Over the past 17 years I've been asked that dozens of times. In our new staff orientation we talk about it so the new hires can answer THE question 'Food Dance. Where's the dancing?'

 

I really wish I had a better story. I have thought about just making something up, but over the past decade people have come up with their own stories, or theories, about what the name, Food Dance, means and where it came from.

 

I've heard 'food dances on your tongue' which was once quoted in a review, 'because there is this big dance floor somewhere in the building,' or my favorite 'there's a special dance the staff does if you ask'. All are theories I've heard over the years. None of which are true but I'll give them points for creativity.

 

Just this past weekend I heard a true story from guests. They were telling me about how their adult children were coming to visit them in Kalamazoo, and that these children live in some urban city where they can choose from 1,000s of great restaurants but that when their children know they will be coming to Kalamazoo for a visit they start doing the "Food Dance Dance." That's how excited they are to eat here. The mother, who was telling me this story, then imitated her daughter by putting her hands in the air and kind of swaying and rockin' her hips from side to side and smiling said in a singsong voice, "I'm doing the Food Dance" all while seated at our bar. That topped them all. I think I will use this story from now on to answer the question, "What's up with the name Food Dance?"

 

Oh, you really want to know the real story-forgot about that part for a minute... So here it is. As I was getting ready to sign the lease for our original location at 161 East Michigan Ave., only a couple blocks from where we are now, I had to, of course, have a name. My friends and I threw around names with historic links like Haymarket CafÄ, Ghosts of Restaurants Past but nothing felt right. Then my ever so dear and highly creative friend, Chris, pipes in, "Food Dance." I don't know... it felt right, so it stuck.

 

I would love to hear your stories about Food Dance and it doesn't have to be about the name, since we've solved that mystery.

—Julie

 Food Dance founder & owner

   

There are many women who have influenced my life of food: Alice Waters, Madeline Kamman, Julia Child, Sheila Lukins, Judy Rogers, Odessa Piper, my friend Chris Morgan and now Gabrielle Hamilton author of Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. Gabrielle owns Prune, a very successful small restaurant in NYC’s East Village. She is, as well, a damn good writer!

I am in a book group. Well it is fair to say it is part book group, part food sharing, part renewing friendships (some new, some very old) all woven into the best sort of new millennium “support group” you can imagine. However, Gabrielle’s book wasn’t on our list to read. Every time I read a book that I can’t put down I tell everyone I know: friends, customers, my staff and my husband, “You should really read ________; it is so fantastic!” Blood, Bones, and Butter is no exception. I love to read books about women who are passionate about food; those women also being a bit offbeat and successful is just a bonus. I related so much to this book. Not to the crazy family she comes from (mine wasn’t that colorful) but to Gabrielle’s journey to her current life, her business of cooking for and sharing meals with her community. She, like myself, wants to cook simply using real food. She writes of her newly dreamed of restaurant “there would be no foam, and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food, just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry.”  Throw in the pure pleasure of feeding people and I am there.

Hamilton writes, “I had no idea how to open a restaurant. I had the work ethic and that nearly strange mania for cleaning and organizing kitchens.”  That mirrors my own journey to where I am now.  I highly recommend you pick up this book now available in our Market and carve out some time to savor the passion that exudes from the pages.

In contrast to Gabrielle’s book, I also just finished reading Grant Achatz’s book Life on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat. Grant is the ultra driven, risk taking, visionary chef that is part owner of Alinea restaurant in Chicago. In 2002 the James Beard Foundation named Grant “Rising Star Chef”and in 2005 Gourmet declared Alinea the best restaurant in America. Then 2007 Grant was diagnosed with stage four squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth–tongue cancer. Yes, the irony is too much to bear. In 2008 The James Beard Foundation awarded him Outstanding Chef in America, the highest honor for a chef.

In this curious memoir, Chef Grant Achatz and his business partner, Nick Kokonas tell of their Chicago restaurant, Alinea, as well as Grant’s cancer diagnosis and recovery. I found the frank honesty of Grant’s journey intensely personal, interesting and inspiring. He shares his family, his schooling and the time he spent with his mentor Thomas Keller. A legend in his own right, Keller is Chef and owner of The French Laundry, a Napa Valley icon, and one of the most humble, creative and talented chefs of our time. All of the intimate details of working in the kitchen of such a legend painted a picture for me that allowed me ‘to feel’ what it was like to be a part of it. There are parts that are almost too painful to read about during Grant’s long illness. Those parts I wanted to hurry through in order to know how it is now for Grant. Having Nick’s voice telling the story of his friend and business partner gave the book a richness and depth that can be at times be lacking in first person memoirs.

I have yet to experience the privilege of eating at Prune, Alinea or The French Laundry but through theses books I am one step closer.


—Julie Stanley

Food Dance's executive chef Robb Hammond will be going toe to toe with 24 other local chefs in the 6th Annual Gumbo Cook Off.

Sunday March 6th
Louie’s Trophy House and Grill, 440 E. North St., Kalamazoo.
3 to 7 p.m. (winner will be announced at 5 p.m.).
$15 in advance; $20 at the door.

Tickets can be bought at several locations, just look for the Got Okra? poster on the door.

Chefs from Mangia Mangia, Food Dance, Louie’s Trophy House Grill, Fandango, Old Burdicks and many more will offer their variations on the Cajun stews. Read more here

The Mattawan Artisan Creamery is part of Kal Carbon Acres in Mattawan Michigan. Their mission, to deliver quality natural farm products at a fair price, and they do this without the use chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. MAC employs an integrated, natural approach to farming. The farm is owned and operated by Anne and Steve Cavanagh, with a little help from their donkeys Clifford and Bo, who watch over the La Mancha goats protecting them from wondering coyotes. All the goats, doelings and bucklings were born and raised on the farm. All animals on the farm graze naturally and are fed untreated grain. MAC takes pride in natural sustainable farming and top quality dairy products.

The milk used for the yogurt comes from the grass fed Jersey cows at Moonique Dairy, a family farm in Vandalia Michigan. The milk is delivered in the evening to our on-farm dairy in Mattawan, where Ty (Moonique owner) helps load the pasteurizer. The milk is pasteurized then cultured overnight. In the morning, Steve drains whey from the yogurt and pours the yogurt from the drain bags into the containers for delivery to us. The whey goes back to Ty on his next trip and is a high protein treat for their pigs.

Compare the ingredients to store bought yogurt.  MAC’s has only milk and culture. The delicious taste, just like everything at Food Dance, comes from high quality ingredients.


For more information you can follow the links below.

Mattawan Artisan Creamery

Moonique Dairy

Julie will be speaking on the Local Branding Heroes panel/discussion. We all know the "big brands" but this program will offer a rare inside look at successful brand-building, on a personal, local level.

Over the past 16 years we've make some great food. Working with the best ingredients is part one, part two is the talent we have attracted. I am not bragging just observing.

This New Year's Eve the menu that Chef Robb and his team put together was hands down, some of the best tasting and well thought out menu we have offered. Sometimes when you see the food being prepared, talk about it over and over, then serve hundreds of guests that food, you don't really want to eat it- it’s an industry hazard. This menu was different for me.  As I sat down at the end of the night and truly tasted the flavors and talent shine through the plates I felt so appreciative of what we do here.

For those of you who dined with us that night, I heard a lot of comments to the same. I personally know how much work went into each dish, from the house cured Coppa from Dave's happy pigs they butchered in house, to the amazing variety of radishes on the perfectly balanced goat cheese salad with California Olive oil and Italian Truffles, to the spinach Fazzoletti pasta (big squares of pasta folded around the Ragu) that Robb handmade with the Lamb Ragu I could of eating it for days.

Then was the sweet ending of the Upside Down Cranberry Cake with orange Szechuan peppercorn ice cream and candied fruit. Just the right amount of fruit and amazing ice cream they made. I look forward to many more great dinners in my life and hope you too will continue to support the great talent we have here at Food Dance.

Julie - yes the owner

Community Event, Saturday January 15th 2011
“Rising to the Challenges- Local Farmers, Local Food, Local Pride!"

Food Dance owner Julie Stanley will be co-speaking about buying from local farms as a restaurant. The Michigan Family Farms Conference is a forum for beginning, small-scale, and culturally diverse farmers to network, learn and build sustainable family farms.

Join us for the 8th annual Michigan Family Farms Conference on Saturday, January 15, 2011 at Lakeview High School in Battle Creek to discuss challenges and growth opportunities for family farms. Connect with other growers and great resources, network, and learn about organic certification, hoophouses, agritourism and local markets, urban school gardening, food safety, niche marketing, alternative energy, CSAs and much more!

 

more information can be found here

At times the restaurant business is all consuming. In 1974, while in
college, I applied to cook at this little hippie restaurant upstairs
in an old building on the corner of Locust and Vine in the "student
ghetto" as it was and is fondly referred to. The Troubadour restaurant
was a very warm space that has been left pretty much unchanged all
these years under the watchful eye of Kim Kavanaugh owner/chef of
Cosmos Cusina/O'Duffy's .

That was the beginning of some overlap of my career choices and Kim's.
Kim and I were not close friends but women committed to running
restaurants focused on working with fresh local foods within our
"neighborhoods".

Time seems so precious these days as I watch many of my close friends
go through cancer, care for their aging parents and begin the empty
nest phase of life. One begins to ask if what they spend 70 +hrs a
week doing makes life worth it?

I know for Kim she gave a large piece of her life to Cosmos/O'Duffys
and her neighborhood. She both loved and tired of the business I
sensed. I only hope she was able to find some peace in the realization
that she brought joy to so many people with such a warm comfortable
place to gather and eat great food. I celebrate her life and I will
miss her.

Julie

I thought the best part of breaking down a couple of hogs in my kitchen would be… well breaking down a couple of hogs in my kitchen. If any kitchen in Kalamazoo is set-up to butcher two whole hogs at once, it's ours. With sheer size, equipment, and staff experience we were able to butcher them in four hours down to the usable cut. It's been a long time for me, at least six years, but that’s pretty impressive for 450lbs of porky goodness. The best part turned out to be my staff’s enthusiasm, knowledge, and overall love of learning the lost craft of butchery.

 

Most of us were on the back end of a long week, a couple of our staff came down with illness but like sand, we always fill the cracks. By the end of Sunday’s brunch, the anticipation started to give us the energy the long week had stripped from us. Zach had worked seven days with no break, and by the start of the second pig we had to stop him. He was shaking with exhaustion. At this point where most people would have gone home and slept, he grabbed himself a milk crate and granola bar and watched till the last chop was cut. He even then helped clean up.

            

Tony “Slasher” (not “Big Tone”) saved us with the chine bone. Pork Chine is a square shaped area across the backbone between the shoulder blades that holds tender meat, which can be sort of a bear without a bandsaw. As we struggled to saw it with our large bone saw, Tony suggested a method that included a cleaver and a meat mallet. We blew him off the first couple of times, because tony is a super ambitious kid but lacks a lot of knowledge due to the fact that he is 21 and is very much in the learning stage of his early career. Little did I know that Bistro Rio, where Tony previously had worked, they had done this and he remembered it all pretty well. Pat and Ryan both served 600 guests for brunch this day and stayed ‘til the end, peeling skin and washing down the butcher blocks. I’m not sure what I did to deserve such an amazing and dedicated staff but I got one.

-Robb "Chef" Hammond

 

            

        

            

The list of items we are making with the two hogs are:

BBQ Pulled Pork

Pork Chops

Breakfast Sausage for Biscuits and gravy

Chorizo

Pancetta

Coppa

Lardo

Guanciale

Ribs for staff meal

Jagdwurst (Hunter Sausage)

Sopressata

 

I will update each one of these as they come out of the salt, or go into the casings.

Our pork chops are now on the menu, look for the rest in the coming weeks.

On December 16th, the gloves come off at 6pm. Reserve's own Chef Matthew Millar & Sommelier Peter Marantette take on Food Dance Café’s Robb Hammond & New Holland Brewing Beervangelist Fred Bueltman in a battle of beer vrs. wine. The Reserve team will pair wine with the French classic, Beef Bourguignon, while Robb and Fred will pair beer with Carbonnade, the Belgian stew of beef, onions, and beer. Two beverages, two beef stews, tons of fun. Vote for your favorite and resolve the age old debate.

For more information and to purchase tickets in advance please visit...
http://www.reservegr.com/news/read/beer-vs.-wine