Where in the World is Leah Scafe?: Home Sweet Santa Cruz

Home is a relative term for me these days. I consider myself to have about 5 homes these days: Santa Cruz, Montreal, Salmon Arm, Vancouver and Smithers. I sometimes also like to joke that The Thompson Hotel in the Lower East Side, NYC is my home, since between September and November last year I stayed there 3 separate times for at least 4 days at a time. I'm about due for a visit back I think- the new restaurant, Shang (headed by big name Toronto chef Susur Lee), just opened last month and I'm eager to go check it out.

Anyways, since leaving Peru I've returned "home" to Santa Cruz, CA, where the company I work for, Outstanding in the Field, is based. One of the reasons I originally went to Peru was to get away. Yes, it is hard to get away when you're always away... you have to choose somewhere where you can really give the illusion that you're off the edge of the world, like in Peru. There's no way they have internet and cellphones there.... right? Turns out they do, but at least when you say you're in South America, people don't expect you to be in touch. Last year was busy, really busy, with OITF. I pretty much worked nonstop from May onwards, and the four months prior to that I was going to school at McGill as well as planning our dinner tour. I needed a break, to say the least. But now I'm back and refreshed and ready to get going... starting Monday.

For those of you that might not know so much about Outstanding in the Field, I wrote this little description about it as well as how I originally became involved.

Outstanding in the Field

About 4 years ago I met Outstanding in the Field at the UBC Farm, when I was then working at the Saturday morning Farm Market. Responding to an email sent out by the volunteer coordinator at the farm, I had signed up to help out at the dinner event that was happening one Sunday evening in August. It was a gorgeous event and I had a lot of fun working with the California crew who put these events on all across the country. Jim Denevan is the founder of the company, a some sort of quote “mysterious, handsome Californian artist/chef” who had been devoting himself to his cause since 1999. Katy Oursler was the coordinator/manager of the team, a charming girl with great farm dinner dresses and a welcoming smile. That first year there were three other team members, including a bus driver, a front of the house manager and a dishwasher. It was quite the crew, to say the least, but I was totally enamoured with them all.

It would be a full year until I would see the group again, and although there had been a few staff changes, I still had a great time helping out at the 2006 event. Once again, we set a long table next to the rows of flowers in the field at the UBC Farm. Chef David Hawksworth then of West Restaurant, cooked a delicious 5 course meal, mostly following the “100 mile diet”, and of course paired with local BC wines. The fisherman, cheesemaker, winemaker and UBC Farmers all joined the guests at the table as well, sharing their stories about where the ingredients came from and how they were produced. It was a very educational dining experience! The most fun part for the staff was hanging around the campfire in the field after finishing the cleanup, enjoying the leftover food and wine and hearing the stories of the Californian travelers. Who wouldn’t want to travel around doing this all summer? Happy guests, beautiful farms, fantastic chefs and delicious food and wine… sign me up! So after I graduated with my Biochemistry degree from UBC, I began harrassing Katy to take me on tour for the summer of 2007. I had to put that education to good use! Katy was hesitant since I didn’t have any restaurant/serving experience whatsoever, but with my looong list of prior, highly diverse and random jobs (see the right side bar of this blog) and my persistent emails, I managed to convince her otherwise. In June of 2007, my friends and I gave our notice at “the MacDonald House”, our Vancouver home on 23rd and MacDonald St for the past two and a half years. I packed up my little room and stored some boxes in my friend Colleen’s parent’s basement, then headed off to California to enlist in Outstanding in the Field for the summer. We did 16 events that summer: 14 public events and 2 private. We went all over California, up to Vancouver, across the USA and back from June until October. Relative to our 2008 schedule, this seems like peanuts now, but it was still pretty tiring, a lot of work, but really fun and rewarding. I was hooked. That summer was Katy’s 4th year of traveling across the country, planning the events and managing the tour. It had been hard times, pioneering the “farm dinners”, convincing people that it would be fun and interesting to eat local food in the field. The 2007 tour was the first one that came very close to selling out, as the popularity of local eating and “knowing your farmers” and finally boomed. After that year, Katy was willing to step aside for the upcoming 2008 season and let someone else take the ropes. Being the obsessive organizational enthusiast I am, I was happy to step in. And now here I am! I’ve recovered from our somewhat traumatizing, overambitious 2008 tour of 37 events across the country and am more than satisfied with how everything turned out. It was a very successful and inspiring season. We had over 6,000 guests and greatly increased our “portfolio” of farmers and chefs across the country. I was fortunate to be communcating with some of the best chefs across America: Bill Telepan, Nate Appleman, Paul Virant, Lachlan Patterson, Mary Dumont, and on....

The sky is our limit, that’s for sure. And Jim and I are definitely testing that theory with our 2009 schedule planning.

I’ll save repeating myself and direct you to the Outstanding in the Field website and blog. Jim and I work on the blog together while we’re on tour. We’re a pretty good team: he’s full of ideas and I articulate them well. We polish off each entry together and post it for our readers. We have almost 20,000 people on our mailing list and a pretty broad “fanbase”, essentially all over the world. It’s exciting to think of all of the people reading our stories! Also be sure to take a look at our Dinner Site History Map, which shows most of everywhere I (we)’ve been the past couple of years with the dinners. It also includes the sites of the dinners that date back to 1999, which I of course didn’t participate in.

As I implied earlier, I have signed up for OITF Season 2009. We’re working out the details right now: a 60+ dinner tour? Maybe. We’re not sure how the current economic situation is going to influence us at this point. But we’re ready for more adventure and getting more people out to the farm.

Check out these photos to give you a taste...