NORTHAMPTON — If you’ve recently eaten ramps or fiddleheads at a city restaurant, chances are they were put on your plate against regulations.
And if you’ve worked in restaurants, you’ve likely had a visit from the neighborhood “mushroom guy” delivering foraged goods to a kitchen backdoor.
While the items seem deliciously harmless, there’s simply no language in federal food code for “wild edibles” other than mushrooms.
That’s an issue that snared a new downtown eatery, Sevenstrong, when owners approached the Northampton Health Department for permission to forage for ingredients, or search for wild food resources.
Chef-owner Jonathan Adler said tasty greens like wild watercress grow locally in abundance and are ripe for the picking, but it looks like those leafy gems may go unharvested.
While the concept of plucking easily overlooked items from the earth and serving them up tableside is an international trend — popularized by the Danish restaurant Noma, among other Michelin-star restaurants — food code hasn’t quite caught up, said Health Director Merridith O’Leary.
“We don’t want to say no to everything, especially if it’s trendy and there are benefits,” she said Monday, adding she still has to be sure the items won’t put people at risk.
Adler, who opened the Strong Avenue restaurant in September, said the issue hasn’t stopped him from pursuing the goal of “Pioneer Valley cuisine,” meaning that just about everything on the menu is locally sourced.
He and his sister Katherine Adler will soon pursue a variance from food code to allow them to legally sell two foraged items — fiddlehead ferns and ramps, a wild garlic. Both are local springtime favorites.
For all other flora, Katherine Adler, assistant to operations at the restaurant, said she will instead cultivate relationships with local farmers to glean extras from the land. She said they’re pursuing this avenue over foraging as farmland is clearly a more controlled setting from which to pick greens.
“Those are completely separate practices,” she said of gleaning versus foraging. “Nothing is set in stone, but that is our intention.”
The Adlers said they’re trying to pave a path to make it easier for others to have knowledge of these practices. “I think part of the problem is that people don’t know,” she said of all the restaurants that sell things like ramps, fiddleheads and leeks without applying for variances. “We could have just as easily made the mistake.”
To approve the variance, O’Leary said she will need all of the relevant information pertaining to the ingredients’ sourcing, who is picking it, toxicity information and more. She said no other restaurants in the city have requested such a variance.
“They’re typically not on menus,” she said of the springtime favorites, adding inspectors will sometimes see them listed as temporary specials and inform the restaurant owner they’re not permitted to sell them.
O’Leary said the city follows federal food code, as well as code of Massachusetts regulations. Foragers who provide restaurants with mushrooms can do so legally only with approval from the Board of Health. For all other items, however, it gets more complicated. O’Leary said in order to allow restaurants to sell other wild edibles, the Health Department itself must approve the ingredients and itself become the “approved source.”
“All food must come from an approved source,” she said.
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.