I was more tired than a carrot bought from a local farmer.
If only we could string together a sentence that revives the word sustainability, a word we've stuffed into every corner and emptied of all meaning just as we've forgotten that restaurant comes from restoration.
If we remembered that… People would leave restaurants healed. Staff would serve meals dancing, like they’d stepped out of a musical.
Because maybe, just maybe, they’d have one more day to rest in the home they barely manage to afford, instead of spending it shaping a piece of meat into a star.
I think back to a tragic evening at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Barcelona, name withheld. After the tenth plate of edible art, we stopped counting. When it was all over, we had to call a taxi back to the hotel. We couldn’t walk. That restaurant felt like a beautiful cover for our slow execution.
A holiday we couldn’t digest. We spent the next day in bed, watching TV.
Where had healing gone? Can’t a simple, fair, beautiful bowl of soup be a form of art? Must food always be elevated into art? If it must, then let it at least be art for the people… Understandable…
While working under a beautifully branded chef whose ideology I once revered, I was more exhausted than the carrots coming through the kitchen doors. The ideas were lovely, those noble “farm-to-table” mantras. But somewhere along the way, the wrong kind of ideology slapped us in the face. When you work 14-hour days and never get what you deserve, doesn’t something feel deeply wrong in this unsustainable, inorganic lifestyle?
As I cleaned up after intoxicated or otherwise altered guests, I kept wondering: When did we forget how to restore people? How did feeding, this most tender, pure, human act, turn into such a grotesque marketing tool?
So when the other day, Simone from Jazzed on Grains reminded me of Rebecca L. Spang’s book, I realized: The company I’ve built, Kavata has quietly, surely become about healing. About restoration. Of food and people. Of the one who cooks and the one who eats. Healing the culture that we forgot…
To serve simple Turkish dishes, from a humble home kitchen, prepared cleanly and kindly by people who aren't tired to their bones. That’s the whole point. Seeing how deeply people respond, I just had to say it aloud.
Maybe the secret really is this: food becomes real when it’s cooked by restored souls.
Blessed are those who cook with peace and serve with peace.
Maybe one day, food will truly restore us. Maybe one day, a chef more tired than a carrot will suddenly realize how absurd it was to serve crispy, fresh carrots while being ground down by unpaid, exploitative internships masked as “learning experiences.”
Feeding people is only truly cool when the deep tattoos also carry justice when they speak up for human rights!
But you know this, don’t you? There’s no such thing as a bad experience. Sometimes, you just learn how not to never do things.
Sincerely, my unbent back and my carrots that are not yet tired.
Nesrin Eren