From Not Afraid
of Flavor: Recipes from Magnolia Grill
by Ben and Karen Barker
© 2000 by the University of North Carolina
Press
All rights reserved.
Preface
What possesses two people to want to
open a restaurant?
We sat next to each other on our first day of
class at the Culinary Institute of America. Within weeks, without fully
realizing it, we had embarked on the journey that has enabled us to
share our passion, our passions, our craft, and our lives in an
often time– and labor-intensive fashion. The paths each of us had
followed to our meeting that day were very different, yet as our
relationship grew, we gained a shared purpose that defined our culinary
education. Throughout the program at CIA, we sought to extract as much
knowledge as we possibly could to prepare ourselves for the restaurant
we would one day create. It was a wildly romantic, monumentally
stimulating time; we were learning many things about technique,
ingredients, culinary history, and the foundations of contemporary
cuisine. When we weren't in class, or working in restaurants, we were
cooking, tasting wine, and devouring any piece of reading material about
food that we could lay our hands on. And we were in love.
After
graduation, in 1981, we separated to begin new jobs: Karen in Nantucket
and Ben in Charlotte, North Carolina. Six months later, we were married,
and shortly thereafter, we were reunited in the kitchen, at Restaurant
La Residence in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Founded by Bill and Moreton
Neal, "La Rez" represented the model for the restaurant we hoped to open
one day: chef-owned, kitchen-driven, with an all-consuming dedication to
a seasonal, ever-changing and evolving menu. We arrived in a kitchen
from which Bill Neal had recently departed, leaving a crew of wonderful
disciples intent on preserving his legacy. It was a dramatic and heady
period for us as cooks. With little experience in the fine dining arena,
we learned Bill's recipes, his food sensibilities, and, most important,
his absolute integrity in all aspects of food preparation, sourcing of
ingredients, and cultivation of the supplier relationship. We brought a
different orientation to the mix and soon began to influence the menu
with our own ideas. Many days brought menu genesis at its most romantic
level: we have these ingredients; what can we make with them?
Experimentation ran rampant; we read cookbooks voraciously and then
descended on the kitchen like Huns sweeping across the steppes, eager to
test our skills on unsuspecting customers. As long as we could call our
new dishes something in French, there were no boundaries. Many of these
creations were successful; some were abysmal failures.
After nearly
two years at La Residence, we began to look for other opportunities to
expand our roles and responsibilities. La Rez had moved into Chapel Hill
when the original site of the restaurant, in rural Chatham County, was
restructured by Jenny and R. B. Fitch — as part of their
development of the surrounding pasturelands as the Village of
Fearrington — into the Fearrington House. Embodying the Fitches'
vision, the restaurant was situated in the rambling old farmhouse that
had been home to La Residence, now freshly renovated and redecorated.
National acclaim had touched the restaurant under the direction of the
great Edna Lewis, the country's leading exponent of high Southern
cuisine, seasonal ingredients, and indigenous producers. When Miss Edna
returned to New York, the kitchen staff at Fearrington continued to act
in her stead, but it seemed to us that the situation presented an
opportunity for us as a chef-couple to make an impact and proceed
further along the learning curve we were on. We presented ourselves to
the Fitches as candidates endowed with the abilities to create, as R. B.
termed it, "the cuisine of the New South"—and the Fitches gave us
the job. They invested considerable faith in us, given our limited
credentials, and it was occasionally a rocky road. Not only were we
thrust into the limelight as the originators of the menu, but our
untested capabilities for creating and managing a staff, developing an
all– American wine list, and supervising an established operation
were all on the line.
The challenge of working within the Southern
idiom loomed large on its own. Presented with the opportunity to develop
our own style, we chose to follow the guidance of Bill Neal in our neck
of the woods and Alice Waters in California by cultivating a network of
suppliers, growers, and purveyors who could determine the path of the
menu. Adopting the mantra ingredient-driven cuisine, we set off on a
labor–intensive search for local growers at our still-nascent
farmers market, for suppliers of old-fashioned indigenous ingredients
like stone-ground cornmeal and flours from Lindley Mills in Alamance
County, and for small seafood brokers from the North Carolina coast
willing to drive three and a half hours to bring us better quality fish
and shellfish.
The Fitches gave us an extraordinary environment to
work in, with herb gardens right outside the kitchen door, free rein
with the menu (after a time), and a developed clientele stimulated by
our excitement over the food we were creating. We learned so much about
ourselves, our limitations and our potential, that when the owners of a
small health food grocery store in Durham moved to larger quarters and
offered us their former space, we felt the timing was right for us to
open a restaurant of our own.
The exact moment when we realized
that, barely four years out of culinary school, we were going to realize
our dream is lost to us now. Many people were of the opinion that
opening a fine dining establishment on the periphery of West Durham's
business district was suicidal. No evidence existed to show demand for
the type of restaurant we proposed to have in the little brick building
on the corner of Ninth and Knox. And yet, we knew that if we pursued
great ingredients, prepared them with adroitness and passion, and
invested ourselves in the success of our staff, we couldn't help but
achieve our goals.
Since we opened Magnolia Grill in November 1986,
an extraordinary array of folks have passed through our doors, both
front and back. If it weren't for the dedication, skills, and integrity
of all those coming in the back door, we would never have had so many
walk through the front. We have taught, learned, made mistakes, burned
pots and bridges, and, we hope, grown as chefs and as people. We have
observed proudly a number of young people pass through our kitchen en
route to their own dreams of running or owning a restaurant.
This
book represents a testimonial of sorts to the guests and staff who have
enabled us to continue to live our dream. Of course, there have been
days when circumstances have coincided to cause us to question our
choice of direction. Even so, on the not–so—infrequent
evenings when everyone in the kitchen is clicking and the plates of
fearless food exit gorgeous and well–executed to an appreciative
(and often noisy) audience, we're reminded of the days when we first set
out on this road. And the question is answered: after twenty years of
cooking together, we're still in love with what we do and we're still in
love. And we still believe, as Henry David Thoreau said, "To affect the
quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts."
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