“Every day can be enriched by doing something slow – making pasta from scratch one night, seductively squeezing your own juice from fresh fruit, lingering over a glass of wine and a slice of cheese – even deciding to eat lunch sitting down instead of standing up.”

As you may have guessed from the above quote, Slow Food isn’t about Dutch oven cuisine or crock pots (not that these culinary techniques wouldn’t qualify). “Slow Food” is more a philosophy than a cuisine – one that is defined in part by how food is prepared, and how it should be enjoyed. It’s also the name of an international movement, founded in Italy in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, that now numbers over 80,000 members worldwide.

The Slow Food Movement is at the heart of our culinary mission at the Brick Oven Bistro. It underscores our belief that part of a good and healthy life consists of sitting down and breaking bread with friends and family – in other words, slowing down at mealtime.

It’s also about the consumption of wholesome foods, wines, etc., that are produced as close as possible to where we live. Fruits and vegetables are allowed to ripen on the vine before being harvested. Breads are made from scratch. Sea salt is raked by hand. Slow Food is about local, hand-made ingredients, traditional cooking methods and the producers and chefs who follow this creed. In a recent New York Times Magazine article, the Slow Food Movement was aptly described as “…a defiant determination to preserve unprocessed, time-intensive food from being wiped off the culinary map.”

Vive la revolucion!