In small-town Massachusetts, immigrant farmers whose crops once thrived in the tropical region of Southeast Asia continue to grow their native produce for their own community. Along the power corridor of the nation’s capital, a fashionable restaurant delights legislators, statesmen, and locals alike with sophisticated renderings of southeast-Asian cuisine. In an unlikely but inspired partnership between fine dining and refugee farmers, these two worlds have come together for mutual benefit—in a project that may ultimately broaden and elevate America’s taste for international flavor.   

Renowned Chef Jeff Tunks of DC Coast and its sister restaurant, TenPenh, is assisting in spearheading a movement to help immigrant Cambodian farmers reach a far larger market for their exotic produce. Tunks, along with his Chef de Cuisine of TenPenh, Cliff Wharton, purchase all of the produce for TenPenh from a collective of Cambodian farmers in western Massachusetts; future plans may also bring the farmers’ produce to the menu of DC Coast.  Between the two restaurants, which each serve as many as 500 meals five days a week, Tunks has dramatically increased the farmers’ volume of sales, with orders of up to twenty-five pounds of Chinese long beans, for example, per week. 

The vegetables, shipped hundreds of miles south to Washington, are necessarily more costly. But for Tunks, whose TenPenh menu is inspired by his own culinary adventures in Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore, the access to such specialty varieties as wax melon, fuzzy squash, aquatic herb and red shen choy is simply too tempting an opportunity. As for Wharton, he has also influenced the menu by adding upscale versions of dishes coming from his native country, Philippines. Many of the Filipino ingredients are quite similar to the produce of Southeast Asia.  TenPenh’s popular favorites currently incorporate such delicacies as lemongrass, snow pea, Asian lettuce, and Thai Basil; the mind—and the taste buds!—reel to imagine what Tunks and his award-winning team will conjure up with the exotic vegetables newly available by this special arrangement. 

The Cambodian farmers are fairly recent immigrants to this country, most having fled the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They continued to farm, even in the vastly different climate of New England, and what they grow is that which they crave and remember from their homeland. What began as little more than subsistence crops for the close-knit immigrant communities are now bringing modest profits at local farmers markets. In turn, this income from the surplus crops is sent back to Cambodia, where the dollar stretches remarkably in the daunting effort to rebuild villages and lives destroyed over the past decades. 

The next step, wide-scale distribution of the exotic vegetables to urban centers, is the vision of former Undersecretary of Agriculture, August Schumacher, Jr., along with Michael Batterberry, Editor-in-Chief of Food Arts Magazine, and Chefs Jeff Tunks and Cliff Wharton. For years, Schumacher has been championing the rights and access of immigrant farmers to USDA training and loan programs, as well as to market share, nurturing fledgling operations and encouraging cooperative growth. Over a recent informal lunch at TenPenh, Schumacher, Batterberry, and Tunks brainstormed the mutual benefits of bringing the produce directly to the high-end restaurant market. In turn, Tunks shared those ideas with Wharton in order for these ingredients to be incorporated in his spring menu. Wharton will then share his ideas with colleagues at an upcoming workshop in New York, organized by Batterberry and Schumacher. What has begun with the creativity and leadership of a single Washington restaurant is poised to become a fashionable, humanitarian trend on a national scale. 

Such social responsibility comes naturally to Jeff Tunks. Despite the demands of running two top restaurants – DC Coast was #1 in Washington on Gourmet magazine’s list of “America’s Best Restaurants of 2000;” TenPenh was among Esquire magazine's “Best New Restaurants of 2000” – Tunks, Wharton, and the owners of TenPenh, DC Coast, Ceiba, and Acadiana restaurants are active leaders in the Washington community, involved with numerous charitable, civic, and industry organizations.  Now they have found a way to support a distant community whose native cuisine inspires TenPenh – their own latest success.

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