Matt Bolus busting ass on a Sunday morning
When it was announced that Chef Matt Bolus of The 404 Kitchen would be cooking at the Sunday Gospel Brunch at the Music City Food + Wine Festival, you could almost hear the sound of a thousand eyebrows being raised. The reason for the reaction was that the event (which also featured performances headlined by Robert Randolph & the Nashville Friends Choir) was sponsored by Smithfield, a Chinese-owned company with a controversial reputation for factory-farmed pork products. It seemed like a surprising incongruity given that Bolus is well-known for his use of local and heritage products in his own restaurants.
In his recap of the festival, The Tennessean's Jim Myers — full disclosure: he's a good friend of mine, as is Bolus — takes Chef Bolus to task for taking the gig.
He says:
The biggest misstep, and this one's a headscratcher, was chef Matt Bolus' (404 Kitchen) partnership with Smithfield as their on-site chef. I get it that the festival needs sponsorship dollars to be successful. I would prefer they didn't showcase companies such as Smithfield that, to me, embody what is wrong with industrial pork production in this country.
Myers certainly speaks from a sincere and experienced background, with a previous stint managing the production plant at
The Fatback Pig Project, an Alabama-based facility charged with trying to promote the use of heritage breed hogs instead of factory pigs, by encouraging and incentivizing local farmers to switch their practices from traditional commercial hog production. I certainly see where Myers is coming from and respect his opinion. I also heard several other local chefs grumbling and questioning the participation of Bolus in the Smithfield event during the week prior to the festival — the issue clearly struck a nerve in the culinary community.
I ran into Bolus a couple times last week, and he appeared to be a little bit conflicted himself, but he had committed to the event and even went on local television to promote the festival and cook with Smithfield. It got me to thinking about the whole complicated topic of chef endorsements.
For example, I was surprised to hear that local favorite pastry chef Lisa Donovan had cooked the biscuits that were used to showcase Land O' Lakes' new European butter product under one of the tasting tents. Despite the fact that nobody would call the huge multibillion-dollar agricultural cooperative "artisan," and that the company has had its own share of criticism over its ownership of the factory egg producer MoArk, nobody seemed to give Donovan any grief about her participation. And neither will I, because those biscuits were the bomb, and they definitely made the butter better.
In fact, many chefs (including those that have participated at the festival) have long-standing endorsement deals, some of which make sense, but others that would surprise many people. Scott Conant held sway at the Infiniti tent and shared his demo meals with a few lucky diners at a formal table situated nicely under some shady trees. Michael Symon endorses Lays potato chips, Ed Lee likes KFC, Tom Colicchio is a Diet Coke fan, Lorena Garcia develops recipes for Taco Bell, Alex Guarnaschelli pushes I Can't Believe It's Not Butter (even though her restaurant is named Butter), and Fabio Viviani claims to love Dominos. Even stranger are deals like Paula Deen's affiliation with a diabetes medicine, farm food activist Jamie Oliver's relationship with a UK supermarket chain and slow-food pioneer Rick Bayless' 2003 support of a Burger King chicken sandwich.
I guess what I'm saying is that the temptation to align yourself with a company must be strong and frequently occurring once chefs reach a certain level of acclaim. And marketers aren't shy about asking for the deal. I personally witnessed somebody trying to shove a liquor bottle into Andrew Zimmern's hand last weekend and take a picture, despite the fact that Zimmern doesn't drink and has talked frankly about his past issues with drug and alcohol addiction. Shockingly tone-deaf.
Strangely, a site called celebrity-endorsements.com says Chef Zimmern will tweet an endorsement for your "unusual food-related business on his Twitter account" to his more than 800,000 followers for $2,000. If the site's legit, one would hope that Chef Zimmern takes the time to research and decide whether or not he actually likes the eatery before he accepts such an endorsement deal.
In my humble opinion, I have to cut Chef Bolus a lot of slack. While I'm personally a big fan of heritage foods and eat them whenever I can, I certainly don't subsist solely on heirloom field peas and Ossabaw Island breed pork. I dare say that many of the attendees at the festival have Smithfield products or some other processed-meat equivalent in their home refrigerators and that for good or for bad, those products probably make up more of the average daily diet than trendy and cheffy Benton's bacon (which is also made from commercial hogs, BTW). Heck, at the Scene's annual Iron Fork competition, we ask the chefs to create something remarkable using a lot of prepackaged commercial proteins provided by our generous sponsors, a development that almost convinced the Porter Road Butcher boys to present an all-vegetarian dish when they competed. Quelle horreur!
What Bolus did was to take ingredients which were presented to him and try to make something as delicious as possible to feed a bunch of folks who were lucky enough to hear an amazing concert from Robert Randolph, courtesy of the sponsors at Smithfield. Sure, Bolus got paid to cook, but that's what chef/restaurateurs do every night, and they have to constantly make conscious decisions on what they cook with based on ethics and economics. Bolus also shared his recipes, one of which can be found here. While some may not agree with his choice, Bolus worked hard for hours preparing and serving food to hundreds of festival attendees, which is a heckuva lot more difficult than just sending a tweet for hire.
I certainly appreciate the argument that was presented by Myers and other chef friends of mine when they heard about the event, but in the end, restaurants and food festivals are intended to be for-profit ventures. While chefs are free to make their own decisions on what they do in and out of their own kitchens, diners ultimately make their own choices on where they eat and what they stock their larders with. And I'm pretty sure that those fried bologna sandwiches that chefs love to chomp on at Robert's Western World after a long shift of working in their own kitchens probably aren't made from heritage Duroc hogs.
I hope that this can stir some thoughtful debate among our local community. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go put on my asbestos underwear before I click on the comment section.
