With help from NY1, we took a video tour of Foragers City Grocer at the corner of E. 22nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. It’s the first Manhattan outpost of the market, which opened in Dumbo six years ago, and it’s one of many locavore businesses in the borough we’re profiling in the weeks leading up to Eat Drink Local Week, which begins June 23. (What – you don’t yet know about our week’s worth of locavore events, restaurant prix-fixe and specials?.)
Since its launch Foragers had a mission to buy good food from its local foodshed, but it was so hard to find farmers who would or could supply good local vegetables to a supermarket in the early days, the owners ended up starting their own farm. Now Foragers’ eggs, herbs and greens make their way into the aisles stocking produce and prepared food, and the little company now also trucks down dairy and meat from their upstate neighbors, making their own sausages, hams, bacon and pastrami and cutting meat to order.
Last but not least, all that good product goes to an in-house restaurant run by San Francisco chef Douglas Monsalud. The place marries Forager products with his Cal-Asian food, like a Southeast style pork chop that uses the Red Wattle pigs hanging in the butcher shop yards away. Yep, it’s as delicious as it sounds.
Want proof? Watch the video here!
