Courter: Food tastes trending toward fresh and local

Food seems to be on the minds of a lot of people these days. Which should hardly seem surprising since we all eat, but the subject matter has changed a bit.

It's hard to fathom today, but back when the Chattanooga Market opened a decade ago, it was not very easy to find, or buy, fresh produce. We had markets in the area selling produce, but in reality most of those were selling the same stuff that the bigger grocery stores were selling. They still are.

Now, after many of us have tasted an heirloom tomato or a strawberry that was picked just that morning, it is kind of hard to imagine biting into one that was grown who knows where and picked green sometime last week and blasted with gas to give it that bright red color.

As people have become educated and pickier, suppliers and restaurants have worked to meet the demand.

Longtime diners will remember when the majority of restaurants here served essentially meat-and-two dishes, and everything came out of a can from the one or two main food vendors in town.

I remember when some folks from Atlanta opened a place called Buckhead Roadhouse in East Brainerd near the mall. They were so proud that everything would be prepared fresh that day. The cooks spent the morning preparing the sauces from scratch, and the vegetables were all bought fresh and cooked up that day. People hated it. After a few weeks, the owners switched to canned vegetables, and sales increased.

When the Moses family -- mom Maggie and daughters Sally and Susan -- opened 212 Market, chef Susan boldly introduced a radical new menu that broke from the meat-and-two tradition. They also put their restaurant in a place that most folks passed by on their way out of town on the way home. Timing is everything, and the restaurant got in on the front end of the downtown revitalization, but the food and service were also very good. That's why it worked then and still works now.

What 212 has done is kind of representative of how the city's attitude toward food has changed. The restaurant has always used fresh, locally grown foods, and the Moseses have always been willing and able to introduce people to new things. And, over time, people have learned to like trying new things.

The only quail eggs I've ever eaten I had there. Not sure I'd order them again, but at least I was able to try them.

At a party the other day, several of us were trying to remember when and where the first Chinese restaurant was in town. The first pizza place we could remember was Shakey's Pizza, and barbecue, back in the day, was purchased from a stand and taken home to eat.

Today, of course, we have all manner of ethnic choices, including Thai, Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Mexican, Cuban, Japanese and German. To be fair, we still demand that some of them Americanize their menus to local tastes. Some "authentic" Mexican restaurants do offer tortilla chips and salsa, for example, but more and more don't.

Of course, you can also get a piece of meat and vegetables, but the meat was farm-raised and recently butchered and the vegetables likely were picked that morning.