Breakfast with Jodi Adams of the Rialto

In 2007 I had the opportunity sit down over breakfast and interview Jody Adams of the famed Rialto restaurant. Jody graduated from Brown University with a degree in anthropology. Her first culinary position was as a part-time helper to Nancy Verde Barr, a food writer and teacher. She assisted in the classroom and helped test recipes for Nancy’s first cook book of Italian Immigrant cooking, “We Called It Macaroni”. When Jody decided she wanted to be a chef she worked her way through some of the best restaurants in Boston starting as a line cook at Seasons in 1983. Three years later she worked at Hamersley’s Bistro with Gordon Hamersley as his sous chef. Today her restaurant is ranked with this elite group of Boston restaurants.

CV: I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your degree in anthropology influenced how you perceived the relationship between culture and food and how it comes to play at Rialto.

JA: Food came first; it was always a central part of my life growing up. My mother was a good cook, not a fancy one, but pretty adventurous and she would schlep over to another part of town to shop at the Italian markets where she would buy chickens, pasta, cheese, and vegetables instead of going to the local supermarket. Before I graduated from high school we lived for a while in England and traveled to Europe often. We would eat at many great little bistros and buy really good local food. Then I went to visit my uncle who was a Latin American anthropologist living in Guatemala. I spent the summer there with him and again became very interested in the food and spent a lot of time in the kitchen learning to cook Guatemalan food. It was during this period of my life that I began to appreciate the many different cuisines and cultures and saw first hand how importance of food to culture. So it was during this time of my life that I really developed an appreciation for food and where it came from. I guess you could say this was beginning of my life long love of food. So before I even graduated from high school my life was focused on food in a natural kind of way.

When I returned to the United States, I entered high school as a senior and I was trying to figure out what I would offer up as my potential minor. As with many young people entering college, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. However, based on the time I had spent with my uncle I thought anthropology looked like an interesting discipline. So I looked into it and found it was pretty much all encompassing; such as why people eat what they eat, what they wear, how they speak, and the music and all that; all those things interested me. It turned out that it worked very well because of my interest in food; it definitely filled my need to know the whys and the wherefores. For example, why did cuisines evolve the way they did, why do certain foods work so well together and why do they so naturally occur over and over again in different cuisines?

Ultimately, I decided I wasn’t going to be an anthropologist but wanted to cook in a restaurant and that was 25 years ago. But as time has passed and I have evolved, I’m now in a position where I am a chef/owner of a restaurant. I approach my menus with an evolutionary process like we were talking about earlier. What I do does not come out of thin air but rather from the history of my life; building blocks that influence the final result. Anthropology has therefore both directed me to cooking and continues to inform the way I cook.

CV: What do you think influences what people eat? For example, over the past two years I have had two young Chinese students living with me; one from southern and one from northern China. Both of them were quite adamant in letting me know that they were not vegetarians and needed to eat lots of meat. This is a very new in their culture and I wondered if it was a status symbol driven by their economic success. So, I wondered what you found in your investigations.

JA: Yes, if you look at a country like Italy which is they one I focused on, you will see that geographical boundaries determined how the cuisine evolved and that people ate what was available and this was local food, and so tradition grows out of those ingredients. In the case of China it is economic development; In the case of Italy, it was the availability of transportation which made it easy to move food from one region to the other which blurred the boundaries; when this happens there has to be a re-definition of what exactly the cuisine is.

Italy is made up of many regions each with a different cuisine. At Rialto we do a different region each month which makes it very interesting for me and my staff. I look at what local ingredients are here, do some magic, and then I interpret the region through my menus. I use a very broad stroke when it comes to culinary food. Some customers have not happy when they order a meal that they have had in Italy and mine is not the same. And it’s true that mine is not an authentic representation of a dish that you get in the Venetian but it would have ingredients and techniques that you would find from those dishes. As I mentioned earlier, food boundaries are constantly shifting.

CV: What is your relationship with our local farmers’?
JA: We use many, many local farmers’ for our produce. A tiny few are Eva’s Garden and Verrill Farms. We buy our clams from a clam farmer in Wellfleet and we buy micro greens from a gardener in Rhode Island; we have lots of different farmers we purchase from. (*Ilene, do you want me to get the list?)

CV: Isn’t this a lot of work when you could buy everything from one place?
JA: It is more work but the farmers come to us. But is it harder? Well what is hard? Is it time?

CV: Well the managing of it, knowing what is coming, and planning your menus.
JA: It is more work, but there is a texture to it, there are people involved it’s more creative, it’s more alive. Does that make it easier or harder? If it’s just a case of sitting in a cold room with a computer and checking off what you need, and it’s going to come to you in packages with no dirt on it and no human connection, that would be harder for us because of that lack of human connection but for some yes it would be harder for them to work with independent farmers.

CV: Based on the individual shopping you do with local farmers there must be times when you have to do a quick turnaround with your menu because of unpredictable weather?
JA: Yes, that does happen. To be perfectly honest the expectation for spring food starts before produce is available here in Massachusetts, so I buy from California to begin with. If I was to wait for our local asparagus and peas I would lose part of the spring and we would still be serving winter food. Once our farmers start producing their Flatfru of ingredients we start using them and we no longer buy from the west cost. We have just got in our peas from Verrill Farms but I have been serving them for a month now and they were beautiful but they were not local.

CV: Is the produce your purchase all organic or a combination?
JA: My preference is buy local.

CV: This is a hot topic. There appears to be a definite line drawn between those who buy local and those who buy organic. When I interviewed Francis Moore Lappe for the summer issue of edibleBoston she said that if she had to pick between local or organic than local would win out each time.
JA: That’s because local food, just picked tastes better.

CV: So there must be times when you have to juggle around your menu at the last moment?
JA: Yes, this is why I chose to use menu paper that was not expensive so that I could reprint it at short notice. There are all sorts of factors to consider when you change a menu such as training the staff, physically changing the menu, and reprinting the menu

CV: Training the staff in what respect?
Letting them know that we are not serving asparagus with the sole but peas. If we don’t remember to tell them that and they talk to the customer about asparagus the customer is going to think they don’t know what they are doing. So there is a lot of education and there is physical work too.

CV: Do you require your staff to participate at all in the process?
JA: Yes, absolutely. We talk to them at three levels: (1) Why the dish we are serving is Italian, where the ideas come from and what makes it Venetian, for example; (2) the techniques and the ingredients. It’s very important that the staff has this information as a customer may have an allegory. (3) Lastly, we talk about where the food comes from and if it’s local.

CV: You are between the farmer, the producer, and the consumer what do you think your responsibility is to both?

JA: I have a responsibility to run my business responsibly because that’s who I am. I don’t think I have a responsibility to broadcast to customers what it is we are doing. My job is to provide the most hospitable, enjoyable and soul satisfying dining experience for people. We are here to provide food, service, wine, and hospitality. Within that there is a certain way that I am interested in doing it like working with the local farmers. Personally I think we have a responsibility as a community to support local farmers and to buy responsibly raised animals and to be aware of what fish stocks are for particular fish and not buy those that are endangered. Just as a community we should be aware of how much gas we are using and our effects on the ozone layer. I conduct myself in the restaurant and at home in a way that I think is responsible.

CV: I still don’t understand the complaint that I read somewhere that some restaurant chefs won’t serve endangered fish and thus this is dictating to customers what they can eat. To me it does not seem necessary when there are many other types of fish to eat.
JA Yes, One of the biggest selling fish is tuna. I have it on my menu in small pieces. I also have sole (which is pretty plentiful) and swordfish which isn’t but again I do that in small pieces. The biggest problem with tuna is not the Americans but the Japanese. We can do our part but there is a reasonable side to things. I serve lobster but again in small pieces.

CV:: I see that you donate a lot of time to the Greater Boston Food Bank and now with Partners in Health who do a lot of work in Haiti. How does this fit into your life as a chef or does this go back to your work in Guatemala? What got you involved given your limited free time?
JA: Chefs are asked on a daily basis to make contributions to non profit organizations one way or another; I am not the only one. About 20 years ago someone hit on the idea that if you’re going to have a party and your needed food why not get a “named” chef to provide the food. It was a good idea because it was beneficial to the industry and it meant that chefs were getting attention in different kinds of ways. We are in the hospitality industry, if we are asked to provide food for someone in need, it’s very hard to say no. I probably participate in 50-60 different events a year where I am giving away food or my time. One kind of events that I have been asked to do is to cook a dinner at someone’s house for a certain amount of money. For example if Mt. Auburn Hospital is going to have a fundraiser they can auction Jody Adams for $20,000 and I provide the dinner for ten folks in their home. It’s has been very successful. The experience that people have bringing ten people together in their homes for a dinner cooked by me and where they have made this wonderful contribution to the hospital is just amazing for them.

The organization however, that I feel the most passionate about, and that is the most compelling to me, is Partners in Health. The work that Ophelia Dahl, Paul Farmer, and Jim Kim have done in building that organization is remarkable. It is a community based care giving system where people are trained on the ground and sent out into the community to deliver care. Paul Farmer works in the hospital in Haiti, Cecile is their building the organization. Their people without question believe that the work they are doing are not only important, and that it can change the world, but that it has to change the world. I don’t find that with all the non profits that I work with. I don’t find that I am making the connection with the people that are doing the work and who are so convinced about the work that they doing in that kind of way. They are so committed. It’s going back to the source which is a pattern with me. It’s to do with authenticity at the core. There is a direct connection with the work I do and where the money goes. I can see it happen I know they take the money I help them raise and it goes to make a difference in people’s lives and lives that they specifically touch themselves.

The Greater Boston Food Bank and Share our Strength it is the same. I know the people and the work they do is unbelievable. I have chosen to work directly with organizations that are focused on hunger, poverty and children. The work has to touch you; I think that is where authenticity comes from. The dollars that I raise can be done in a variety of ways and it can go to a variety of places that need the money but there is more than the dollar value in what I do and that is important to me.

The work that I do here at Rialto I am passionate about. There is easier ways to make money in terms of time but not for my heart and soul. The reality of the work that I do at Rialto is that I see people who have a certain ability to afford to come here, which is not the majority of the people in the world. People have a great time, it is always full and great work is being done around the tables by the folks from Harvard and the Kennedy school but personally I need a balance and they way I can to this is to work directly and very internationally with organizations that I believe in. There is more than a dollar value to what I do for them.
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CV: What cookbook could you not live without?
JA: The 1977 Joy of Cooking;

CV: Is there anything that you would like to add that is important to you and that I have not asked you?
JA: To go back to one of your points in terms of costs. I know that people come to restaurants like Rialto because of the quality of the food, and the quality of the food, particularly in the growing season, is dependent upon the ingredients that we use, it is as simple as that. These ingredients come from our local farmers, so people need to recognize that in order for restaurants such as mine to continue to serve the kind of food that we do, we need the community to support the local farmers

To learn more about the organizations that Jody Adams supports and is so passionate about please visit their websites. Visit Partners in Health at http://www.pih.org/home.html.
Share our Strength at http://www.strength.org/.
The Greater Boston Food Bank at http://www.gbfb.org/content/main.cfm?sca_id=18

Published in edibleBoston Fall 2007

My writings can be found at http://www.edibleboston.org/, http://www.farmersmarkettoday.com/, and www.belmontfarmersmarket.org/newsletters/2007/newsletter-2007-05.pdf.