TAMPA
Greg Baker stands in the Fodder & Shine kitchen explaining what will happen in a vast room full of gleaming ovens and prep counters when his phone rings for the fifth time. "And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate. Baby I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake. Shake it off." // Wife and business partner Michelle gives the four-time James Beard Award semifinalist the stink eye. She's tired of the Taylor Swift ringtone, even as a bit of ironic-hipster stunting.
The Refinery, the Bakers' first Seminole Heights restaurant, began as a stunt of sorts: a menu that changed entirely each week, dictated by what farmers brought them. With the debut of Fodder & Shine in December, the Florida-raised and classically trained Baker, 47, upped the ante with a true feat of culinary daredevilry. In his words, here's his new mission:
"I'm taking this snapshot of the time when Americans started coming into Florida in the 1820s up until the Depression, which is when food started to homogenize. Culture defines food, and food defines culture, especially when you're living at a subsistence level.
"This was a period when there was a distinct lack of infrastructure. Settlers would get things from trading posts or from steamboats coming up the river, and that was their supply of worldly goods. Everything else they had to improvise, tossing their preconceived notions and getting down to the business of staying alive. This very unique cuisine that evolved out of necessity is (a) generation away from dying. If somebody doesn't step up and celebrate what Florida food used to be, we may not know. This is about preserving heritage.
"We started our research the old-fashioned way and looked for cookbooks, trying to find ingredients people would have had ready access to. From that handful of books, we started talking to people, multigenerational Floridians. I happened to meet the great-grandson of Ted Smallwood, who ran a store in Chokoloskee. He talked about his grandmother's secrets for tomato gravy and about going hunting before he went to school so they would have game every night for dinner. A lot of these conversations were more about life than about food specifics.
"We learned about limas and Florida speckled butter beans, white celery, Seminole pumpkins and white cushaw pumpkins, Georgia rattlesnake watermelons, Everglades tomatoes, Florida high bush eggplant and seven-top turnips. We went to several heirloom seed companies and were able to find these old seeds; then we started talking to farmers to find people to grow them. I was approached by seventh-generation Floridian Will Crum, and I said, 'Hey, I'm interested in having someone grow this stuff for me.' He's taken a big section of his father's old orange grove and dedicated it to growing crops for Fodder & Shine.
"At the restaurant we're doing smoked mullet roe. Completely different than bottarga, this is salted and smoked fresh, spreadable and the consistency of a slow-poached egg yolk, a little fudgy and custardy, the poor man's caviar. And everybody seems to love sofkee, fermented rice cooked into a porridge, which goes back way before white people and European settlers, a native dish that thrived and survived.
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Explore all your options"It's a very limited color palette to be working with as far as what was available. There was not a lot of flour used, not a lot of leavening. Even our fried chicken is breaded in cornmeal, no flour, and then fried in chicken fat.
"This is not a Southern restaurant. It's a Florida restaurant."
Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley.