Glasgow Food Heroes: Ivan Stein from The Gannet

Let’s Eat Glasgow is the city food festival working to help tackle food inequality. It will return to SWG3, in Finnieston, this weekend (Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th September) with twice as many social enterprises taking part.

The organisers are a curious not-for-profit group called Real Food, Real Folk. It’s a co-operative of some of Glasgow top restaurants.

This year they are doubling the number of vouchers for restaurant food at the event donated to social enterprises and community groups across the city.

The Real Food, Real Folk restaurants Cail Bruich, Crabshakk, Guy’s Restaurant, Mother India, Ox and Finch, Stravaigin, The Gannet and Ubiquitous Chip came together in late 2014. They wanted to bring attention to the great food and drink being grown, reared, fished and cooked on our doorstep whilst recognising, and raising money to help tackle, food inequality across the city.

The eight Real Food, Real Folk restaurants are donating their time to serve food at Let’s Eat Glasgow, which is free to enter, with the plates priced from an accessible £5.

They will be joined by eight guest restaurants – Banana Leaf, Café Gandolfi, El Perro Negro, Eusebi Deli, Lychee Oriental, Martha’s, The Hanoi Bike Shop and Wee Guy’s – with guest chefs also donating their time.

Any profits made by Let’s Eat Glasgow! will go towards Real Food, Real Folk’s work to address food inequality in the city.

Early on a Monday morning we wandered down to SWG3 for a chat with chef Ivan Stein from The Gannet. He told us the story of how this all came about and also what you can expect if you go to Let’s Eat Glasgow! this weekend.

Glasgowist: The story of The Gannet is part of the story of the rise of Finnieston. I’ve always felt that the restaurants down there have a very easy relationship with each other, not necessarily collaborating, but certainly creating a collegial rapport and creating a bit of a scene. Let’s Eat Glasgow! grew out of wider cooperation between the Real Food, Real Folk restaurants. How did that come about? How did they start talking to each other.

Ivan Stein: Well it was Colin Clydesdale [from Ubiquitous Chip], he was the first to approach others with an idea. It wasn’t really around a food festival necessarily. It was just a sense of frustration about the way that Glasgow promotes itself or is viewed in relation to other places, like Edinburgh. He felt like the restaurants themselves could do more to tell their story. We wanted to educate people that it’s not just about deals and getting more for less. That’s fine if people want it, but there should be a bit more space in a city of Glasgow’s size for more diversity of food.

Part of this is about telling people what is available then?

It’s tied in with issues in the restaurant scene and you take that and you widen it out to issues about food awareness and nutritional poverty. There’s a very uneven distribution of food resources within the city and there are issues around diet. We wanted to do something that speaks to a more vibrant and interesting food scene but taps into those inequalities. We initially thought a festival event and outreach programmes. It was all quite loose in the beginning but when the restaurants came together we decided to do Let’s Eat Glasgow and make it a not-for-profit event so the profits could be ploughed back into other ideas with potential or food banks or community projects.

With the first group, the first discussions. How many restaurants were there at first?

I think there were eight of us at the beginning.

How does that work? Do you hire a community hall and decide which chef takes the minutes of the meeting?

It was a Monday morning sit down in the Ubiquitous Chip, with a cup of coffee. It was us from The Gannet, John Macleod from Crabshakk, Seamus [MacInnes] from Cafe Gandolfi, Chris [Charalambous] from Cail Bruich, Ox & Finch, Guys and Mother India. I think that was it at that time. Colin just threw it out there and said “what do you think?”

The first year of it last year, we stuck with the core team of restaurants and we felt we should widen it out to include other elements of the food scene like the good fishmongers or whisky distillers. The kind of people who are doing small scale, hand-crafted stuff. We were trying to choose people who had some kind of connection to the west of Scotland. I think that’s central to it all as well.

It was a great success last year and it was massively oversubscribed. This year we’ve widened it out again, to cope with demand and so it wasn’t seen as a clique thing. We wanted it to be inclusive.

Next stages then – you’ve had the response you wanted from the Glasgow public and colleagues in the food industry. It seems, like now there’s an opportunity to grow the outreach element and have other activities during the year. Is that possible?

It’s possible, there have been things happening over the last year. There’s a community gardens project that some of the restaurants are involved in. The idea is to take some pieces of land that are not being used for anything constructive and then growing ingredients on them. That’s been used by community groups to supply some of the restaurants. It’s a way of getting local people involved and generating revenue for the community. We’ve also been involved in food banks. There’s been food demos in schools. There’s a variety of things that aren’t maybe publicised as much as the Let’s Eat festival. Hopefully that side will grow next year.

I suppose events like this and the other activities you are talking about can encourage people to think that they could be part of Glasgow’s restaurant scenes, working front of house or as a chef or maybe with their own pop-up street food idea. Is that something you would hope could come out of what you are doing?

I think it would be great if it did to be honest. There’s a danger sometimes that restaurants are seen as quite an exclusive thing or thought of as inaccessible. It’s not always particularly clear how people can get involved in them. Anything that shows a more open and inclusive side is a good thing.

It’s not just about restaurants, there’s a lot more to it, we’re looking at the source and where our food comes from and how that really reflects what’s on offer. You don’t necessarily have to go to the restaurant to get access to these ingredients.

So Glasgow folk should cook more!

Well this is it, that’s why we have some cooking demos when you come and and you’ll see livestock and get a farm vibe. It’s reinforcing that food comes from somewhere, it doesn’t just appear, plastic wrapped on a supermarket shelf. That’s part of the drive to get people to think more about provenance of ingredients and things like that.

If we come along to Let’s Eat Glasgow! what will The Gannet be serving?

Every restaurant is doing three dishes. One dish we are doing is based around herring which has a very short season. It’s a great Scottish product but its only available for, like, six weeks of the year in the late summer months. We are also having a dish using rabbit to make a croquette type dish. A vegetarian type dish as well, using polenta and some wild mushrooms – we have a forager at the restaurant who has been bringing us all sorts of wild plants from the central belt of Scotland.

A video about last year’s inaugural event: