A MOM-AND-POP AFFAIR--The Tasting Room (NY PRESS)

Between 10 and 11 every morning, chef Colin Alevras heads to the local Greenmarket to pick out that day's ingredients. But first he drops off his three-year-old son Lincoln at the neighborhood nursery school. Then, with bursting bags in hand, he heads back to the Tasting Room, the tiny East Village restaurant that he and his wife, Renee, built with their own hands six years ago. Renee is usually there by then, paying bills, fielding reservations and generally managing things, all with their newborn baby, Beatrice, strapped to her chest in a harness.

In the notoriously high-pressure restaurant business, couples working together are the exception—the mom-and-pop restaurant model is an old one, but a hard one to follow. Yet Renee and Colin Alevras have managed to carve out a life that includes both a thriving restaurant and a growing family. "Not everybody is prepared to work with their spouse," says Colin, a tall man in his mid-30s with a shaved head, wire-rimmed glasses and the air of a slightly goofy teenager. "Working with your spouse creates new joys and new pressures. It brings grievances, petty and otherwise, to the forefront." He holds his daughter Beatrice in his arms and rocks her back and forth. "But we really love doing this. It's a life. Our jobs aren't separate from our lives. This is it. This is what we do."

"You lose your ability to do anything else," says Renee, a small woman, also in her mid-30s. "This is all we talk about." She looks at Beatrice, who's staring at the ceiling fan. "Actually, now that we have kids, we do have something else to talk about. I am that person now, the one who's always talking about her kids."

The two met at cooking school in 1993, while washing dishes in the pantry. Renee was 23 and Colin was 21. Renee had graduated from Columbia a year earlier with a bachelor's degree in architecture. Colin came to cooking school by way of construction work, a year studying photography and a year at one of "the last real hippie schools," as he calls it, traveling by school bus and studying environmental education.

After working at several restaurants in New York, the couple flew to Paris "to go see what people were doing over there," Colin says. They spent several weeks traveling and eating before ending up as apprentices at Arpege, which had just received its third Michelin star.

"That whole trip was also an experiment in cohabitation," says Colin. "If we could spend four months in a country where we didn't speak the language, didn't know anyone else and didn't kill each other, we knew we had a chance."

Soon after, the couple returned to the United States and got married. They knew that they eventually wanted to open a restaurant, so they started to plan. Rene moved into management so that she could run the front of the house and the business side. Colin studied to become a sommelier, and her worked at Daniel as the cellar master and as a private chef to a UN ambassador, which taught him "how to please people." In the fall of 1999, they opened the Tasting Room.

"We had nothing to lose," says Renee. "No money, no apartment, no kids. Now the stakes have gotten much higher."

The restaurant sits near the corner of 1st St. and 1st Ave., across from a playground where their young son plays with his preschool classmates. The seating area is fronted with glass, and the interior walls are made from red brick. Crumpled pencil drawings of Irish landscapes hang on walls above sleek-yet-simple chairs and tables, enough to seat 25 people. The restaurant, including the basement kitchen and the ceiling wine loft, measures just 750 square feet.

"It's hard to escape in a restaurant so small," says Colin, "You can only lock yourself in the bathroom for so long." And yet the diminutive scale of the restaurant is what gives him the freedom to change his menu daily, depending on his mood and what's available at the Greenmarket. On a recent night, the menu included honey-cap mushroom soup with raw goat-milk cheese, scallions and popcorn; and Montauk scorpion fish with green zebra tomatoes, leeks, crosnes and Rocambole garlic.

The intimate nature of the space also allows Renee to shower their guests with personal attention. "Our guests know us," she says. "They become our friends."

The best part of running your own restaurant? "We can do what we want, when we want to," says Renee. "We're closed four weeks a year, and we're open only five nights a week. When we first opened, we were open six nights a week. Then we cut back to five. That's how I got pregnant," she says with a laugh.

"I could just lock the door, if I wanted, and stop," says Colin. "It's a bizarre comfort. I could just make it stop."

Renee looks surprised, and then laughs. "That's so funny," she says. "Because I think it's the exact opposite; because we run it, we can't quit."

Colin shrugs. "I'm the apocalyptic one."

"I think what makes it work," he says, "is that we have separate areas of expertise—there's a clear division of labor."

"But because we've both cooked and worked the floor, we have empathy for one another" says Renee.

Colin smiles and passes the baby. Beatrice is hungry, and so Renee grabs a shawl, throws it over her shoulder and commences to nurse.

The Tasting Room72 E. 1st St. (betw. 1st & 2nd Aves.)212-358-7831

FRESH FOOD CHEAP--How the Bronx is eating well. (NY PRESS)

Every Thursday afternoon, in a small community garden in the South Bronx, long-time local residents and recently transplanted bohemian types gather together to fill their bags with vegetables. They pack them with leeks, French radishes, green tomatoes, acorn squash, Savoy cabbage and a bevy of other autumnal items, all organic and many with dirt still clinging to their roots and leaves. Everyone stops to greet one another, share news of their families and discuss the proposed new Yankee Stadium and what it will do to their neighborhood. Kids run through the garden chasing the resident rabbit, and both Spanish and English echo through the group. They're here to pick up their weekly share of vegetables from their CSA, supplied by Zaid Kurdieh of Norwich Meadows Farm in Norwich, New York.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture—an alternative model of food distribution that has started to gain popularity all across the United States. The term is used to describe both the movement and the individual organizations from which one gets his food. In the CSA model, a small group of people work directly with a local farmer to get fresh organic produce throughout the growing season. Members pay an up-front fee in the fall, giving the farmer a guaranteed market and the necessary start-up capital (which he or she usually needs to borrow) to buy seeds and make repairs. In return, the members receive a weekly share of freshly picked, locally grown, organic produce throughout the harvest season at a significantly reduced price compared with a supermarket or even a farmer's market. The CSA model cuts the element of financial risk for the small-scale farmer and makes farm-fresh organic produce accessible to a greater percentage of people by cutting out the costs of marketing and long-distance transportation.

"CSA is a good way to bring fresh, local and usually organic produce into a neighborhood that otherwise wouldn't have access at a reasonable price," says Paula Lukats, the CSA manager at Just Food, an organization that works to equalize access to healthy food in New York City.

The CSA in the South Bronx, sponsored by Friends of Brook Park, Just Food and For a Better Bronx, works to do just that. "Our members are mixed income and multi-ethnic," says the young, bespectacled Molly Culver, the AmeriCorps/VISTA–sponsored coordinator of the CSA. Members of the CSA pay their fees on a sliding scale, she explains, and have the option of paying in installments or using food stamps.

"In the Bronx, all our vegetables are covered in plastic," says member Anita Antonetty as she flips her dreadlocks over her shoulder. "The CSA is great, because every week I get fresh vegetables and it's not expensive."

"I really like the quality of the food, how fresh it is, how good it tastes and its high nutritional content," say Marian Feinberg, a long-time local activist, former health-care professional and CSA member. She shakes her head indignantly. "It's so important to have access to better-quality food. Look at the amount of processed food on the shelves. It all contributes to obesity, diabetes and other illnesses."

She joined a CSA when she was first diagnosed with cancer. "I wanted to eat healthy, I wanted to eat vegetables and I wanted to eat organic. But affordability was a big issue." She motions at the garden and the packing crates filled with vegetables. "We're doing our little bit to help keep our families and communities healthy. Food, health and community go together, the same way a family comes together around a holiday table."

This "coming together" is what attracts many people to the CSA. People don't just rush in and out as they might at their local supermarket or bodega; they linger, sitting on logs and chairs, discussing neighborhood politics; they chat about their children while picking out their vegetables. "It brings together different segments of the neighborhood," says Vincent Russo, a shy, twentysomething with a punk-style political patch safety-pinned to his hooded sweatshirt. "I've met lots of new people and it's pleasant to have an excuse to spend time outside, talking." In addition to providing a weekly meeting place for its members, the CSA also sponsors potluck dinners, trips to the farm and the occasional yoga class.

Nutritional education and raising environmental awareness are also large components of the CSA. "For me, it's really about helping people renew their relationship to nature and food," says Culver, the coordinator. The CSA and Just Food often sponsor cooking demonstrations to teach members how to cook unfamiliar produce, and the monthly newsletter often includes recipes and instructions for canning, pickling and freezing leftover produce.

"I like how it gives us a closer connection to our food source," says Russo, "and how it brings us closer to our natural environment. I can go to the store and buy anything at any time. But here, I can only get what's seasonal. And so being a member, you become aware of how far things have to travel to get to you out of season and how much energy that requires."

Most people forget that in order to buy a box of strawberries in January, it must first be trucked in from California or flown in from Chile. With fuel costs rising, buying locally grown produce and supporting the creation of small-scale agriculture in areas like the Northeast has become not only an environmental issue, but also an issue of safety and economics. Many experts worry that if an energy crisis occurs, many highly populated areas will suffer from food shortages, since most food in the United States is grown on large commercial farms far from population centers and must be distributed on trucks and airplanes. The CSA model offers an effective counterapproach.

Approximately 37 CSAs operate in New York City. "Groups are pretty autonomous," says Lukats at Just Food, an organization that has had a hand in starting almost every CSA. "They build on a similar model but adapt to the members' needs and preferences." Each group offers slightly different products at slightly different prices. Some offer only vegetables; others offer fruit, meat, dairy or eggs. Some, like the 6th Street Community Center CSA in the East Village, even offer a winter share made up of organic produce grown in warmer climes.

"We like to support the organic industry worldwide during the off-season," says Annette Averette, one of the coordinators of the 6th Street CSA.

Citlalic Jeffers, the bouncy intern at the 6th Street CSA, offers perhaps the most practical reason to join a CSA: "I went to Whole Foods the other day and bought an organic apple, and I couldn't believe the price; I've never felt so robbed in my entire life." She looks around the room at a young mother picking out carrots with her son and a man with a long beard weighing his bag of apples. "You shouldn't have to be a billionaire to eat a good piece of fruit." n

For more information on joining a CSA in NYC, visit justfood.org/csa.