KEEPING AN AGROECOLOGICAL RESTAURANT ALIVE DURING A NEVER-ENDING PANDEMIC

July 2, 2020

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The front door is locked and all of the chairs are crammed into a harshly lit corner of the restaurant. In their absence are tables set up with organic and natural wines, homemade vinegars made with kiwis and crates of agroecological vegetables for sale. Manuela Donnet, the matriarch of the eponymously named vegan restaurant and palace to all things mushroom, is bouncing around in the back of the shop mentally preparing for a slow night of slinging nigiri prepared with marinated tomato and rolls stuffed with oyster mushrooms grilled over a wood fire. 

“We thought, if we can’t do Donnet right,” she later recounts, “let’s keep the little dignity we have left and do something completely different. One of the guys knew how to make sushi so we were like, alright, this is how we’re going to reunite the band.”

She leads me to a table and pours me a glass of cabernet sauvignon, “it tastes like mandarins and peaches,” she insists. Next to us is a poster that reads Autopublicar es resistir, a karmic message from somewhere out of this realm to accompany the first interview of MATAMBRE. It is also a perfect summation of Donnet herself. She rejected the status quo of the restaurant world to open her own space guided by principles within an industry that isn’t exactly congruent with moral convictions.

We sat down around day 90 of what was shaping up to be the world’s longest quarantine to talk about the difficulties of opening a vegan agroecological restaurant in a country that often shuns diversity of food, maintaining order in lockdown and the future of the restaurant industry once the Covid dust settles.

 

Matías Macchi prepares nigiri and rolls with marinated tomatoes and oyster and monkey head mushrooms.

Before we get into pandemia-era Donnet, can you tell me how it all started?

I was sick of working for a boss. It didn’t even matter if I was cooking stuff that I enjoyed. I needed to cook what I wanted. I ended up finding a storefront and that’s how it started. I wanted to make soups. It was the middle of summer! What was I thinking? The first menu was oven baked potatoes, soup, potato knishes, empanadas and a mushroom sandwich. I felt horrible because we were buying empanada shells that were total garbage. It was like 10 square meters and I put the kitchen together with a pallet. There was no infrastructure to work with [sic] it was hell. When I was looking for people to work they’d show up and be like, no fucking way am I coming to work here. It was like working in a trench. Although here [editor's note: Donnet has since moved] we aren’t too far off. The kitchen is still really uncomfortable. It’s basically a hallway. I tell the guys, I don’t know if I’m pregnant with my boyfriend's baby or one of theirs the way we are all pressed up against each other back there. There is a lot of friction going on.

I, and I think most people who have eaten here, immediately connect Donnet to crazy mushrooms. You dialed it back with the last version of the menu but I remember for a while every dish had some in it. How did you go from that first menu to identifying so strongly with mushrooms?

They found me. I didn’t look for them. I had another plan. I was in love with soup. They showed up on their own and people responded to how I cooked, so I said, fine I’ll go down this road. Now I want to know more but they showed up and I just cooked and as I cooked more and more, more and more arrived. 

You have spent a lot of time in Bariloche working with wild mushrooms, right?

I spent two years going back and forth. I was invited because they were trying to bring tourism there. They wanted to bring tourists to forage mushrooms and cook them with a chef. It’s what always happens in these small towns. The forest is full of mushrooms and no one eats them. Everyone wants trout and deer that were brought in from somewhere else. Whatever. Society. The mushrooms are native and the people who live there don’t care. They found me and started calling and hooked me up with some scientists that taught me about each variety in exchange for recipes. The mushrooms in Bariloche are incredible. They are the same mushrooms found in Oceania. When the continents separated, on one side was Argentina and Chile and the other was Oceania. The mushrooms are the same strains. They share the same lineage. The mushroom universe gives me goosebumps. They are like aliens. They have animal and vegetable characteristics. Recently I read that they discovered that they are connected with networks under the soil. 

It’s fascinating to me this idea of an incredible local ingredient and the people there don’t give a shit. I’ve seen a version of that pretty much everywhere that I have traveled in Argentina. In Misiones you have this unparalleled biodiversity, river fish, everything grows there and everyone eats beef brought in from 1500 kilometers away. 

It’s all over the place. In Misiones, there are mangos littering the streets and people ask you for spare change to buy bread. In Corrientes if it’s not meat, it’s not food. 

I imagine that it is a combination of colonization, a chronically unstable economy and the high cost of living but it has always struck me as very strange that in a nation so connected to agriculture, the products available to consumers and the majority cuisine is very basic. 

You go to the vegetable stand and it’s maybe 10% of what this country can produce. Just look at how people cook [sic] we don’t know how to cook. Green onions, for example, everyone chops it in half and throws the green part out. I remember living in shared apartments and feeling like my head would split in two. All that potato and onion sprouting on the counter. It makes me want to scream. No one is asking, how much energy did the earth and the plant spend to form this? It spent six months working and we let it go to waste. It’s a total lack of consciousness. And maybe all these things are changing but very slowly. They are very small changes and our perspective is shaped by what happens in our circles. 

I’m sure you run into resistance here, too.

There is a lack of curiosity. With my mom, for example, I have a really hard time talking to her about food. She could eat two kilos of bread and a single lettuce leaf, bloat and then she is going to tell me it’s because of the raw lettuce, you see? These are habits and ideas that we have been programmed to think since childhood. We need break that. But hey, that’s the capitalist system working, too. My mom lives in the house she grew up in and in the back my grandpa had rabbits, chickens and a garden. When she was a girl, they preserved tomatoes in bottles with a little olive oil and had tomatoes to eat all year. But then enter all the pre-made food so we can all cook faster, everything processed because you have to work, you have to raise your kids and satisfy your husband and so the garden turns into something counterproductive.

 

How are you dealing with this quarantine that feels like it will never end?

I remember the day that the President announced his decree. We were all working here and huddled around the computer to watch the speech and it was like, what costume do we throw on now? The other day my brother sort of called out my moralism. He said to me ‘if you didn’t have so many principles we could be selling food to a hospital or cooking garbage delivered in plastic and actually turn a profit.’ It’s just really difficult for me to take Donnet out of Donnet. This is an experience. We want you to come here, listen to our music, feel like you are here in our second home. This has been a punch to the gut. The only way to take care of myself has been taken away and I don’t want to change the life I lead. I want to loosen the reins as little as possible. 

Not that anyone is safe from what is going on but Donnet is pretty unique in that you are an almost 100% organic or agroecological, fully vegan restaurant and pretty orthodox about the systems you’ve developed here. I imagine it's your morals against the realities of the economy, the supply chain [sic] everything that’s changing everyday. So where have you loosened the reins? 

A lot of things happened to me with my dignity and flexibility during this quarantine. I said to myself, the most dignified thing I can do is sell this sushi and deal with this bullshit until we can open the doors and bring back the Donnet experience. And in the meantime prepare ourselves because I feel like we won’t be able to bring back anything that we did before. Everything has already been buried. The best thing I could do for our last menu we had leading up to the quarantine is let it disappear and let this be a rebirth of creativity, the kitchen [sic] possibly everything. I think that this happens to all of us who want to transcend. Adios! As much as we want everything to be like it was, we are never going to be able to return. It’s time to prepare for the rebirth. 

How far am I going to push myself to do something I don’t want to do and how am I supposed to do something I don’t want to do? This is the first time since Donnet opened that I don’t enjoy coming to work. I don’t like it. I don’t like that no one is here. I don’t like that all the chairs and tables are crammed in a corner. I don’t like that the team is all fractured. I don’t like giving less work to someone. I don’t like anything! I don’t want to make sushi every day. I don’t like not using agroecological ingredients because there isn’t enough money anymore. But whatever. If I don’t come here, what do I do? We could easily say to everyone, ‘whelp, pandemic!’ Shut it down and come back when this is all over. It would be a better economic decision. Everyone for themselves. The responsibility of being the boss really hit me with everything it had. All these people. My lord. So for now, it’s pure resistance. Let’s make something up so this keeps going and people don’t forget we’re here. 

The thing about small business people like us is that we are tossed into the margins. It’s like standing in the middle of a river and the water is up to your neck and the only thing you can do to survive is be calm because if you breathe in too hard you’re gonna drown. You have to resist. Obviously there are days where I feel like I can’t breathe and I can’t stop crying and I feel like I’m going to die but you get up the next morning and you go to work. 

Have you ever read Rayuela? There is this chapter where they are in a hotel and they have to craft something into coins to turn the heater on. That’s the Argentine in a nutshell. We are all in the same shit and it’s creativity that is going to bring you out of it. I think there is a lot of dignity to that [sic] when a person finds their place and uncovers the solution to make things a little more bearable. 

You’ve done a lot of work to make everything agroecological or organic prior to Covid. What are the challenges of maintaining that in the middle of all this?

The agroecological products we use are all in limbo and very expensive. Lots of people stopped working. And a lot of people started basically selling co-op bags to the public and don’t want to sell to restaurants because we can’t buy in quantity anymore. So if I want tomatoes from my vegetable vendor, he wants to sell it to me in a bag of a bunch of other stuff. The union that represents farm workers has its own set of problems right now with transportation. Nothing arrives on time and that is creating a different kind of demand. Last week organic tomatoes shot up to $190 per kilo [editor’s note: non-organic tomatoes currently cost $80-85 at the average vegetable stand]. How much do I have to charge for a little slice of faina with tomato sauce and pesto? 500 pesos? Then we get thrown into a totally different rabbit hole of how to sell here at a fair price. 

I’ve been reading different takes from the US about Covid pulling back the curtains on how problematic the restaurant industry is and how it should evolve. I read a few pieces that suggested burning down the whole system and turning dining into luxury. This very one dimensional economic perspective. That is so indicative of the cultural zeitgeist in the US [sic] the problem is money. Just throw more money at the problem and hope it goes away. It just fails to acknowledge that our problems don’t exist in a vacuum. The restaurant world is just an expression of the capitalist system it exists within. So you mentioned ‘fair price’ and it’s interesting because everyone has to decide where to place their energies. What’s the impact? Because no one can fix everything. And for someone like you who wants to run a business guided by moral conviction, how do you begin to decide where to invest your energy and where to abdicate power?

How do you fix it all? Who knows. I agree there isn’t an answer. All restaurants work differently. They are all different. We are talking about a bunch of different systems converging into the same place. Take a restaurant where you have a waiter that is working until he’s 75 and he gets paid this horrible salary because he has to put food on the table and his boss pays him shit while he scrapes all the money off the top. That is a lot of issues all wrapped into one. The whole system is set up to work that way though. In my circles, I see young people trying to change things but that is always guided by the limitations of the system itself. And within this system, there are choices. I have a friend who is working at a pizza shop with a lot of money behind it and they are paying 40% of his hourly wage. We told everyone here: we are going to pay you everything but we are cutting your hours. Sorry, that’s what’s going on right now. But if this business tells their employees, we are only going to pay 40% and you have to pretend it’s all good or game over, shit, where do we fit in? You see the injustice? 

And how do you deal with it here? 

The important thing to me has always been to be conscious but becoming conscious is a very long process. I have moments that I am very orthodox and others that I’m not. It’s such a tragic awakening, don’t you think? No one likes to be aware that everything is so fucked up. As a human being that is going to pass through life which basically means birth, work and death, I am one individual. What do I want to leave behind? Ok, I’m a cook. How can I be a better human? For me it’s doing something that people like and is good for them. That is my concept professionally and personally. Be a good person and leave something selfless behind. Obviously I charge people for their food but what I mean is I could make more money selling milanesa and french fries, I could make more money buying a Subway franchise, I could make more money a million different ways but it’s about stacking your chips in what you want to leave behind. And I don’t even necessarily think that it’s bad to buy a Subway franchise. Not everyone has to have a curiousity or desire to be a good person like I do. 

You don’t think so?

I mean, of course they should, but there is a whole lot of space between what someone should do and what they see and actually do.