If running a restaurant is enough to give anyone a headache, Michael Altenberg must be trying to give himself a migraine. He’s weeks away from the opening of Crust, a pizzeria in Wicker Park that stands to become the fourth certified-organic restaurant in the country and the first in Chicago. But certification presents a unique set of problems. Even the simple act of bringing food into a kitchen gets tricky.
For Altenberg it’s all about transparency, a way of calling out chefs who misrepresent their use of organic products and green practices. Stopping in at the farmers’ market once a week isn’t enough, he says. “There are a ton of guys out there getting photo-ops of them walking with baskets and sniffing a tomato. But come on. Stand at my back door [at Bistro Campagne] all day and see what I get in–and this is just a 90-seat restaurant. I have truckloads of product coming in. If you and I were going to walk together and shop for my day at the bistro, we would have to have, maybe not a semi, but a substantial truck sitting there. You’d be following me with a dolly and we’d be picking up pallets of products. It’s just not realistic. It makes for good fluff in food magazines.”
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Organic food has been a fundamental part of Altenberg’s life for 13 years, ever since his two-year-old son was diagnosed with a strain of leukemia he says was “directly correlated with environmental causes.” At Campagnola, the restaurant he started in 1993 (with which he’s no longer associated), he relied on organic, often local ingredients; Bistro Campagne followed the same model. “Once I started thinking about organics,” he says, “it became very difficult for me to go into my restaurant and feed people food that I wouldn’t feed my family.” But where his previous restaurants have been upscale, Crust is supposed to be accessible to anyone, the kind of place where families can “go out and feel good about eating pizza. My kids get invited to birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese and places like that. I can’t in good conscience let them eat that crap.”
Before Crust came along, Indiana Certified Organic had never certified a restaurant. Now the agency’s working on audit number two–and if all goes well, Chicago’s Bleeding Heart Bakery, which has advertised itself as organic since the day it opened, will soon become the first certified-organic bakery in the country.
But as demand for organic products at restaurants citywide has grown, distributors have started to respond. Goodness Greeness launched a food-service division last year. Even Sysco has started to get in the game. “It’s amazing how much has changed,” Garcia says. “We’re able to make so much more stuff because I’m able to find so much more stuff. My product line is probably ten times what it was last year.” Although she still buys locally, she often turns to Goodness Greeness to find things she can’t. “If somebody wants strawberries in the middle of winter for their wedding cake–even though it goes against my better judgment to give them strawberries in the middle of winter–I’m going to do it. And they’re able to supply me with that.”
When demand exceeds supply, of course, prices go up. And in an industry with notoriously thin margins, where the extra change spent per pound on organic broccoli can eat up what little profit there is to be had, restaurateurs traditionally haven’t been willing to take the gamble. Bleeding Heart Bakery, for example, is in a neighborhood with no shortage of cheap butterfly cookies, and while Garcia’s the only baker peddling organic, locally sourced goods, her customers pay for the luxury. The cheapest pastry at Bleeding Heart, a breakfast scone, costs $3; at Alliance Bakery, just a few blocks north, a conventional scone runs $1.50.
For an organic restaurant with only one location, profitability may be too lofty a goal. Amona Buechler, owner of the Lake Side Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant in Rogers Park, says her menu is about 90 percent organic, “and at some point, our goal is to break even.” Since opening the restaurant in the fall of 2005, she and her partner, Jeffrey Tippman, have kept it afloat with the profits from their massage table company, Tao Trading. “At the moment, our prices are way too low,” she says. To go completely organic–all the way down to ingredients like soy sauce and vanilla–she estimates she’d have to double her prices. David Lipschutz, owner of Blind Faith Cafe in Evanston, had considered an organic overhaul of his restaurant’s vegetarian menu before reaching the same conclusion. “Without pretty much changing the nature of the cafe and the price point,” he says, “I don’t know if it would ever be possible to be strictly organic.”
