The Chef Who Puts Local Farmers First

Jack Coetzee, chef of Johannesburg-based Urbanologi restaurant and a believer in sustainable living, sources all his ingredients from within a 150km-radius of the restaurant. To achieve this, he has worked hard at building close working relationships with local farmers. Lindi Botha reports.

The vast majority of chefs create a menu and then find the ingredients. Jack Coetzee, the chef at Urbanologi Asian fusion restaurant in Johannesburg’s CBD, has turned the process on its head.

To achieve this, he has had to journey into the rural areas of Gauteng, building relationships with farmers along the way to reach a point where all his menu’s ingredients are sourced from within 150km of his restaurant. This is no mean feat in a world where the ingredients for a single piece of sushi can travel up to 25 000km to reach a diner’s plate.

Project 150 centres on Coetzee’s belief that chefs have a responsibility in the cycle of food.

“A study done after the Second World War claimed that the ocean would never run out of fish. Then the sushi movement came along and we’re now in a situation where fish stocks are being depleted. This illustrates the chef’s role in determining how and where food is sourced and what becomes popular. This got my thought process going and ultimately resulted in Project 150,” he says.

EXPLORING THE BACKYARD

Coetzee notes that there are certain ingredients that simply are not available within the 150km radius, but this has switched his thinking from designing a menu based on finding ingredients for what he wants to cook, to looking first at what ingredients are available and then deciding what he can do with them.

Interestingly, he is already well-used to this innovative approach; growing up on a farm in Zimbabwe, with a limited grocery selection, taught him to improvise.

“I went to boarding school and the food was terrible,” he laughs. “During holidays I’d come home, scratch around for old recipe books and start experimenting. Because we had a limited range of ingredients, I’d end up researching replacement ingredients and this eventually sparked a love for food and cooking.”