I am looking for a business partner of sorts, hopefully in or near Amsterdam.
My Offer
Basically, my proposal is this. My garden is not in a state to start large scale production suitable for supplying a restaurant, and I’m also not a salesman and don’t want to go into the restaurant supply business. I do have a number of interesting things growing this year in my garden, ideas for more, and I expect to have enough to start experimenting.
What I have is knowledge of unusual varieties of fruits and vegetables, as well as contacts for searching out new varieties and information on growing them. The emphasis in the Netherlands is often on ‘old varieties’, but what I specialize in is more modern varieties created with old techniques and traditions. Over time the genetics of all plants change anyway, so nothing is really that old. In the modern world people are more used to eating processed foods and so have different expectations of what tastes good and what’s nice to eat than our ancestors did. I look for food people today find exciting to eat. Of course these can include good tasting older varieties as well.
I speak English and passable Dutch.
I can also offer the publicity associated with my blog.
What I’m Looking For
I’m looking for a restaurant chef who would like to spend some time with me, learn something about my garden and the plants I’m growing, and experiment with cooking some dishes and possibly serving them to a small number of customers. The long term intention would be to find a way of growing some of the more interesting plants on a larger scale for use as ingredients in restaurant dishes.
While the taste of these plants is likely to be far superier to any produce available locally, the cost is likely to be correspondingly high. Therefore, I’m looking for someone with experience preparing high quality dishes that customers may be willing to pay extra for. Of course costs always have to be managed, but to be clear I’m not really looking for someone whose top priority is to produce large amounts of food at low cost.
While making money in this venture is a goal, the first priority is to gain publicity for heirloom produce in Amsterdam as well as myself, this blog and my other projects. Of course if the business venture is successful, I will expect a share of the profits.
Ideally this person would already work for an established restaurant in Amsterdam, but I would also consider working with someone just starting out. To be clear, while I understand many businesses have interns working for them, I am not prepared to take on the primary responsibility of training one.
While this is not a precondition as such, my past experience suggests the chances of success will be highest if this person has an international element to what they do. For example, they themselves are from another country or have a restaurant already where a significant percentage of customers or staff are non Dutch born. Maybe someone educated outside the country.
Few Dutch born people read and participate in this blog, understand the principles behind it, and there is a strong sense here that someone who grows vegetables is very lower class. For someone who perceives me in this way, there simply won’t be any basis for a working relationship. Someone who doesn’t understand the difference between a vegetable garden and a commercial farm, won’t understand how to work with difficult to grow vegetables and how special they are. I’ve had too many frustrating experiences investing time trying to bridge differences like this, and I’m looking for someone where that won’t be necessary.
If anyone has any concrete ideas or contacts along these lines, please let me know. Do you think you’re the right person? I’d like to hear from you!
Good show Patrick! I’m working on a similar project. You can also seek out high end “fresh” restaurants (this is what I did). Invite the chef owner to your garden. Ask what they would like to cook, this is how I started working with celeriac. Show them what you have going already and discuss how you might fit in some requested items. Give a small gift of something from your garden. Vivian picked the first radish and took home a loaf of bread and a jar of honey. This is awesome and I wish you well!
Patrick, I don’t think you will find people here on your blog who are restaurant owners in Amsterdam. Like Jo suggested, you should go to a restaurant (an organic?) and just invite them to your garden.
If you want a list of organic restaurants, here is one: http://www.biologica.nl/bio-gids/?http://www.biologica.nl/eko-gids/list_dir.phtml?text22=ekogids&text23=restaurant
Hi Orhan,
Thanks for the suggestion.
A bit like we were talking about by email before, ‘organic’ (biologisch) is more of a legal term and a way of creating cartels and excluding small businesses than anything else. An organic farmer must use organic seeds, must purchase everything else he uses (fertilizer and so on) also from certified organic sources. A restaurant that is organic must buy their vegetables from certified organic suppliers. Especially the EKO mark people have a lot of rules that are very bad for small farmers and businesses, and are really an organization I try to avoid.
In short, an organic restaurant can only sell food that they buy from large (organic) farmers.
This would probably be the last kind of restaurant I would try to contact, because I am not certified organic, and they would not be allowed to use vegetables from my garden.
For the same reason, if I were looking for a place to eat, I would not go to an organic restaurant, rather if I could find one, I would go to one that purchased their food from local farmers who didn’t use chemicals and so their food was the same as organic.
Customers of a certified organic restaurant would also probably not understand what is interesting about what I grow in my garden, and would not want to pay extra money for it.
Also, like we talked about in our emails, what I grow in my garden is illegal to sell because they are not official varieties. This means I need to work with a special kind of restaurant who is willing to take the risk of selling ‘illegal’ food, and a restaurant who has gone to the trouble of being certified organic could get in too much trouble too quickly by selling something they weren’t suppose to.
I am probably looking for a restaurant that is either very small and just getting started, who doesn’t have a lot to lose anyway by getting in trouble selling illegal food, or a very large restaurant who is willing to stand up to the authorities and make a lot of noise about it.
You mentioned you were having a hard time buying organic seeds, and partly that’s because so many people outside of the country don’t care about certified organic any more, and so there isn’t anyone to buy the seeds. More people now are interested in high quality locally grown foods that are grown without chemicals (organic, but not called organic), and this is more the kind of restaurant I am looking for. There are not many of them around however, so it’s hard to find one!
This is part of the reason why I said the person should have an international element to what they do, because while this kind of food is not yet popular in Holland, it mostly likely will be within a few years. We’re a bit behind the times here.
As well as hoping to find someone now with this post, it’s also my intention this post will stay around on the Internet for a while and people will be able to find it with search engines like Google. I’m not really expecting to find someone right away, but it would be nice if it happened. So if you don’t know of anyone now, don’t be afraid to get in touch later!
Hi Patrick,
I met a portuguese guy working in an interesting company, though I don’t know if it interests you. Think micro-vegetables…
http://www.koppertcress.com/index.php?PageID=1304
Rgds, Joana
Hi Joana,
Your friend sounds really interesting. A company that produces cress! I’m not sure he’s the right person to get in touch with right now, but I’m really happy to know he’s there. Thanks!
It just occured to me, have you ever checked out foodie blogs? That would be another way for you to connect to a market.
Hi Patrick,
Well I understand that. But maybe there is a small organic restaurant that wants to take the risk?
Orhan:
No, I doubt there would be. I tried a couple of years ago with the farmer I mentioned to you in Friesland. He wanted to use my garlic is some of his cheese, but his cheese is certified organic and my garlic is not, and it simply was not allowed.
For a small restaurant to become certified organic it’s very expensive, and it’s too important to keep the customers that want to eat at that kind of restaurant. If they lose their certification, they would probably lose their entire business. It’s just not a risk I would expect them to take, or a place I would spend time looking.
It may be there is a small organic restaurant who is not certified as such, but then they wouldn’t be on the list of Platform Biologica that you linked to. Someone would have to tell me about this restaurant specially, or I would have to find it some other way.
Honestly, the whole idea of certified organic is not really part of the subject of this blog, you and I have discussed it quite a bit already and these discussions don’t seem to be coming to any conclusion. If you really want to discuss food certified organic it’s probably better if you look for some place else to do this, perhaps start your own blog. At the moment, you’re the only one I’m aware of interested in discussing it here.
Everyone:
Amsterdam is not very large, and finding lists of restaurants is not difficult. I can find those on the Internet or local Chamber of Commerce (Kamer van Koophandel). While I may not know of absolutely every restaurant in the area, I do know most of the important ones.
My reason for making this post was not so much looking for lists of restaurants, but looking for someone who themselves might be interested or someone who might have personal contact with someone who might be interested. Something along the lines of what Joana mentioned above. I had some good suggestions by email as well.
I have tried to make some contacts with different places, and I have not found just showing up or calling them a particularly good way of doing it.
Most places have their own established relationships with suppliers, their own established menus, do not deal with someone like me, and in any case being a supplier is not something I want to do.
It is not legal to run a business here out of a community garden like mine because they receive government subsidies, and the varieties of vegetables I grow are themselves not legal for sale. I am looking for something much less formal than running a restaurant supply business.
I don’t expect to find anyone quickly, so if you happen to come across this post some time in the future, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
sounds like what you are really looking for is a cook/chef who is interested in experimenting with the weird and wonderful stuff you grow. A full time restaurant maybe too ambitious? do you have enough land to supply enough produce? I did hear of a special restaurant where the gardener/cook opens the restaurant (which I think was attached to the garden but not sure) one night a week and cooked with the produce from his garden. You take pot luck and turn up for the evening (I think they did it on a Friday night) and it became quite a destination but sorry I have no more info than that. I’ve often thought I’d like to do something like that.
P.S Have you tried local recipe blogs as somneone else suggested I think it may be more likely to help find cooks, who would be interested in your request / business idea.
Hi Laura,
The place you are talking about may be ‘De Peper’:
http://www.depeper.org/ He is a long time and famous cook in Amsterdam, who cooks really good vegetarian and vegan food. I haven’t been there in years, but I have very good memories. It used to be called ‘De Silo’ and was in an old squatted grain silo on the outskirts of the city. It is very popular.
The problem is I’m really beyond the age of squatters and squatting, and they have little or no intention of making profit or becoming mainstream.
This place is in the back of my mind, and I might make contact with him at some point. He’s probably already cooking with some of the same things I grow, and yes I think he has a garden too.
I’ve just been surfing around for Dutch Foodie/Recipe blogs. If anyone else is interested in having a look, there’s quite a bit in English, you can best search on ‘Amsterdam Food Blog’ then follow links in people’s blogrolls. A representative Dutch language food blog, with an extensive blogroll is: http://mrooijer.web-log.nl/ or Onno Kleyn http://www.onnokleyn.nl/ who I think is a columnist for the Dutch Volkskrant newspaper.
I don’t honestly follow local press much, because at least the last time I looked most of it was behind a pay-wall and of very poor quality anyway. I also don’t follow foodie blogs in general. I’m not really sure who are the big names for ‘foodie-ism’ are here.
From what I know, the sense of good quality or ‘exciting’ food here revolves around exotic game like what you might find in a South African restaurant. Some people also look for certified organic food. There are a couple of Michelin star quality restaurants, but I think these are nearly all far away from Amsterdam, and there aren’t a lot of these. I doubt a Michelin star restaurant would be interested in ‘illegal’ veg, but I guess you never know.
There is not really much of a foodie culture as it exists in other places, as far as I know. I don’t really know anyone who writes about and promotes local foods, with a few exceptions.
These exceptions are intensely commercial, like Slow Food Nederland or an extended group of people and companies associated with Vergeten Eten (forgotten foods), of which I seem to have very little in common with and certainly don’t seem to have any interest in me. They seem very happy to have me help them and promote them, but are not very interested in working together with me on things I’m working on. In my opinion, the things they are working on are not interesting either, mostly trying to create cartels and closed distribution networks for things called ‘old foods’, but are not that interesting in my opinion.
Like I said in this post, I’m more interested in modern foods made in the old way, that people in the modern world find exciting. For me, working with these guys would be taking a step backwards from that. I also see little point in trying to build cartels and closed distribution networks for unpatented heirloom seeds!
From time to time I have contact with these people, and I’ll probably continue to discuss things with them, but there’s no immediate prospect of working with them. They read my blog sometimes, so maybe they’ll see this and be interested in getting in touch again.
This is really all I know. If anyone cares to point me to a Dutch foodie or recipe blog that I may have missed, please do!
Namaste, my name is Atom and maybe i can be interested in opening a new restaurant in Amsterdam, visit my website http://www.ribadolte.com, i’m a Chef owner and for now i live in Cape Verde but me and my family are considering moving to Europe again, I’m more used to seafood for now but my background is Macrobiotic and Vegetarian chef…by the way have you seen the movie “FOOD MATTERS”???, before anything else you must watch it, and than we can talk, namaste a7
hi, i have recently read your blog/website.i am very interested.i am english but my family originate from spain. i have a wide range of dishes on my website. i have 19 years experience as a michilin trained chef. i have worked with some of the best chefs in the n/w of england.i am always looking for new produce to extend my dishes.i think it would be fantastic to work alongside a person such as your self who produces produce no one else has.
please feel free to peruse my website or email me.
thanks and regards
karl isidro centenera
Thanks both Atom and Karl, I’ve sent you both emails and hope to stay in contact with you. I’d love to hear from others who may be interested, as everyone has their own circumstances and I might be able to work with a few of you at the same time.
hello!!
was wondering i still u were lloking for a chef for your company!!
I am a ex culinary instrustor who has opened and updated kitchens and chef’s. I love the business. I was experimenting with beans, grains years before they came popular.Have been featured in the New York Times and other magazines. I could and will make you money and with your garden:love it. I am great to experiment with new products and I say “Lights burn 24 hours a day”
Hello Karl,
I am Ana and I’m writing to inform you that we have started a sight in facebook called Familia Centenera Y Garchitorena.And a question came up about one of the 8 brothers that travelled to europe named Isidro Garcia Centenera. If you are directly related to Don Isidro, may we invite you for more info about him.I am also in Fb and you maybe one of my friends. Please join us.
Tank you
Ana Maria