The Silverspoon in Wayne is a hidden gem of a BYOB offering a locally sourced and seasonal menu. I had a chance to sit down and chat with Silverspoon’s Chef Tim Courtney, who shared his thoughts on using local ingredients and his appreciation and respect for the local producers who supply him with those products.
The Silverspoon’s menus are printed in-house and change on a regular basis. Items are switched up about every other week. As seasonal ingredients become available and the price drops each year, they begin to appear on the menu: “It’s a never-ending work in progress. I’m always searching for new products and trying to get over that hurdle of getting the product into the restaurant.” From just looking at the menu, it’s clear that local family farms are integral to Chef Courtney’s process.
Chef Courtney acquires many of his ingredients through farms like Keswick Creamery in Newburg, PA. Though he only gets a couple of cheeses from Keswick, the farm is well-networked with other suppliers that Silverspoon can pull from. Keswick checks in with its neighbors and lets Chef Courtney know what products are available from the area. This type of cooperative gives Silverspoon access to ingredients it wouldn’t otherwise be able to acquire.
Chef Courtney explained that when he was learning to cook, he was taught that the chef sits down and writes the menu. Then, the chef will find the ingredients he or she needs to create the dishes that were planned. “This is not market driven food. (At Silverspoon), it’s the complete opposite,” he explained. Even if Chef Courtney wants a particular ingredient, the farmers he works with won’t sell it to him if it’s not ready.
He speaks incredibly highly of the farmers he works with. It’s clear that he respects them for the work they do: “For me, that’s just the way it ought to be. I think chefs get too much credit for what we do, especially guys like me. My approach to cooking is very simple: I want to get that great product. I want to get those asparagus and I just want to drizzle them with olive oil and sea salt and throw them on the grill. I don’t fuss with the food. I don’t mess it up. I want you to taste what it is. And if you get really lousy asparagus from Peru in January, you’re going to end up with a really lousy dish. If you wait until the time is right and you just treat it simply, the results take care of themselves. I give (the farmers) a lot of credit.”
Chef Courtney plans to make it out to smaller farmers’ markets this time of year to check out potential new vendors. He explained, “This is where you meet these people. It’s where the relationship starts. When they’re excited about what they grow, I get excited about using it.” He added, “First and foremost, I source locally from people I know and trust. They have a passion for farming and good food. In a lot of cases, I’ve been to the farms, I’ve seen the way they work, and they’re as passionate about it as I am.”
This local-sourcing process is new to Chef Courtney since working at The Silverspoon. It’s how he’s personally sourced his own food, but this is the first job he’s had where he’s gotten to put it into practice for his customers: “I’m able to impact my local farm and food shed by increasing what I do to a business-like scale. That was something I hadn’t done before. I know I can cook. I’ve been doing it for a long time, but this is the next hurdle. Silverspoon provided that challenge.”
He explained that in other restaurants, the emphasis is less on the product and more on the chef, “and the chef trying to shoehorn technique over quality of goods.” To him, getting products such as spinach all the way from California doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem fair to the people of California and Mexico, whose water went into growing that spinach, and it doesn’t seem fair to his neighbors who can grow that spinach themselves, without having to put the time, effort and resources into packaging and shipping it over 25,000 miles. “That’s why I feel the way that I do about getting local products,” he said.
Check out The Silverspoon’s ever-changing local menu on their website. It’s a BYOB, so don’t forget to stop at the closest vineyard on the way. It’d be a shame to bring imported wine to this local establishment when there are so many excellent winemakers in our own backyards.
Photographs credited to Lisa Yoder.
