was amazed with the quality and the quantity of produce that Harris delivered—countless beautiful and ripe seedless Oregon Star tomatoes along with a shocking amount of delicious, sweet red peppers and eggplant.

Now, as regional chef for Bon Appétit, McGarry manages 14 chefs and 24 kitchens in seven states. He regularly organizes farmers’ markets at the Intel campuses, and when the day is over he typically buys back everything that hasn’t sold and distributes it among his kitchens. Last year McGarry worked with Dave and Amy Dixon of Signature Salmon for an on-site salmon sale. Intel employees placed orders online and, before heading home from work, picked up local, line-caught sides of salmon that had been out of the water for less than 48 hours.

McGarry keeps busy coordinating farm visits for his cooks and chefs and, in return, his co-workers are inspired to do good work. Bon Appétit executive chef Micah Cavolo has partnered up with Square Peg Farm in Forest Grove to compost Intel’s food scraps—nearly a ton a week. And now, after several Intel employees have been consistently using the discarded fry oil from Bon Appétit’s kitchens to fuel their cars, McGarry and his staff are gearing up to convert their catering vans to biodiesel.

“That’s part of the responsibility we feel we have—to keep things evolving in the movement. You can’t stand still and say that the tomatoes coming from Mexico in the wintertime are OK. You’ve gotta’ start thinking, ‘How can we change that?’”

COMPUTER CHIPS TO POTATO CHIPS
After our initial coffee rendezvous at Tiny’s, McGarry invited me to have lunch at a quintessential Bon Appétit corporate restaurant. A few weeks later I traveled out to Intel’s Jones Farm Campus in Hillsboro.

As we walked around one of the on-site restaurants I noticed a small, framed list on top of the salad bar that detailed the source and status of the food below: cilantro grown in Aurora, red leaf lettuce that’s Food Alliance certified, mushrooms from Yamhill, basil from Siri Farms. I also noticed that at the various expo-style cafe stations, labels next to menu items denoted: vegetarian, vegan, Farm to Fork (dishes that contain ingredients sourced from a local farm or artisan), organic and more.

Information was shared sparingly so that it was easy-to-read, helpful and informative. McGarry noted, “It’s great to interact, but in a business environment a customer doesn’t want to have to go through 20 questions when they’re here for lunch.”

Instead, McGarry graciously put up with my 20 questions. Some of his best stories stem from last year’s Eat Local Challenge; stories that involve University of Portland chefs shutting down soda machines for the day and making aqua frescas, or a wily chef stalking a wheat combine down a dirt road and returning to his kitchen determined to get his hands on a mill. One of my favorites revolves around the extremely inventive use a salad spinner—literally.

“Oil was the big one that we really got bummed out on because we thought, oh my gosh, we’ve got all these great nut growers here,” said McGarry. While McGarry and his sous chef prepared for their 100 percent local meal, they discovered that although Oregon is home to scores of nut growers, most of the farms ship their nuts—particularly hazelnuts—to California for processing. Therefore, the nut oils could not be considered completely local.

McGarry and his sous chef did some research and decided to extract the oil they needed themselves. “We started reading up on it and we made this trippy little centrifuge with a big salad spinner.”

First they ground up hazelnuts and a bit of water in a food processor and set the slurry aside for a day. In the interim, some of the oil separated and they skimmed that off. They took the remaining hazelnuts, packed them in a pillowcase and tied the pillowcase tightly to the middle part of the salad spinner. By quickly spinning the hazelnuts, a light film of oil was released. Luckily, all they needed was enough oil for a hazelnut vinaigrette.

“It probably wasn’t the most food-cost-savvy way, but we applied the nuts into our dessert so, actually, it worked out all right.”

McGarry is still planning what he and his chefs will cook up for this year’s Eat Local Challenge, scheduled for October 3. Despite his overarching duties and frequent business travel, he’s determined to actively participate again.

“I totally make sure that I have ample time in the kitchen. That’s a great part of my job. I make sure that I’m always rolling up my sleeves. That’s why I got into this in the first place.”