What A Chef Wants.. Quality From Farm To Plate

It’s a chef’s job to elaborately transform raw ingredients into works of art with highly complex flavors and chic plating.

It’s a chef’s responsibility to impress customers and keep them coming back.

Brian Goodman, chef and part owner at The Greenhouse Tavern in Cleveland, Ohio, says that means trusting the high-quality products they start with and pairing unique ingredients with an eclectic atmosphere.

Walking into the Greenhouse Tavern on a typical Friday might leave you a bit dazed. It’s a bustle of customers, clamoring to get one of the 175 seats in the long, narrow venue that sits in the heart of Cleveland’s revitalized East Fourth St. corridor.

The rustic restaurant gestures to the old farmhouse with salvaged barn wood and antique bicycle wheels. VHS tapes lines the walls, and there’s a family-style table in the middle. It’s a mix of historic English tavern and quirky Americana.

The food complements, or perhaps helps define, this décor. The menu is built around the farm- to-table concept with fresh ingredients, many Ohio-sourced.

“We have an emphasis on local product,” Goodman says. “But it’s not about only local, the product has to meet our standards.”

In produce, that means Goodman and chef/partner Jonathon Sawyer going to great lengths to have a relationship with their growers.

With beef, it means knowing something about the animals’ background.

“We use Ohio-raised Certified Angus Beef ® brand, and almost all our ingredients are local, where we can visit and see where and how they’re raised,” says Goodman, who concedes that he won’t hold “local” above quality.

An established relationship with the brand comes from having toured ranches and harvest facilities in Kansas and Ohio. He feels comfortable sourcing CAB from anywhere when supplies are tight, as he knows the same standards are applied across the country.

Goodman says, “Every time I get a strip loin, if it’s the same marbling and looks the same, or similar in size, it makes my job a lot easier.”

That consistency is often put to the test. Take a featured and popular menu item at The Greenhouse Tavern: hand-ground tenderloin tartare, a raw beef dish popular in upscale restaurants.

“For a dish like tartare, it is beyond important to start with the best quality meat,” he says. “It is a completely unaltered product with minimum prep – olive oil, salt and pepper, that’s it. So, if we are showcasing the meat, it has to be above the rest.”

The same applies to everything from salads to sides. Greenhouse Tavern is known as much for its gravy pommes frites (adorned with mozzarella cheese curds and made-from-scratch brown gravy) and pig’s head (yes, it’s just what it sounds like), as it is for its beef dishes.

But when that protein is on the plate, it’s the star, not sauces or sides.

“We want the beef to shine, because that is important; it’s really about showcasing the products that make up our menu,” Goodman says. “When you think of beef, you think of full flavor and tenderness. You expect it, so as a chef, we want that, too.”

Goodman’s simple style isn’t going unnoticed.

In 2012, he was named to Restaurant & Hospitality magazine’s “Nine to Watch,” and The Greenhouse Tavern dishes have earned nods from Food & Wine magazine.

“It’s a fun environment where we are serious on food and flavor, but light on the mood,” adds Goodman. “It’s a mix of fine dining with value. Not elite, but worth every detail we put into each ingredient we source, and I want that to come through in each dish.”

Fun to work with, serious about food – it is his business after all.

“If customers don’t have a great experience here, they go to another restaurant,” Goodman says. “So more or less, I’m putting the (product) under a microscope to make sure it's what I want, and I can cook confidently.”

Source: Certified Angus Beef LLC