That old saying “you are what you eat” has a sort of ominous ring to it. So let’s consider a more hopeful spin on a classic adage: you are what you cook.
For those in the restaurant business, it’s an idea to keep close at heart—whether it powers the kitchen at an established eatery or inspires a joint to open its doors for the first time. Even over the years, the questions remain: How does your food matter to people? What are the dishes you want to be known for? And as you refine your menu over time, what is the story your restaurant tells?
We threw these tasty brain-teasers at two very different restaurants this week. One—the long-standing Fernandez Family Restaurant—is now in its 26th year serving heaping portions of Puerto Rican food to the weekday lunch crowd in downtown Holyoke. The other—Great Falls Harvest—opened in late 2013 with an eye on bringing fresh, locally-sourced food to dinner and brunch tables in Turners Falls.
The two eateries are 35 miles apart, keep near-opposite hours, and tend to different culinary legacies. In these ways, they bookmark the breadth of cuisine available to Valley diners.
But in many ways, their hearts are in the same place. Consider that the word “restaurant” comes from the French “restaurer”—literally, “to restore.” These two businesses have different missions, but there’s something restorative in their goals. You can fill up a plate, and a body. But good food can also fill up a people, and a place.
It’s a chilly morning in Holyoke, but a rush of warm kitchen air periodically escapes from the back door of Fernandez. Inside, the kitchen staff is preparing all of today’s meals—boiling, frying, slicing, stirring. Over the next fifteen minutes, everything has to end up behind glass at the counter up front. It’s 10:45 a.m., and a line of hungry customers has already formed outside.
Ada Fernandez, 56, runs the kitchen. She’s the reason everyone is here—each recipe, without exception, is hers.
She flashes a smile as she steps around me, and I do my best to avoid whacking her in the head with my camera. Clearly I’m standing in the middle of her well-trod, well-organized daily track. She finishes a gazpacho, turns to slice some avocado, then ducks past me again to check the yucca boiling on the stove. I feel like a bad ballroom dance partner.
Retreating to the front, I catch Ada Fernandez Jr., 41. Ada Jr. manages the restaurant with her sister Jackie, 36.
“It’s funny,” she says. “When my mom cooks at home, it’s good, but it’s not as good as the food she cooks at the restaurant. I think she’s so used to cooking big batches of food that she’s forgotten how to cook on a smaller scale.”
It’s not entirely clear when Ada Sr. has time to cook on her own. Since 1988, Fernandez Family Restaurant has been a time-consuming operation.
“We’re open five days a week, but we’re here every day,” Ada Jr. says. “If we don’t have the restaurant open, we often have a client put in a catering order. I haven’t had a weekend off since the spring.”
It’s the price of success—in this case, a locally famous selection of Puerto Rican lunch dishes. Favorites jump out from numerous news articles and Yelp reviews: roasted pork shoulder, beef stew, chicharrÓn (fried pork rinds), alcapurria (a fried fritter filled with ground beef), and mofungo (a fried plantain mash with pork), among others.
There’s no printed menu. The faces are familiar. People know—and love—what they’re getting: big portions of fresh, authentic food for between $5 and $15.
“Everything we serve is popular, because the menu has been set for so long,” says Ada Jr. “That’s the way my parents designed it. Jackie and I don’t take that away from them. It’s part of the tradition.”
The most popular dish? “Definitely our roast pork and yellow rice. We go through 35 or 40 pork shoulders every day. The meat is really tender, and the skin is really crunchy.”
Ada Jr. is well used to the rhythm by now—including the routine suggestions from customers on how to tweak a winning formula.
“Some people want us to start doing sit-down dinners or late-night meals. But this works for us. People don’t want it to change as much as they might think. I remember one year we did a buffet, and it worked for, like, one day. But then people wanted to go back to ordering from the counter.”
How come? Her explanation goes beyond food.
“People like to be able to ask questions of us, and they want to interact with us at the counter. God forbid one of us ever takes a day off—people spend all day asking where I am, or where Jackie is. They check in with us. That’s part of the culture of eating here.”
An older patron walks past, loaded up with lunch in a plastic bag. She bids him farewell, then turns back to me.
“He comes in all the time. His wife orders over the phone. We’ve never met her, but Jackie has developed this great bond with her over the phone. Every time she calls, they chat for a few minutes. It’s been going on for months. We talk to her, but we only see him.”
She scans the rest of the lunch line. “That guy in the red hat? He’s been coming here since he was very little. And that lady there? She’s part of the WestMass ElderCare program. Everyone knows her—she’s a real personality. And that young lady right there? Her son is a senior in high school now, but she’s been getting lunch here since he was in kindergarten.”
Although it’s mostly regulars here, the restaurant gets a small handful of new customers each week. Summer visitors to the Children’s Museum will bring their kids for lunch. During the school year, college kids swing through. Sometimes parents will come pick up a meal, freeze it, and send it off to formerly local children now living farther away.
And the menu never changes? Really?
“Well, we’ve added some American dishes, like meatloaf and chicken parm and beef stew. And Mom will try new recipes every now and then.”
Currently on Ada Sr.’s test table: a stuffed pork loin, plus a few items with pumpkin.
Steamed yucca also made it onto the menu at some point. “Ours is really tender and soft. We keep it in a steam cart so it stays nice and moist.”
Her personal favorite? “The yucca with garlic chicken. And Jackie and I also like the stews. Today is a pig’s feet stew. Whenever the weather gets colder like this, that’s what people come in looking for.
“But I think people like coming here because they enjoy seeing us all working together,” she adds. “They can see the food comes from a passionate family. If you’re not passionate about it, it’s not going to work. We all learned that from a very young age, from our parents.”
Chris Menegoni steps behind the bar at Great Falls Harvest to pour two pints of Brewmaster Jack beer. Back in the restaurant kitchen, his home, work and life partner Bridgette Chaffee takes a few minutes to whip up a quick dinner for their daughter—Velouria, age 7—who’s settled in to watch some cartoons farther down the bar.
Menegoni, 39, and Chaffee, 35, co-own the restaurant, which celebrated its one-year anniversary in September. This off-hours interview, held in the warm low light of the main seating area, offers a quiet look at a different sort of restaurant family—deeply committed to food, but new to the huge task of running a place of their own.
“We’re not trying to make a million dollars,” Menegoni says. “We just wanted to create a fun, comfortable place for people to come and eat really good healthy food.”
But there’s another side to it, says Chaffee. “We needed better family time. For six years we were living in Turners but driving an hour to work. Now we’re more self-sufficient, and we can work for ourselves, really close to home.”
The family lives on nearby K Street. The restaurant is only open from Thursday to Sunday because, says Menegoni, “we just need to be able to relax and spend time together.”
Chaffee looks down the bar to her daughter. “How’s the food? Tell us what you’re having.”
Velouria studies her plate for a long, thoughtful moment. “Um… I’m eating salmon, and rice, and mushroom, and bacon.”
Menegoni looks to her, leaning back on his stool. “What are the spices in the rice?”
Another few moments of eye-roving and thinking. “Um… cumin? And… cardamom?”
Menegoni takes a sip of beer. “She’s good.”
Velouria loves the salmon at Great Falls Harvest. Her other favorite is the whitefish, which Menegoni breads in a pistachio-parmesan crust and sautées with garlic-roasted tomatoes, feta and braised greens. It’s served over basmati rice with a cilantro yogurt sauce.
“People might not understand how healthy this food is, because it’s so tasty,” Chaffee says. “So many people are worried about the fat content in what they eat. But then they eat a lot of empty bland calories instead. So, we’re all for serving something fattening and delicious with real ingredients.”
Some other highlights from the current menu: a crispy shrimp risotto cake topped with red pepper bacon cream, a porcini-crusted filet mignon, and pan-roasted chicken with creamy feta rice.
“Personally, I don’t go crazy over food that isn’t all-natural or organic,” says Chaffee. “We’re not above stopping for fries at McDonalds every now and then. But there are plenty of things that I care about sourcing locally. And I like restaurants that put some thought into that. So we try to do that here.”
“There are a few aspects of our diet, on a large scale, that are screwing us,” adds Menegoni. “It’s the sugar, the grain, and the salt.”
He points to a slab of pink rock, glowing roughly in the light of the kitchen. “That’s Himalayan pink salt. It’s a naturally-formed crystal. That’s what I cook with. It’s good for you—it’s got 84 minerals in it—and it’s not that hard to come by. You can make something amazing with just that and a little bit of lemon. And maybe some cayenne. And a little maple syrup.”
Menegoni avoids processed sugar as well. “We use jaggery, which is an unrefined Indian sugar. It has iron and vitamin A. Even these things that people think they should avoid, like salt and sugar—they have real nutritional value.”
These two aren’t new to the restaurant game. They met working at Picasso Restaurant & Bar in Barre, in central Massachusetts, and they’ve worked in several restaurants since then. Putting a menu together for their new place, then, has been an ongoing, but intuitive, learning process.
Menegoni’s time working at the Blue Heron in Sunderland inspired the $25 prix fixe three-course meal on Thursdays. “We’ll continue doing that through the winter. But the menu will be changing.”
On his to-do list: stockpile root vegetables (“I love anything orange or purple”). Swap the filet for a new local beef offering (“We get the whole animal, which is pasture-raised in Wendell”). Change up the cheeses and meats on the Harvest Board. Add a ravioli from Vermont Fresh Pasta. Toast and grind up some new spice mixes. And look for ways to add kale (“If I can get that into a dish, I’m happy”).
Menegoni still needs to contemplate the risotto. “It’s going to change to a mushroom risotto with squash and duck. But I’m not sure what it is yet. Maybe a duck breast over the top? Or it might be a confit duck, and I’ll put it directly into the risotto and add roasted vegetables on top. I need to daydream some more about that.”
Planning is simplified, however, by the fact that Menegoni doesn’t believe in measuring ingredients. “Recipes to me are like Tibetan sand art. You make it, it’s gone, and you make it again. Is it going to be exactly the same? No. Recipes are temporary.”
So there are no secrets with him? “Nope. I’ll tell you exactly how to make what I’m making. And if you want to make it yourself, I’m sure it’ll be different anyway.”
Word-of-mouth has been good to Great Falls Harvest, it seems. The spot is increasingly popular with locals, but out-of-towners taking Route 2 west from Boston often come over the bridge to stop for dinner.
“I think we’re right at the speed we’re supposed to be at,” says Chaffee. “Chris is the only person that cooks for the entire restaurant. And it was a little scary when we got busy last winter, because we were new, and people were going to judge us for being congested. But people in the area seem to be appreciating more and more what we’re all about.
“And the foodie culture works to our advantage too,” she adds. “Once someone dubs themselves a ‘foodie,’ they go looking for places that tap into that feeling, whatever that means for them.”
Menegoni shrugs. He’s allergic to buzzwords. “I can’t even watch cooking shows. They’re not really about cooking.”
Chaffee smiles at her partner, recognizing when a grouchy moment is looming.
“Those shows glamorize something that I don’t think is glamorous,” Menegoni explains. “It’s not pretty. It’s hard. Cooking is hot handles. It’s breaking glasses. Even when you succeed, it’s not pretty. You just have to love doing it. Coming in and working hard. Getting callouses. Feeling your hands go numb. That’s what the work is about, whether you’re swinging a hammer or using a paintbrush or taking someone’s pulse. You’ve got to love it. If you don’t love it, then you’re just involved in a system that’s pushing you along.”
Velouria, done with her supper, comes over to Chaffee’s stool and climbs up into her mother’s lap. It’s time to get this family home—tomorrow’s another Thursday, with more hungry customers coming through the door.
“I just mean that you have to put your love and energy into it,” Menegoni says. “It’s not about making one plate, for one judge. It’s about lots of plates, and lots of people. You’re doing something which is a sacred service. You’re feeding someone.”•
Reach Hunter Styles at hstyles@valleyadvocate.com or follow him on Twitter: @hunterst7les
