by Camara McLaughlinIt’s feast night at Grateful Bread Baking Company, and owner Teresa Mackey is rushing about.
“We’re in the weeds,” she says as she hurriedly grates the fennel that, along with fresh oranges, will star in tonight’s spinach salad.
It’s been one of those days. An oven is broken. It has been on all afternoon, and has only gotten to 283 degrees. Not hot enough to toast walnuts or roast turnips. Both of which are needed for tonight’s dishes.
It is hard to imagine how the kitchen would feel if one more oven was up to its proper temperature.
This small space is hot. And crowded.
Silver pots and pans are stacked above and around the dishwashing pit. All have dents and blemishes, marks of a well-loved piece of equipment. Tupperware containers are piled one on top of the other near the food prep stations. Convenient for storing food, but a lid or two are missing.
Giant sacks of stone ground whole-wheat flour are piled near the door. A towering metal shelf holds cans and boxes of food in sizes only restaurants can buy. Soymilk, kidney beans, roasted red peppers and pumpkin, just to name a few.
Recipes and notes of encouragement are tacked to a small corkboard like the well loved mementos they are. A gluten free cookbook completes the organized chaos so often found in crowded restaurant kitchens.
Soup is bubbling on one of the many burners, and there is talk of the sweet potato gnocchi to be made.
The myriad of scents mix in the humid air, like a custom blended, mouthwatering perfume. Dinner is going to be good.
The beginning
Teresa and her husband, who is co-owner, but doesn’t actually work at the restaurant, opened Grateful Bread in March of 2000.
“Which is amazing,” Teresa notes. A decade is a long time for any restaurant.
Teresa is from High Point, N.C. so she knew what the restaurant scene in the city was like.
“There was nothing like this in High Point,” she says of the restaurant that offers fresh, local food, along with many vegetarian and vegan items.
From the start, Grateful Bread has always been open for lunch six days a week. They added brunch on Saturdays, and in the past year, have added Tuesday soup night, and Thursday feast night.
Teresa started the bakery with no restaurant experience.
“The only cooking I’d done was just for my family. Figured it out as we went,” she says matter-of-factly, as she disappears into the walk-in refrigerator to fetch some mandarin oranges for a salad dressing.
Three vital ingredients for the salad dressing are soy sauce, mandarin oranges and tahini, a product similar to peanut butter, only with sesame seeds. Teresa combines them all in the blender and voila. A salad dressing.
“Yum,” she declares, tasting the sauce, before setting it aside, ready to move on to another task.
What’s in a name
As the name Grateful Bread suggests, the restaurant is not an uptight place. The interior of the restaurant is colorful, with orangey pink walls, green trim and knick knacks galore.
When you first enter the space, the counter where you order your food is straight ahead. It too is painted orange, with the green and white logo on the front. Above is a black and white striped awning, making the counter look like a European bistro.
The main attraction of the entrance though, is the food.
On the left is a counter with all of the different breads. All baked fresh every morning. There is even a plate with selected slices of breads, butter and jelly. Free to any who enter.
As a bakery, this place does more than just bread. Straight ahead, gleaming like pieces of forbidden treasure, from behind a Plexiglas case, are the baked goods. S’mores bars, derby bars, lemon bars, savory scones like bacon and blue cheese, muffins, in flavors like blueberry lemon and apple walnut, gluten free cranberry orange cookies, on and on and on. Just one look and your mouth will be watering like Pavlov’s dog.
Living close to the dirt
Teresa and the rest of her staff, most of whom have been working there for over 3 years, believe in using local products. As much as possible, they get food from within 100 miles of High Point.
They buy cheeses from Goat Lady Dairy in Climax, N.C. and Ashe County Cheese in West Jefferson, N.C. Local pork, rabbit, fish and free range chicken and eggs populate their daily menu.
Supporting local agriculture is not just a passion, for Teresa and her staff, it’s a way of life.
“It’s what we do,” Teresa says.
Thursday feast nights are when Teresa really gets to make use of local products. On that morning, she goes to the Piedmont Triad Farmers Market to see what looks good. She then creates the evening’s menu based on what she buys.
“It’s the hard way to do it,” she says, “but it’s the only way we know how.”
This type of green cuisine is often a selling point to customers, so Teresa makes sure to advertise Grateful Bread’s Cause. On the front door there are a variety of stickers proclaiming support for organic and locally grown products.
Groups like the Slow Food Movement, for more information see sidebar, and the Green Restaurants Association advocate restaurants doing what they can for the environment.
The closer a product is grown to the place it is being sold, the tastier it is. Often the produce we see in supermarkets has been harvested before it is truly ready, and has been made to ripen on the truck.
Why? Since a product doesn’t have to travel as far to reach its final destination, it can be picked when it is in the peak of freshness, rather than before it is fully ripe.
“If you eat close to the dirt,” Teresa says, “it’s always going to be good.”
Linda Hester, a landscaper and friend of Teresa, agrees. For years she has been designing the flower beds outside of the bakery. Today she is switching out the flowers, switching to summer geraniums to hardier pansies, which will last through the winter. She is bundled up against the wind that whips down North Main St. and through the tiny parking lot.
She believes in Grateful Bread’s cause.
“Teresa is very much an organic herbs and vegetables person, as the bakery shows,” Linda says, standing next to her plant and potting soil filled pick-up truck. “Somebody’s got to save the earth.”
Customers notice the fresh flavor
Lunchtime at Grateful Bread Baking Company in High Point, N.C. is always bustling. Customers begin to filter in around 11 a.m., but the 40 seat restaurant really starts filling up around noon. By 12:30, the place is usually full; every one of the 12 tables occupied.
Eliza Walmsley, a 21-year-old High Point University senior from Ridgeway, Va. is a devoted follower.
She’s been coming to Grateful Bread since she was in high school—Ridgeway is about an hour from High Point. Her neighbor, whose job with Basset Mirror Company out of nearby Martinsville, Va. brings her to furniture market week introduced her to the place. She would have Eliza help her set up for pre-market, and then take her to lunch. It would always be at Grateful Bread.
“It was my neighbor’s get-away spot,” Eliza says.
When Eliza began coming to HPU for college, she of course had to continue frequenting the bakery. She loves that the food is healthy, unlike the many chicken and biscuit places that populate High Point, but still so full of flavor.
What’s Eliza’s favorite meal?
“I love the egg salad,” she says. “Everything is good, but I just keep coming back to that sandwich.”
The everything she refers to could be the pimento blue cheese sandwich, which is Teresa’s personal favorite. Or it could be the curried chicken salad, the tomato basil soup, the hummus and veggie sandwich, the daily veggie burger. All of these items are on the daily lunch menu. All are tasty and fresh.
On any given day at Grateful Bread, the type of customer is as varied as the menu.
A middle aged man eats a turkey and havarti sandwich while talking on his Bluetooth. Judging from his black dress pants and shoes, blue shirt and sweater vest, he’s on break from an office job. His Blackberry and a pair of reading glasses lie on the rustic wooden table at which he’s eating.
A young woman in UGG boots and cropped yoga pants orders at the counter. Her green and white floral bag almost clashing with her gray and cream hooded sweatshirt.
Two women, probably in their 30s sit at one of the retro looking tables. With its silver ridged top and black and silver chairs, it looks like it is straight out of the 1950s.
The two women do not. One looks like she just came from the office. The other from a tennis match. Are they the modern “ladies who lunch?”
“We might look like a little hippie shop, but we don’t just serve hippies,” Teresa says.
It doesn't matter who you are, your age, or your profession. Everyone enjoys good food.
Sidebar:
Founded in 1986 in Italy by Carlo Petrini, the Slow Food Movement first set out to fight the growing fast food trend. Today, it is a worldwide organization with over 100,000 members in 132 countries.
Including the United States, where there are roughly 16,000 members.
On their website, Slow Food USA says, “Slow Food USA seeks to create dramatic and lasting change in the food system. We reconnect Americans with the people, traditions, plants, animals, fertile soils and waters that produce our food. We seek to inspire a transformation in food policy, production practices and market forces so that they ensure equity, sustainability and pleasure in the food we eat.”
Slow Food USA does this through educational outreach, encouraging the eating of in-season food, advocating farmers and growers and in-general, celebrating food.
High Point, N.C. is a part of the Slow Food Piedmont chapter, which has been working to support local agriculturalists since 1989.
In Sept. 2009, they awarded their first Snail of Approval awards, which recongnize those restaurants, growers and markets which exemplify the ideals of the organization.
To qualify, a restaurant must serve food that is: fresh, local and sustainable, good for the body, supports the local community, good for the environment, promotes relationships, and is sustainable for the future.
“We’re trying to get the snail,” Grateful Bread owner Teresa Mackey says.
When an establishment gets the award, a snail decal gets placed upon the door, so that customers can feel good about the place where they are about to eat.
Additionally, Slow Food Piedmont has a list of these restaurants, so diners can take environmental practices into consideration when choosing a place to eat.
The Slow Food Movement, along with local restaurants such as Grateful Bread, are bringing environmental issues to the forefront of our minds. And to the dinner table.
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