Women's Health
: Green Chef - Cooking with Andrea Reusing

An award-winning chef, ardent
advocate of sustainable agriculture, and
working mom, Andrea Reusing has
redefined the term farm-to-table. As
the chef-owner of Lantern restaurant
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Andrea
has elevated the use of local seasonal
ingredients to national importance as it
relates to flavor, good health, creativity,
and environmental sustainability. At
the same time, she strives to make
the use of the fresh ingredients found
at local farmers’ markets, CSAs, and
roadside stands approachable for the
home cook. It’s a model with both
personal and global implications—and
one we can all benefit from.
It takes a great chef to create a great restaurant. Andrea Reusing is
one such chef. Her Chapel Hill restaurant, Lantern, has garnered
high praise for its passionate marriage of Asian cuisine and local
North Carolina ingredients. Not only has this unique restaurant
been named one of “America’s Top 50 Restaurants” by Gourmet
magazine, it has also been lauded as one of the “Best Farm to
Table Restaurants in the state of North Carolina” by the American
Farm to Table Restaurant Guide, one of “America’s 50 Most
Amazing Wine Experiences” by Food & Wine magazine, and
“Restaurant of the Year” in 2009 by the Raleigh News & Observer.
These accolades haven’t distracted Andrea from her core
devotion to local, sustainably produced food. In fact, her work
today is simply an extension of her continuing enthusiasm for
the rich flavors found in the seasonal offerings from local farms,
orchards, and ranches.
“In a lot of ways, the utilization of local ingredients brings me
more flavor than if I got my ingredients from all over the place,”
says Andrea. “It also provides me with a natural restriction
from which to draw ideas to assemble the menu. When you
can pull any possible ingredient from any place in the world at
any time, it’s almost too much freedom. I find sourcing locally
really focuses the cooking—and it focuses decision making. I
love that challenge.”
A Chef in the Making
Andrea’s path toward a career in food began at an early age.
“For me, cooking stemmed from loving to eat—and from
being hungry all the time,” she recalls with a smile. “I wanted
to be able to prepare things that I had eaten in different
places and was always trying to duplicate foods that I’d had in
restaurants and people’s houses. That’s how I started cooking
when I was a teenager.”
Not surprisingly, Andrea’s love of local, fresh produce also
began when she was young. “My mother and father were both
raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, so I grew up going
to farms with my grandparents and my parents,” she notes. “My
grandparents lived in a very rural area, so I didn’t see cooking
seasonally or cooking with ingredients you grew in your own
garden as different.”
Andrea’s rural roots, however, took a temporary hiatus as she
completed college and became a public policy consultant in
New York City. It was there that she met her future husband
and decided she had had enough of big city living. Andrea
picked up stakes and moved with him to North Carolina,
where she experienced a bit of culture shock. “Things are
a little slower [in North Carolina], which made me a little
anxious,” she says with a laugh. “It took me a couple of years
to adjust.” Seventeen years later, Andrea feels like this has always
been home.
It was during this transition that Andrea’s professional life also
took a turn from consultant to professional chef. In 2002, she
teamed up with her brother Brendan to open an Asian restaurant
in the historically progressive university town of Chapel Hill.
Concentrating on local ingredients was not Andrea’s primary focus
initially. “I had the idea to open a restaurant that was going to be
financially successful and not go out of business,” she recounts.
“There were only a few Asian restaurants here at the time. When we
first opened, I would say that the percentage of local we used was
much less than it is now. The main focus was just trying to get open
and survive day to day.”
A “Local” Establishment
As Lantern gained a foothold, Andrea began to explore Chapel
Hill’s farmers’ markets. What she found was a flourishing local
food scene. “This is one of the older areas for farmer-run farmers’
markets in the country, so there was already a thriving community
of farms and restaurants when I arrived,” she continues. “I wasn’t
cooking professionally in New York, but I shopped at different
farmers’ markets there. The ingredients I found here were, in many
ways, a lot better.”
It wasn’t long before Andrea began to gather many of the ingredients
used at Lantern from local sources. “We knew tons of farmers just
from being in the community and going to farmers’ markets,” she
says. “There are about 300 small farms within 25 or 30 minutes of
here, so there was no challenge in finding them. The challenge
became organizing the menu to allow us to use as much of the
local meat and produce as possible.”
All of that organizing has resulted in a menu that revolves
around local, seasonally available ingredients. “For the most
part, availability determines the menu,” Andrea points out.
“We have a couple things that are on the menu year-round,
like our tea-and-spice-smoked chicken. However, we typically
change the fresh ingredients that are in the rice, as well as the
vegetables that are served with the dish. We start off in early
spring with asparagus, then we do sugar snap peas. Next we do
some sort of early spring braising mix, then we go into green
beans, and then broad beans. In the winter it’s usually just
braising greens, which is a mix of mustard greens and kale. But
we’re really lucky that we have the kind of climate here where
people can grow a lot even in January and February.”
Andrea pays close attention to the way that crops are grown
and the methods by which animals are raised—and she has
seen the results in the taste. “I’ve noticed that people who
care about what they are growing have food that’s a lot more
flavorful,” she says.
Cooking in the Moment
Andrea’s culinary art isn’t limited to creating and operating an
award-winning restaurant. In 2011, she published a cookbook
entitled Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes. As
the title implies, the book takes home cooks through a year
of meals created around seasonally available ingredients—over
130 recipes in all—supported by approachable and informative
text and vibrant photographs that help celebrate each season.
Her reasons for creating the book were quite specific. “I was
constantly having conversations with people who told me
that they wanted to be able to cook dinner after going to the
farmers’ market,” remembers Andrea. “They didn’t want to
have to stop off at the grocery store, but they felt intimidated or
challenged by the prospect of only going to the farmers’ market
to make a meal or two. I realized the opposite was true of me.
I ended up cooking that way most of the time—more out of
laziness, really. I didn’t follow recipes. I was just trying to use
up what I had in the CSA box, what I brought home from the
restaurant, or what I had grabbed at the farmers’ market. So
the book actually started as me writing down very simple, basic
recipes for friends.”
Andrea envisions her book as a confidence builder for home
cooks. “What I hope is that it can be useful to help get dinner
on the table quickly, and also to demonstrate that food doesn’t
have to be complicated to taste really good,” she explains.
“There’s been this kind of ‘foodie-ism’ that has crept into the
way we think about food, and the way we think about cooking
in our own homes. In the last 10 years it seems as if there’s been
a trend among people who aren’t in the food business to feel
like there needs to be some sort of special training to just have
people over for dinner—or to even cook for their own family! I
hope the book helps to counter this idea and encourages people
to believe that the ultimate ‘shortcut’ in cooking is to use really
good, high-quality ingredients.”
Beyond the Kitchen
Andrea’s enthusiasm for local agriculture extends far beyond
Lantern. Currently, she serves on the board of advisors for the
Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS), a joint
effort between two of North Carolina’s leading universities and
the state’s Department of Agriculture. Since 1994 CEFS has
been heavily researching and promoting organic, sustainable,
and local agriculture. Today, its impact is being felt statewide
and the organization is setting a remarkable example for many
other states throughout the nation.
“I consider the work that CEFS does vitally important to the
future of North Carolina’s agriculture,” says Andrea. “We’re
an agricultural state, yet probably well less than 5 percent
of what we eat is grown here. Their approach—to try to
help North Carolina feed itself—is important from many
standpoints: food security, community, and the environment.
But there is something that’s even more intangible, and
that’s the quality of our lives, including healthcare and our
connection to each other.”
Andrea sees local and sustainable food systems as the only
hope for our long-term survival. “The answer to how local food
systems around the country could fix the overall food system is
complicated. The short answer is that it’s the only way to fix the
food system,” she says. “If the food system is becoming more
consolidated—with fewer and fewer farms producing more and
more of our food—then it’s a very brittle system. What we need
is more resilience in terms of economic models so we can feed
both community and economic development. This resilience
will also help us defend ourselves from future climate change.
Small-scale local farming will also help provide more resilience
to ‘superbugs’ that are resistant to antibiotics. Many authorities,
including the CDC, fear that we’re approaching what they call a
‘post-antibiotic era’ due to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics
in factory farming. Community food systems can address our
ability to produce farm animals without using antibiotics.”
In addition to CEFS, Andrea is a member of Chef ’s
Collaborative, a nationwide network of chefs that is working
to expand the sustainable food landscape through professional
connections, education, and responsible buying decisions.
“Chef ’s Collaborative is an organization that tries to foster
networks of chefs who are working toward sustainability. The
group allows them to support each other in this effort,”
Andrea explains. “One thing Chef ’s Collaborative is focusing
on right now is an initiative on sustainable meat production.
We are looking at how chefs can help each other eliminate
barriers to sourcing local and regional pasture-based meat in
their own kitchens.”
Whether in the kitchen, at the local farmers’ market, or
working with various organizations, everything Andrea does
relates back to her first love—the act of transforming local,
sustainably produced ingredients bursting with flavor into
surprising dishes that people have never experienced before.
But it’s not only about food. It’s about people, too. “I love the
camaraderie that comes from working in a kitchen in very
close quarters,” she says. “I love the long-term friendships
that cooking has allowed me to establish with people over
the years.”