Reviews

August 23th 2010

Clearly I will always be partial to the BlueCat BrewPub because of it's being locally owned and locally brewed beer. I feel like it's a little unfair to talk about just a few restaurants in the area so instead of listing a whole bunch of places I'll just talk a little about what it is that really should be done regarding local food here in Rock Island.

Unfortunately there are really not any restaurants that serve locally produced fruits and vegetables. Most people don't know that restaurants need to guarantee that there will be everything that they need to make their menu. This is the current model. We have our menu and most restaurant management wont even consider changing it. There are other models out there. We could start by accepting the seasonal nature of food and going with it. So when your supplier runs out of certain things then the chef gets working on alternate menu items on the fly. Very fun and very creative we will be yes? Well, that's just where it breaks down. No local produce is able to find its way into the local restaurant businesses because of the difficulty of the supply. Specifically how the current model most restaurants use does not dovetail well with local, seasonal, or otherwise sporadic supply lines.

The solution?

If a restaurant owner so chose, he/she could purchase from local farmers markets and or even purchase straight from the farmer. If our small farmers had a place to bring it to in Rock Island such as a local coop, then we could guarantee at least a semi-steady supply which could then be supplemented with produce from other sources.

So, without being too extreme about things, at this time I just simply refuse to patronize large franchises that take our money perhaps out of state, and go to the small mom and pop shops instead. At least this way I keep some of the money here. Someday perhaps if we work diligently towards our goal of sourcing our food mostly from local farmers we can enjoy local farm produce in our locally owned restaurants. So I say right now the best thing you can do is buy locally and talk about it with your family and friends. Come to our meetings and get involved with our campaign to get the City of Rock Island to take local food a little more seriously.