THE CHALLENGES OF PUTTING SUSTAINABLE IDEOLOGY INTO PRACTICE
July 9, 2020
Rosario Mercau is holding a steaming gourd of mate as she looks up at me, somewhat startled, from her lone position in the dining room of Yedra Cocina Silvestre reviewing orders for the coming week. The infusion of loose yerba leaves native to the Argentine northeast is usually shared; passed around in a circle and subject to a strict set of rules. It is as much a social interaction ingrained into the national identity as it is a pick me up repeated throughout the day. She greets me through her mask shifting her smile to her eyes and pours a fresh round, hesitating for a moment with her hand frozen mid-air before asking if I’d like a coffee and warm croissant instead.
“This has been a really strange experience,” she later explains, “We haven’t figured out the new rhythm. We put out a combo and it’s too expensive. We put out a promo and people are suspicious of it being cheap. We sell frozen food and people don’t want to turn on their oven. We sell a hot dish and sell out of the frozen food instead. I know we are all in this together, all the restaurants are going through the same thing, but this has been a very lonely experience.”
She gestures to the oversized communal table that anchors the tiny dining room. Marina Bartolomé, who runs the kitchen, emerges with a tray of bread that was baked and confined to seran wrap an hour before to arrange in a window display of the kitchens breads and pastries: chunky cuts of vegan banana bread, cookies with chocolate chips or sticky quince jam, lemon squares and focaccia bread that still has a little steam.
We sat down to talk about the realities of the restaurant world, the challenges of running a small restaurant with a vision of sustainability that extends from the menu to the hands of the people in the kitchen preparing it and the future ahead once we settle into the new world order.
Head chef and co-owner Marina Bartolomé.
Could you start by telling me how you two met and how Yedra was born?
Rosario: Marina and I met each other in a photography course back in 2012. She was already part of this group of friends that is now our group of friends. We call ourselves ‘Santo Domingo’.
Marina: It is basically a sect.
R: Every Sunday we get together to cook and eat and drink too much. I don’t know why but once we were feeling a little buzzed, we’d always start babbling about how we needed to open a restaurant. I was working in film and production and was starting to do some catering and learning about food with friends. I quit my job at the animation studio, worked for a year doing freelance stuff, burned through my savings and took a trip to Ushuaia [editor’s note: Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world]. I almost stayed there. I was about to cancel my return flight and Mari called to tell me she had found this spot. I came back and we had a look and it was Yedra.
What did you imagine when you dreamed about Yedra?
M: Very vegetable driven because that’s really missing [in Buenos Aires]. It’s easier from a cost perspective and I think it’s a lot more fun, too. Vegetables have color and meat all has the same color. It’s cleaner. Handling meat gets to me [sic] storing it in the fridge, blood dripping in the fridge, having pieces of meat tossed into the garbage can next to the oven, no thanks.
R: I imagined a small space where you eat well. I wanted to get to know people and understand them. Having a small space was partly economic, too. This was the place we could pay for. Maybe if we had thought it out differently, we could have fit more people but we always wanted something small. Smaller is friendlier. You can feel the people. There is just a totally different human quality. This isn’t just work, it feels like a community space.
M: Rosario is like everyone’s aunty.
Was there a political or social motive to working with vegetables? Did you grow up eating a lot of vegetables?
R: At home I ate milanesa, noodles [sic] beef. We had barbecues every Sunday. It was very traditional. Very little variety and few vegetables. I still hate lettuce. I can’t stand it. I learned to eat with Marina.
M: The political element came after. I wanted to be a vegetarian when I was in my twenties and failed horribly. I didn’t know what to eat. It was bread, cheese and tomato. I didn’t understand how to avoid eating all the stuff that my dad had in the refrigerator. I didn’t have the tools. At home, we ate vegetables but it was never the focus. So I started grabbing vegetables like ‘ok, I don’t know what this is but I’m going to grab it and try it and see what's up.’ Later on I started thinking more about organic produce and la ley de semillas and learning how sinister the food industry is [editor’s note: la ley de semillas is a 1973 Argentine law which predates the creation and commercialization of transgenic seeds and grants rights to both seed producers and farmers. Its vague language has been used to the advantage of multinationals like Monsanto upon their insertion into the market in the mid-2000s to manipulate and control farmers]. The more you learn you realize that the product you are selling is incredibly political. If I could only buy agroecological, I would be a lot happier. Whether it is organic or not, the petroleum and water footprint of a vegetable is much smaller than a piece of meat. In terms of diet, we have been programmed to eat flour, sugar and fat. The reality is that chemically that makes our brain really happy and the industry has latched on to that to profit off of very cheap products. The message here is to try to eat better and put ourselves in this position against a diet based on simple carbohydrates and simple sugars. We want to have a smaller petroleum and water footprint. And we want to communicate why we need to eat vegetables and keep fighting to change mentalities.
Have you dealt with a lot of resistance? Where does that fight concentrate itself?
M: It goes back to how we have been programmed. We’ve had a bunch of clients, and I hate to reinforce stereotypes but it is almost always women because we are who the media goes after, who ask us things like: how many calories does this have? Will quinoa make me gain weight? We have a salad that is filled with vegetables and a spoon of quinoa but they’ll say, no no, I can’t eat carbohydrates because my nutritionist told me they were bad. And I want to say to them: you’re going to eat a really colorful salad with a carbohydrate that is much more than a carbohydrate because it also has minerals and vitamins. And I really think of dishes in that way. I would never ever create a dish based on calories but I am always looking for balance and people still resist, mostly with specific things that we have developed an ignorance around like legumes or carbohydrates. We experienced the same with water. When we opened we sold pitchers of filtered water for 15 pesos and people fought us on that, they didn’t trust that the water was safe to drink. People would rather pay 65 pesos for water that is probably the same quality from a bottle that we can’t even recycle. We looked for glass bottles to not create plastic waste and saved all the bottles and the vendor told us they don’t reuse them [editor’s note: in Buenos Aires, an informal recycling system exists where glass and polyethylene terephthalate bottles are collected and reused or recycled by beverage manufacturers]. What do I do with all these bottles? I inform myself as much as possible to be able to explain why we do certain things, why we make our food this way, how it’s good or why it’s not bad but it’s a fight.
On the menu there are a lot of organic and agroecological ingredients and many that are not. What is the barrier to getting up to 100%?
M: We add them where we can. It’s definitely an economic challenge but it also has a lot to do with logistics. There are just two of us and in addition to managing this space and taking care of everything, we work service too. I know that there are a lot of producers that I could reach out to and buy from and there are lots that I don’t know yet. That’s the direction we are headed. Beyond the smaller carbon footprint that comes with using lots of vegetables when it is organic the cruelty is even smaller. We have always said that our dream is to be as environmentally friendly as possible. Cost is definitely a barrier but that’s not a hard rule. Some things are more expensive and other things are cheaper than what you find at a vegetable stand. But it’s a lot of logistics and an established network doesn’t exist, we have to create that for ourselves. Big restaurants have a person whose only job is to handle stock and orders. Right now, I handle that and have different producers for the same products to get the best quality for our money and it’s already a lot of work. We do as much as we can and work beyond purchases too. We take all the leftover bits from vegetables and make stock throughout the whole winter [sic] we are looking for a way to compost because that won’t make as much sense in the summertime.
Rosario Mercau, co-owner and head of front of house
How do you think that your experiences as a cook in someone else’s kitchen influenced you as a boss?
M: I remember once I had this boss that thought I was lying about a fever. He told me, when I have a fever I come in and work. He wanted me to come in and work the hot dishes. I would never do that to someone. When you are in the kitchen, I think that it is difficult to get rid of that violence that happens in a kitchen. That’s how we were programmed since our first jobs. They treat you like an idiot the whole service and then pass you a beer at the end of the night. And that’s really not right. I have definitely gotten a lot of that out of me. I’ve calmed down a lot. Rosario called me out on it and we have worked through it.
R: It’s really important to understand that the restaurant world is full of abuse. I have always seen it as this very hierarchical world. Like everyone is supposed to be afraid of the head chef. I’m just not down with that. I came from this other world in film production, and sure it has a hierarchical structure but it is also very much a community. We all get upset sometimes but treating people like humans is essential.
What was difficult about ridding the kitchen of violence and what was that process like working together to actually eliminate it altogether?
R: For me at first it was about not knowing how to lead. I was never at the head of a team. At every job I ever had, I was always a soldier and suddenly I found myself at the point of the pyramid and that was very difficult for me. I still have a hard time delegating.
M: It was also the first time I had ever led a team and with the added responsibility of being the owner with a team to lead. I think that dynamic creates a responsibility to build a family and have close relationships and want those relationships. It was a matter of paying more attention. Sure, they get paid to be here but the team puts their time [sic] their body into this place and they deserve gratitude. Things can get intense, stuff comes out wrong, you get behind, there is a lot of pressure and sometimes we start barking at each other.
R: You have to learn to breath and understand that there is a person on the other side of all this [sic] take a second to understand how you react. It takes more than a second but when you make that a habit you start lowering the intensity of being a firecracker just because.
M: And reacting that way hurts us too because you start feeling like you are on bad terms with your team. They give so much of themselves and I treat them badly? When you take two seconds to breath you end up realizing that whatever you’re mad about isn’t worth being mad about. I remember a brunch we did last summer where everything went wrong. Everything. I yelled and treated everyone like shit and it was because I was mad at myself. It had nothing to do with them. It wasn’t their fault. It was mine but I expressed myself in a way that pushed it to them. I came back on Monday and apologized and that was the last time. I have a lot more peace this way because later I thought about all the times that I was treated like an idiot or blamed for the kitchen being behind or made to feel completely useless even though I had been working for ten hours giving everything I had of myself. We started paying attention to those things to become what we had initially set out to be which was a little family.
R: It affects what we transmit too. When the team is happy, the food tastes better. We really noticed that in the last year and especially with me handling service. Before we were a little rough around the edges but we sanded everything down and the energy in the dining room and with the clients is so much better. I have always been great to our clients but when I was having a bad day, it showed. This is a recreational space. People need to be happy and we need to transmit joy to do that.
M: The other day a new fumigator came and happened to show up when we were all eating. We always eat family meal together. He was surprised by how happy we all were and told us that he goes to lots of restaurants where everyone has these long faces, and here we were at the beginning of the quarantine with no idea what was going to happen and we were laughing and eating. That was another important thing for me here. In pretty much every job I had, we’d be cooking this incredible food and the staff would get old lentils or the same pot of noodles and red sauce three days a week and that really affected me, not being able to have the same joy eating as cooking.
We create the spaces where we always wanted to be.
R: I think that is a philosophy a lot of people are starting to latch on to. Creating this more lineal structure. I want to get rid of this pyramidal structure. The hierarchies led by the alpha male: that’s over. I want more fairness, that all of us [employees and employers] work together. Here, we are the bosses but we give everyone the space to show up and contribute something. Here we are all working towards developing ideas and creating together. I’m not interested in coming in here and having everyone look up and be like, fuck, the boss is here. I dealt with that and I don’t want that here.
M: We are seeing that more and more. Shattering that. There are more young people [in the industry]. And I think especially, at least here, with the pandemia we are all really working together.