Why you shouldn’t order Asparagus in August

Right before a big Earth Day event, the weather turned abruptly and the cilantro bolted and became a mass of beautiful delicious flowers. The menu called for pasta with pesto and so we made the pesto out of flowering cilantro and put the leftovers in our floral arrangements.

That story came up recently when the Pacific Sun asked what farm-to-table really means to us. It's a phrase printed on a lot of menus. For Roux Catering it's less a label than a set of decisions we make every week, most of them invisible to the people eating.

It starts with a conversation, long before anyone talks about courses. When we sit down with a couple or a corporate planner, the first questions are about feeling: what you want your guests to experience, which dish takes you back to a happy moment, what you can't stand. A menu built on that foundation holds up even when the farm doesn't cooperate.

And the farm often doesn't. One season, fog sat over Triple T Farms long enough to push their cherry tomatoes back about six weeks. We bought elsewhere in the meantime, then switched back the moment their Toybox tomatoes came in, serving them fresh and roasting and preserving the surplus. Sanzuma, a small school farm in San Rafael, gets the same patience. Its hillside location means a short growing window, and the care the people working that land put into it shows up in every bite.

Which brings us to asparagus in August. You can find it, but by late summer it has traveled a long way to reach your table, and it tastes like it. When a client asks for it, we explain why and suggest what's showing best that week instead. The shape of the menu stays the same from tasting to event day. What can change is the vegetable beside the short ribs or the herb finishing a dish, swapped for whatever looked best at the Marin Farmers Market.

Sometimes the swap becomes the best thing on the plate. In Louisiana they call that lagniappe, a little something extra you didn't ask for. Many of our favorite dishes started exactly that way: something irresistible at the market, and a menu with enough room to welcome it.

The same thinking runs through NoHungerHere, the meal program we started in April 2020 when the pandemic closed the community dining room at St. Vincent de Paul in San Rafael. Volunteers have prepared more than 5,500 meals through it. Food for unhoused neighbors gets the same care and intention as a wedding dinner, because it should, and a portion of every Roux Catering booking keeps that work going.

So when you see "farm-to-table" on our menus, here's what it means in practice: listening first, cooking with the season instead of around it, and trusting our farmers enough to change course when the weather does.

Planning a wedding, corporate event, or private dinner in Marin, San Francisco, or Wine Country? Let's talk about a menu built this way.