Foraging goes back to the Stone Age when humans scrounged for edible plants in the wild. Today, in the restaurant world, foraging means hunting for and gathering the freshest naturally grown food to serve to one’s customers.

In Europe, restaurants have been purchasing foraged food for years, but in the U.S. the trend is much more recent. Most fine New York City restaurants now have someone dedicated to sourcing the best ingredients for the chef’s cuisine.

In Westerly, The Bridge, on the Pawcatuck River, is one of the only restaurants in the region to have a forager on staff with the exception of the Ocean House in Watch Hill — a much larger establishment.

Paul Servideo is The Bridge’s official forager. His job is to scour Connecticut and Rhode Island for locally sourced food of all kinds — meat, fish, milk and vegetables — creating solid relationships with local purveyors, farmers and ranchers.

Servideo grew up in Westerly and graduated from Westerly High School. He started working at The Bridge as a server when it opened its doors in 2010.

Dave Parr, co-owner of The Bridge, explains that the restaurant’s mission from the beginning was to serve the freshest farm-to-table food at affordable prices, despite opening soon after the 2008 recession.

“When we opened, the economy was still pretty bad,” Parr says, “and I had this idea that I wanted to have the power to be a value-based restaurant but still use high-quality ingredients. (For example), we buy the best chickens we can and don’t fry them — we roast them. We make everything from scratch, including all our own salad dressings. We try to get food into bodies as healthfully as we can while sourcing as locally as humanly possible.”

Parr points out that The Bridge has a varied menu that changes five times a year based on seasonal availability of certain items.

“You can come in and order a nitrate-free all beef hotdog or a 16-ounce New York strip. So we get the $6 customer and the $25 customer,” he says.

After Servideo had worked for a few years at the restaurant, Parr asked him to take on the job of forager.

“I knew he’d studied to be a butcher and what he was up to,” Parr says. “It was almost my responsibility to hire him because he’s a smart guy and we believe in the same thing, but I don’t have the time to go through this learning process myself while (running) a restaurant. Paul brings in all this wonderful food for our executive chef Mike Nagle to use.” 

Foraging curriculum

Servideo came to this career in a seemingly roundabout way. After graduating in 2006 from St. Anselm College in New Hampshire with a degree in philosophy, he decided he wanted to do something to make a difference and found that his philosophy degree taught him how to think about the bigger picture.

He says he became very inspired when he read Thomas Jefferson’s views on an agrarian society while in school.

“The way the country feeds itself has a huge impact on the economy as a whole,” he says. “I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in that sphere. I worked in Boston for a spell in the international trade business where I really noticed how much room we have to improve the way we spend our money. When I was here at the Bridge as a waiter, I was impressed by the efforts they took to feed people really well.”

Servideo spent a year learning livestock farming at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, New York, where he studied sustainable farming practices and the impact those practices can have on the local community and the land itself. He went on to train as a butcher at Fleishers Craft Butchery in Brooklyn, New York, where he learned to break down whole animals.

“When we buy a pig, we bring in the whole pig and butcher it in our kitchen,” Parr explains. “Paul does it all.” 

Partnering with local farmers

“Small producers are family-run farms using their own compost, and the land they’re cultivating comes through the final product in a way you don’t see happening in a larger, commercial operation,” Servideo says.

“We’ve had a lot of success partnering with local farmers who are responsible stewards of the land,” he adds. “Each season we’re discovering what they have available that grew right here — it’s an incredible array of food. Whether it’s a vegetable or a grass fed (beef), the flavor will shine though the final product.”

This includes pasture-raised pork from Davis Farm in Pawcatuck and grass-fed Angus beef from JW Beef in Stonington that Servideo says “is just stunning, flavorful, tender.”

“Something I’ve been really excited about is the organic tomatoes from Hillandale Farm (in Westerly),” he says. “The farmers do a wonderful job raising these heirloom tomatoes. They taste amazing and we’re always excited to showcase them on our menu.”

Both men say one of their favorite vendors is Terra Firma Farm, a pasture-based livestock and poultry farm on two properties in Stonington and North Stonington, which is opening a creamery operation in the area.

“We buy her eggs and believe in her practice,” Servideo says of Terra Firma’s director, Brie Casadei. “She’s just one example of a (responsible) local steward of the land.”

He adds, “Our goal is to raise the standards of our customers and the town as a whole in hopes that they start demanding this level of quality of food everywhere else they eat — that we (create) a trickle-down effect.”