|
|
|
Sample Excerpt: Business Feature Article for Arizona Gourmet Magazine
Joe Davis, Executive Chef of La Fuente Restaurant, understands the importance of tradition. He understands the importance of family. And he understands how to please his customers.
What he has recently been striving to master, however, is how to keep all these elements in balance while running a successful family restaurant.
La Fuente is one of the increasingly endangered Mexican family restaurants in the Tucson area, a restaurant steeped in a heritage of cultural cuisine spanning nearly forty years. It has integrated recipes from six different regions in Mexico, honoring culinary customs dating back to colonial Spain and the indigenous South American Indians.
The Mexican basics of beans, rice, chilis and meats have been prepared the same way at La Fuente since its inception. Davis grew up in its kitchens, and most certainly benefited as a chef from his tradition-rich environment.
But then he left home to explore the culinary arts outside his familial walls, spending 10 years cooking in Missouri and Oklahoma. It was in late 1999 that, at the request of his older brother and owner, Frank Davis, he returned to La Fuente, charged with the task of sustaining past successes while keeping up with the current restaurant trends.
So with his return, while he has tried to honor the authenticity of Mexican lore, Davis has also brought many changes. For family members and staff who’ve worked at La Fuente 20 years or more, some of the changes haven’t come too easy. But lest they go the way of other well-meaning but outdated family restaurants, he knows these changes are necessary.
"What we’re trying to work on is to bring the food into the 21st century," Davis says, "from the sauces to the techniques that we’re using." He remarks that much of his staff are "still cooking sauces the way they did 40 years ago. Since I’ve gotten back, we have made considerable changes from your typical Mexican kitchen to items that most modern kitchens tend to take for granted."
Davis knew that turning such deep-seated procedures upside down would be an uphill battle. So he brought in Lawrence Sanchez as Sous Chef—a man who, like Davis, spent many years working in the outside world, but who also had deep roots in family restaurant traditions, growing up in the business as well.
"Once I started," Davis says of Sanchez, "it was really obvious that, to make some of the changes we were going to make, I would have to have somebody there who knew what he was doing."
Both chefs have earned credentials founded more in experience than formal education. After dropping out of college, Davis sought to continue building on the hands-on knowledge he’d learned since childhood by working in as many cooking environments as possible. "It was never hard to find work with a restaurant," he says. "I knew how to do everything already anyway, from cashier to dishwasher.
"Cooking has always come very easy for me. Growing up in the business, of course, you learn all facets of it, as compared to say to someone who goes culinary school and gets their management degree.
"I’m not taking anything away from people who go to school for culinary arts or management,” Davis stresses, “but until you actually get your foot in the door and get your hands dirty...[the degree is] only a piece of paper."
Sanchez did complete a number of years of schooling at Pima College, including enrollment in a chef’s apprenticeship program and a finishing program. But like Davis, he tends to put more stock in the “real world” experience he’s personally garnered at such places as the Ranchers Club, Dale Anderson and the Palo Verde Inn.
Davis and Sanchez can both boast the richness of their heritage as a culinary credential, for it is the result of hard work and flexibility they learned from their restaurateur families. Says Davis, “You have to hand it to people like my grandparents, my uncle, my mom, my brother—they have accomplished something by knowing nothing. They didn’t go to chef’s school, they worked from the ground up, they learned recipes, they did it the hard way. They knocked their heads against the wall, they made a lot of mistakes, but they made it here. And, even 40 years later, they’re still learning.”
So when Davis returned to make the changes in the kitchen, he had to show respect and sensitivity in reeducating people with such immense restaurant experience. But to stay competitive with the larger corporate restaurants in Tucson, he and Sanchez had to show them an entirely new way.
“We’re not in the old days when everyone was more laid back, relaxed and could take their time,” Sanchez says. “Now, it’s all oriented to money: make sure the food’s perfect, make sure the customers are content. But, if we spend more time preparing the food than we do serving the food, then we have a problem, because then we’re not getting enough clients in.”
As Davis points out, "One thing that Lawrence and I are trying to strive for is not just to make the basics like beans or rice, but to really make the Mexican food that’s very labor-intensive. If we can give our own cooks relief and still have a wonderful end product in quality and quantity, and help them to not be such slaves to the pot, then we will have accomplished something."
So Davis and Sanchez continue to roll with the revolution, recently publishing a new menu that includes more fish, more options for those who are sensitive to spicy foods, and a number of more health-conscious meals.
"Lately we’ve been having a lot of customers come in and say, 'Wow, your food has changed! You have a unique flavor now,'" Sanchez explains. "You can create a food that will sell itself with its unique flavor and texture. We’re here for the customers; we’re not here for ourselves."
For both chefs, the ultimate objective for the transition has been to preserve the family restaurant heritage of this Tucson mainstay. "La Fuente has been doing this for 40 years," says Sanchez. "But let’s continue another 40 years by consistently enhancing the flavor and adding more to what we do."
|
|
|
|
|
