Tampa chef starts food magazine with local focus

Chef Ferrell Alvarez runs into it all the time at his Café Dufrain restaurant on Harbor Island: Customers who don't know or care how much of their meal is made with local ingredients.

They usually have never heard of Pasture Prime Farm in Summerfield, the source of his restaurant's pork and beef. They don't know that the greens come from the Urban Oasis vertical grow farm and Sweetwater Organic Farm in Tampa. Or that the chickens the restaurant uses are raised without the hormones used by large-scale industrial farmers

To educate Tampa Bay-area foodies and the dining public, Alvarez started The Local Dirt, a magazine he hopes to use to spread the gospel of locally grown food.

The free quarterly publication, which has a circulation of 20,000 copies for its inaugural issue, will appear in groceries, health food stores and other shops starting today.

Alvarez shares publishing duties with Ty Rodriguez, general manager of Café Dufrain, and Cathy Hume, co-owner at Urban Oasis. None had prior publishing experience, so they collaborated with Fourthdoor Creative Group, producers of local publications, including Blu, South Tampa Magazine and Vue.

The trio originally sought to bring a version of the award-winning Edible food magazines to Tampa, with something similar to Edible Sarasota and Edible Orlando. But they lacked the $95,000 in startup money to buy into the franchise.

Instead, Alvarez and Rodriguez went on a fundraising spree, holding a benefit at The Independent restaurant and bar in Tampa that raised $12,000. They also took on the task of selling ads and funneling ideas for stories to Fourthdoor.

"Ty and I spent every day for eight months hustling ads every morning from 8 to 10, before going in and working our usual 12-hour shifts at the restaurant," Alvarez says.

The first issue, which features a locally raised curly-haired Mangalitsa hog on the cover, includes a story about the Suncoast Food Alliance, which delivers produce from area farms to local restaurants.

There also is a list of farmer's markets, a list of restaurants that use organic and sustainable ingredients, and an interview with Greg Baker, award-winning chef at The Refinery restaurant in Seminole Heights.

The Local Dirt also gives a nod to pioneering restaurateur Bern Laxer, who in the 1950s began growing his own ingredients for use at Bern's Steak House in South Tampa.

The magazine joins a national trend of chefs and food celebrities publishing their own magazines, including Lucky Peach, an advertisement-free publication by Chef David Chang of Momofuku in New York City.

The goal wasn't for the magazine to become a vanity project, or an ad for Café Dufrain or Urban Oasis, Alvarez says.

"It's not a marketing scheme," he says. "It's what we practice in our everyday lives. I think it's going to snowball."

More and more people are focusing on improving their diets in order to enrich their health and lifestyle, Hume says. The magazine wants to fuel that momentum.

"I'm excited to be a source of information for anyone who — for whatever reason — wants to eat fresh and buy local," she writes in the magazine.