A Simple Leather Strap

A leather strap. This one simple touch point binding the napkin and silverware at FT33 told me most anything I needed to know about their restaurant vision. Hand-made. Attention to detail. Natural. Intentional. That strap evoked visions of a leatherworker in natural fibers crafting the strip in an idyllic setting that would not be out of place in a Mumford & Sons video or backstage of Hamilton.

What we’ve seen in restaurant trends are an easy linkage to FT33: seasonal fare with emphases on locally-grown produce, all-natural ingredients, editorial plating, and creative combinations of flavor. The naturalist movement is part of a bigger picture where music, videos and media find their connection to this leather strap.

The commonality is getting back to basics. The folk music movement eschews synthesizers for the natural tones of acoustic guitars, samples for the sharper pick of a banjo, loops for the percussive warmth of bass drums. Envision the components of a menu item in comparable terms, warm butters and sharp cheeses being worked into a dish by a person that invests their care onto its creation rather than preservative-laden RTU sauces that are shelf stable for up to 12 months.

Curiously, the naturalist movement isn’t solely about taste. The quality of sauces that we get from our vendor partners has increased dramatically in the last 15 years with advances in technology and food science. There are benefits with cost, consistency and safety. The means of these benefits – processes, production lines, stabilizers – are also the problem because they take the inherent fallibility of humans out of the preparation process. In a world where faceless big banks mismanaged pensions and voiceless health insurance companies raise premiums, our guests are looking for their daily transactions to solve these issues of connectivity. A scratch-made sauce is the equivalent of having a live human answer the phone in a call to Bank of America.

How do we return our restaurants to humanity? Our people must connect. Whether it’s our servers creating authentic moments because they get to be real people rather than order takers or it’s cooks that have a personal investment in what they prepare, the core ingredient is emotion that’s either expressed or applied. Emotion isn’t easy to commoditize, so we must change the language and adapt the tone. It’s a folk revolution.

Suddenly, that leather strap isn’t so simple after all.