The plate full of lamb tagine and cauliflower risotto I’m having for lunch
cost me roughly $10. The loaf of raisin-fennel bread sitting on my counter at
home set me back about half that. My son is addicted to $4 orders of braised
pork-belly buns. All of that adds up a bit over time, but looking back on 2011
I realize that it’s been a year of small indulgences rather than lavish
multi-course excess.

It’s also been a watershed year for Rochester’s food world, marking a moment
in time when the foodie luxuries of thinking about exotic, artisanal, and
locally sourced food became a bit more mainstream, and perhaps stole just a
tiny bit of attention and market share from lower-priced “quick-service
restaurants” and fast-food chains. The year may be remembered as a
significant milestone in the way Rochesterians, affluent and less so, young and
old, eat and think about food.

The changes have been both gradual and subtle. Rochester is still very much
a meat-and-potatoes city with an overwhelming affection for hots and,
inexplicably, all things “French.” But the increasing number and
variety of restaurants offering specialized international cuisines – Shanghai
street food rather than food that is generically “Chinese,” for instance,
or the proliferation of farmers markets in the area, and the marked emphasis
being placed by even large restaurant chains on fresh, local and sustainable
food – suggest that significant changes are underway that could, over time,
revolutionize the way we shop, cook, and go out to eat.

These trends are nowhere more visible than in some of the area’s newest and
most popular food venues, including the 10-month-old Han
Noodle Bar on Monroe Avenue, and the year-old Flour
City Bread Company at the Public Market. But the change can also be seen in
the transformation of the 2-year-old Max
Market on the edge of Pittsford, where chef Ryan Jennings is reinventing
the meal-replacement-style carry-out for a public increasingly tuned in to –
and willing to pay for – fresh, locally sourced food for themselves and their
families.

It’s 10 o’clock on a Thursday night, and Junting
“JT” Wu, Tony Ko, and Sean Sun, the owners of Han Noodle Bar on
Monroe Avenue, are closing up shop after a very busy evening. Sun is totaling
up a 2″ thick pile of receipts while Ko and Wu put things to rights for
tomorrow morning – they will be back at behind the line in less than 10 hours.
For the past 10 months, seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, the trio has
put nearly every waking moment into its fledgling restaurant. The eatery has
only been closed four days since it opened: Thanksgiving, Fourth of July,
Easter, and April 4, when the owners had to install new kitchen hardware.

Pausing briefly in his work, Ko, a Chinese immigrant, RIT graduate, and
former software engineer, tells me how the initial idea for a dumpling and
steamed bun take-out evolved into one of the most innovative Chinese
restaurants in Rochester – a place that is changing the city’s concept of
Chinese food one pork-belly bun at a time.

According to the National Restaurant Association, there are nearly 600
full-service restaurants in Monroe County, and between 53 and 73 of them
identify themselves as “Chinese,” according to listings on Yelp and
Rocwiki, respectively. But Han Noodle Bar is nearly unique in offering food
identical to the stuff sold from carts and tiny stands all over China, Taiwan,
and Hong Kong: lots of variety meats, unfamiliar vegetables and pickles, and
far more saturated flavors than most American diners expect from their Chinese
food. And according to Ko, patrons can’t get enough of it.

The current vogue for all things pork made the restaurant’s braised
pork-belly buns an immediate hit with the public. But just as certain drugs are
seen as a gateway to the hard stuff, pork bellies braised and slathered in
hoisin and scallions on a fluffy bun naturally led customers to try pork
stomach braised with sour pickled vegetables, or red-cooked pork hocks, or
cuttlefish, or beef tendon with daikon radish.

At 10 months in, the restaurant is doing better than the trio had expected.
In an economy where restaurants are closing left and right, and where
dining-out dollars are increasingly harder to come by, they are even eyeing the
possibility of opening up another location in the near future.

What makes Han Noodle unique isn’t just the food, although that’s excellent.
It’s that the owners have a serious sense of mission. Sun described
“months of back and forth” on what to include in the menu. Ko told me
that the three toured Chinatowns and restaurants in several cities, looking at
food trends and briefly considering and then discarding the idea of opening up
a high-end fusion place. In the end, they opted for opening a place that serves
“dishes that have been around for more than 100 years,” giving
everyone who walked into the restaurant access to the sorts of things that are
usually included on Chinese-language-only menus in restaurants across the
country. And they wanted to keep the prices below $10 a person.

In some ways, their move echoes the success of restaurateur-chefs like New
York City’s David Chang, owner of the Momofoku family of restaurants. But in
other ways the cuisine at Han Noodle is all their own – straightforward and
simple, just like the dining room in which the food is served. And it’s
certainly cheaper than the star-chef interpretations of Chinese street food.

“No fusion. No gimmick. We cook the way we want to eat,” says the
restaurant’s website. And that’s apparently just fine with the diners who crowd
the restaurant most nights of the week. According to Ko, his meat vendor has
told him that he moves more pork belly, hock, stomach, and beef tendon than all
the other restaurants in the city. The restaurant does have a typical
American-Chinese menu featuring variations on sesame chicken, kung pao chicken,
and dishes like beef and broccoli drowned in brown sauce (it’s ironically
called “traditional Chinese” on the Han website), but Sun says that
they don’t sell much of it. He and his partners know the letter-number
equivalents of the rest of the menu by heart, but they sell so little sesame
chicken (E1) that they have to look at the Cantonese cheat sheet on the wall on
the rare occasion that someone orders it.

Television surely has had a role in the transition. Food Network and other
dining and food shows have increased public awareness of international cuisines
and opened some viewers’ eyes to new and different food choices. Sean Sun says
that a few of those people end up converts to Han Noodle’s brand of Chinese
street food, like the bartender from down the street who came to the restaurant
a devotee of sesame chicken and is now one of the restaurant’s most adventurous
customers. But many more customers show up knowing what they are looking for,
or repeating recommendations from online restaurant guides or social-media
sites like Twitter and Facebook. These people show up because Han Noodle offers
them something they’ve heard about, something they’ve seen or heard about other
people eating with evident relish, and the restaurant offers it without the
inconvenience of having to hie off to New York City or Toronto. And, as if that
weren’t enough, it’s cheap.

The combination of convenient, inexpensive, and local is a
powerful driver for Rochester’s foodie community. And those drives are not lost
on vendors and would-be producers who sell their wares at that perennial foodie
and food-business incubator, the Rochester Public Market. Wander down to the
Public Market on any Saturday morning (and to a lesser extent on Tuesdays and
Thursdays), and you will encounter throngs of shoppers out bargain hunting, who
find themselves going home with quite a lot more than they set out to buy. The
attraction of unfamiliar vegetables purchased for almost nothing – $1 for tatsoi,
kohlrabi, dinosaur kale, delicata squash, tomatillos, and similar exotica –
poses little risk to a customer’s bottom line if a cooking experiment goes
awry.

But in the same way that the Market – where many local chefs also shop for
produce – is an incubator for Rochester’s food tastes, it is also a crucible
from which food businesses are born. Capitalizing on the relatively low
overhead (some businesses start out as little more than an idea and some
product on a card table in one of the sheds), countless businesses that have
since become household names. Juan
and Maria’s Empanada Stop, the Pierogie Guy, and Jon John’s Bakery, to name
a few, got their start at the Market, offering homemade or at least
“artisanal” products at price points low enough to encourage impulse
buying.

Since Thanksgiving 2010, chef and baker Keith Myers, owner of the Flour City
Bread Company based in the Public Market, has been intimately connected with
the seasonal ebb and flow of the Market. As he tells it, Myers didn’t exactly
set out to become a baker, although he did always hope to become a chef.
Educated as an engineer, Myers worked at Kodak developing package materials for
a decade before giving up, as he puts it, his “professional, high-paying,
lots-of-vacation job for $8 an hour at the Rio Bamba. With a 1-year-old. And a
wife in grad school.” Eight years later, and with three kids at home at
that point, Myers says that realized that he “needed to get out of the
restaurant business. It’s not conducive to raising a family.”

Myers paired his desire to get back to his family with an existing passion
for bread, deciding to embark on a “personal quest for a loaf of bread I
wanted to eat,” he says. He had always baked bread for the restaurants in
which he worked, but Myers became convinced that the “only thing that was
holding me back was not having the right type of oven.” So the former
engineer petitioned the Irondequoit fire marshal for a permit, and built his
own wood-fired brick oven in his garage.

Initially he only wanted to “bake good bread for family and
friends,” he says. But at the urging of Sue Gardiner, coordinator for the
Brighton Farmers Market, he started selling some of his loaves at the Brighton
Long Season Market in the fall of 2009. According to Myers, “it kind of
took off.”

From a 14-hour-a-day chef job with maybe one day off per week, Myers – at
that point working by himself, and baking in his garage – worked literally 30
consecutive hours to do production for the Brighton Market each week, he says.
He used the money he made at the market to purchase the special high-quality
flour that he would use to bake the following week’s bread.

Today, even with a staff of two full-time bakers to back him up and a
full-fledged bake shop behind his Public Market storefront, preparation for the
weekend markets starts on Tuesday mornings. Some of the sourdoughs that Myers
makes take two full days to develop, not including the actual baking. Other
items, like Myers’s excellent chocolate croissants, require stunning amounts of
prep time. As he slides the first of many trays of finished croissants into a
proofing cabinet, Myers stops to say, “One thing that makes artisan
‘artisan’ is time. And that’s the one thing that always gets removed from the
equation when bakeries get too big too fast.”

Despite the popularity of his bakery – on Saturday mornings the queue
snaking out the door of his shop resembles nothing so much as kids lined up to
visit Santa – Myers is growing his business “deliberately and
slowly,” he says. He wants to make sure that quality doesn’t suffer as he
moves toward wholesale and restaurant production. Already he supplies some
bread to both Good
Luck on Anderson Avenue and Rocco on Monroe Avenue. For the past year he has also baked bread for the Good Food
Collective, a CSA that grew out of the South Wedge Farmers Market. He’d like to
do more, in part to sustain the momentum that Flour City Bread has built up
through the winter. But that goal seems to be secondary to his fundamental
desire to put good bread in the hands of people who enjoy it.

Myers isn’t the only chef in town who has staked his
fortunes on the cachet of fresh, local, and artisanal fostered at the Public
Market and the emergent, and somewhat more rarified, markets in the South Wedge
and Brighton that attract well-heeled foodies and those in search of organic
produce at reasonable prices. Chef Ryan Jennings, who was installed as
executive chef at the 2-year-old Max Market on Monroe Avenue early in 2011, is
banking on educated consumers who recognize the importance of quality
ingredients and careful preparation offered at fair prices to be his best
customers.

Where are those consumers coming from? Not restaurants, in Jennings’s
opinion. “What goes on in restaurants isn’t changing the way people eat
every day. The biggest impact anyone is going to find is going to the farmers’
markets,” he says.

The growing popularity of farmers’ markets in the area, Jennings suggests,
reflects a greater consciousness about food – really, a food culture – that can
support what he’s doing at Max Market. Today, “it’s easier for the
everyday person to have the same relationships with purveyors that restaurants
have,” he says. That changes the way customers think about the food they
buy. That, and the shrinking economy, have led to more people cooking at home,
making it that much harder to sell what is referred to in the trade as
“meal replacement” services, which has forced Jennings to reinvent
Max Market for a new, pickier, clientele.

“In the past,” the 27-year old graduate of the French Culinary
Institute told me one afternoon as the lunch rush at the market was winding
down, the Market “tried to cater to things that people were comfortable
with. Now I’m offering food that you can’t make at home… food that showcases
the talents of the company.” Tasked with re-envisioning the take-out shop
and market, Jennings started with a simple concept: source as much product
locally as possible and use it in dishes that customers can’t make themselves
because they simply don’t have the time or the skill to do so.

He is, in short, bringing what he describes as the “high-quality
experience” his customers have come to expect of the 10-year-old Max brand
of local high-end restaurants (including Max
at Eastman Place, Max
Chophouse, and, most recently Max
at the Gallery and Max on the Lake) to an informal setting at a somewhat
lower price point than the other Max enterprises.

In some ways, it’s as much of a gamble as the low-butter-low-fat cuisine
Jennings was attempting to sell at Farm Fresh Kitchen, the now-closed Pittsford
restaurant where he was head chef from 2008 through late 2009. Jennings’s work
at Max Market – every takeaway container of mushroom bread pudding with
sausage, or beet salad, or roasted root vegetables – is an argument for
chef-prepared food in an age when people are spending less to eat out, and the
market for meal-replacement restaurants like Boston Market and similar places
is shrinking rapidly.

At first glance, that looks like it could be a tough sell. At $15 per pound
for chocolaty brown, silky-smooth lamb tagine, or $8 for a pound of creamy
cauliflower risotto, it takes someone with a bit of imagination to see how this
carry-out food is a viable alternative to your typical fast-food joint. But
order up lunch from the case and you discover that an abundant meal – with
leftovers – won’t run more than $10 per person.

But, like a popular clothing chain, Ryan is hoping that an educated consumer
is his best customer. “You can tell on my end of things how much better
educated consumers are,” he says. “People know the importance of
eating fresh and local.” What’s more, they expect it, and they are willing
to pay a premium for it. What Jennings is offering, and hoping to offer more
of, is an alternative to continuing “to shop at Wal-Mart and eating out of
a box.”

This article appears in Dec 27-27, 2011.