Andrea Reusing | Slow Food Evangelist

Photo by Faith Dwight

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Andrea didn’t learn about eating local on a farm or in a fishing community, but in New York’s East Village.  “I convinced a friend who was the chef at an English pub to let me cook there.”  The pub’s menu was created from whatever goodies were found at the local green market, and a seed was planted in Andrea’s mind.  That seed has since grown into a full-blown passion.  Andrea, the chef and owner of Asian-inspired Lantern Restaurant in Chapel Hill, is also the leader of the Triangle chapter of the Slow Food movement. For her, that means fostering relationships with committed local farmers around whose products she builds Lantern’s menu. Perhaps she said it best at the Slow Food summit in Italy last year: “…food grown by people with strong connections to their land and community is the only way a girl from New Jersey could open an Asian restaurant in North Carolina and even approach some idea of authenticity.”  

• Andrea says she ended up in North Carolina because she “chased” her husband down here.
• The man good enough to move from NY to NC for?  Mac McCaughn – founder of Merge Records.
  
• When she opened Lantern, Andrea had $500 in the bank.  How’s that for a leap of faith?