99 Station Street

This week I have had the pleasure of being in Bristol, a city in the midst of some very proud and capable food producers. Apart from some amazing local ciders and beers, there are cheeses, sausages and great meat. One of the highlights was visiting a pub were there are photos on the wall of one of the owners foraging for mushrooms, shooting and fishing. It’s moments like this that make you realise that the understanding of food does not start with removing the packaging, a few steps back in fact. Chefs, restraurateurs and guests would benefit amazingly from seeing food at it’s harvest or in it’s creation.

Going to a small scale artisan cheesemaker (Staffordshire Cheese) and seeing the process, is an eye opener. This is a craft and not something that can be done well by machine, even though it’s a very accurate process, there is touch and taste involved too. One of my colleagues got to mentioning about aged beef and that is pretty much the start of one of my rants about the mistreatment and the false economy is mass managed young beef and the tasteless results that a premature life of poor feed and bulking has produced.

You need great raw ingredients, a lot of skill and the right technique to produce a great finished product. Aged beef is no different, nor is smoked fish, quality sausages or artisan cheese. It was a pleasure to see many fine eateries in the city use Great local food, but most importantly understanding it. Local and seasonal mean you get the best, but it’s a fad or a gimmick if you don’t know where you are doing in the first place.

Tags: bristol, local food

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.