Back of the House
By Ivy Manning
Photo by Gregor Torrence
On a rainy day around noon, Shari Sirkin of Dancing Roots Farm pulls up in a little red pickup truck into the parking lot at Fife restaurant. The pixie-like farmer jumps onto the bed of the truck and lugs boxes of
her just-picked, grown-to-order produce into the
restaurant’s small kitchen.
Chef/owner Marco Shaw is there to greet her, eagerly digging through boxes like a kid at Christmas. Within seconds, he’s found a gaggle of pearly white turnips and begins lopping their greens off with a quick whack of his knife. The greens go tumbling into a bus tub. They’ll be braised with house-made pancetta later that night.
Sirkin opens a box, and picks up a head of burgundy-flecked castelfranco (an heirloom chicory). “Aren’t they amazing?” she says proudly. “They’re less bitter than last week’s, because of the cold.”
The delivery is small — just four or five boxes of late-season squash, hearty greens, and root vegetables. But Shaw is patient. As the weather warms, he knows he will be receiving dozens more vegetables, produce he and Sirkin chose from seed catalogs during their annual January planting planning session.
As Chef Shaw sits down with sous chef Todd Matthews to write the daily menu, he laughingly says, “This is when you find out if you can really cook, in mid-winter to early spring when we’re down to two local purveyors. That’s when the mantra of local-seasonal changes. You won’t find me serving asparagus in February, but I could write a book on using kohlrabi, and Shari’s are the best. I think diners here understand what we’re doing and embrace it — they know we’re committed.”
