Beauty and Nourishment: Foraged Eatery
Chris became a licensed forager when he opened the restaurant. “You wanna be sustainable about it,” he says after explaining how delicate plants should only be harvested in small amounts. He’s witnessed a surge in interest in foraging since 2020, but worries that nascent foragers who don’t use good practices can disrupt the ecosystem. He shares a few anecdotal stories he’s witnessed, poison mushrooms in the same basket with edible mushrooms, entire patches of ramps and ferns cleared, “The ignorance on foraging,” he says, shaking his head. “I understand that people want to get back into foraging, but you just gotta understand, you can’t do that.”
Foraging in the U.S. has deep historical roots in indigenous and black cultures. Before they were dispossessed of their lands, indigenous tribes would forage for food and medicine. Slave narratives reference the use of foraging to supplement the often inadequate meals served by plantation owners. Today, the Mid-Atlantic has many black historians and authors who bridge those histories to contemporary and sustainable foraging practices. Foraging has long been an act of perseverance and food sovereignty.
Chef Chris has lived and foraged for the past 20 years along the east coast, Florida, South Carolina, Massachusetts, New York, and Maryland. Maryland made a home for him, as if by invitation.
“No,” he says when I ask if anyone showed him his favorite foraging locations in Maryland. “The first spot I went to ended up being a huge spot for fiddlehead ferns,” he shares. “The second spot I picked, it was so random,” he says, recalling his disbelief, “I went and started walking around and there were all these morels.”
It wasn’t just the abundant forests of Maryland that enticed Chef Chris to plant roots in Baltimore. Foraged Eatery happened serendipitously, through some chance and a lot of ambition. The original location in Hampden was offered to him by a restaurant investor for $200k.
“I talked to a bunch of people, and nobody wanted to invest,” he shares of his initial quest for capital. The original offer came down from $200k to $150k, to a minimum down payment, and finally into a manageable repayment plan after Chef Chris could not secure investment or come up with upfront capital. “Our first month open, we lost ten grand,” he shares.
“It was a struuugggle those first two years,” he says, over-enunciating the word struggle. “In year two, I had overdrawn the bank account a few hundred dollars; credit cards were maxed out. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have shit.”
He cashed in his loose change jar to bring the bank account back into the green. “Everybody says the first three years of a restaurant are the hardest,” he says, hinting toward a resolve, but year three was 2020. State-mandated Covid-19 restrictions shut down the restaurant for months, but Chef Chris, like many other resilient restaurant owners, pivoted and made it work. “It still blows my mind, like how did I do this?” he says, baffled. Foraged moved from Hampden to a larger location in 2021. In 2023 Chef Chris was named a semi-finalist for James Beard’s Best Chef in the Mid-Atlantic.
