Tariffs Are Coming For The Menu

Eater

2 days ago

Sophina Uong's New Orleans restaurant, Mister Mao, is the kind of third culture-chaos cooking party spot where strawberry chaat shares the menu with 'Spanish octopussy,' and cocktails are served with candy cigarettes. It is a purposeful celebration of a variety of influences, which naturally requires both local and international ingredients to come to life. So when President Donald Trump announced his brash, nonsensical tariff plan — if you can even call it that — in March, Uong realized her whole menu may have to change.
She began stocking up on ingredients like asafetida, black salt, and chilies from both India and Mexico, she says. But spices go stale, and some fresh ingredients are becoming more difficult to source. 'We have suggested to our bar manager switching acids, or developing a menu less citrus heavy — limes are $74 a case right now and steadily climbing,' she says. Fish sauce, too, has jumped from $2.99 to $8 a bottle. 'We have dropped avocados for now, and will just be watching like everyone else [to see] what happens.'
'What happens?' is a lingering question, as every day, Trump seems to change his mind about what tariffs are in effect and when. Here's a relatively updated list of the tariffs that may or may not have been invented by ChatGPT, but the numbers matter less than the overall intention — whether it's by 10 percent or 27 percent, Trump means to apply reciprocal tariffs widely, affecting everything from cars to fast fashion.
Even the most locavore restaurants rely on ingredients and supplies from overseas, whether that's European wine, Brazilian coffee, or takeout boxes manufactured in China. And Trump's tariffs, whether they've been implemented or not, are having a profound effect on the industry. Some restaurateurs suddenly can't afford ingredients that have been the backbone of their menus, while others must switch to domestic alternatives that require complete menu revamps.
As Top Chef has drilled into the collective consciousness, the mark of a good chef is the ability to adapt. Which one must do when suppliers text you and say everything is going to cost 20 percent more than it did the day before, as recently happened for chef Nick Wong of the newly opened Agnes and Sherman in Houston. Ingredients like rice flour, tofu, and spice mixes — crucial for the Asian-American diner concept — are suddenly far more expensive than when they planned out the business.
Through one lens, the tariffs (or threat thereof) are having the intended effect of encouraging chefs to buy local. Wong says he's begun working with a local tofu purveyor, Banyan, which allows them to save some costs. Chef Apurva Panchal, the head chef at ROOH in Palo Alto, has also found himself leaning more into the cross-cultural California-ness of the menu. For instance, a cauliflower steak that used to use Indian red pumpkin is now made with local butternut squash. It's an 'opportunity for innovation,' he says.
But locality and seasonality can only go so far, even at restaurants that aren't immediately affected by tariffs. Chef Omer Artun describes Meyhouse, also in Palo Alto, as a Mediterranean restaurant that uses lots of fresh produce and garlic and herbs for seasoning — all cheap and plentiful in the California summer. But 'as we go into the wintertime, a lot of the tomatoes and so forth come from Mexico,' or from hothouses in Canada, he says. Currently, most goods from Mexico and Canada are subject to a 25 percent tariff, various court rulings notwithstanding.
The tariffs disproportionately affect restaurants that rely on foreign ingredients, which are often cuisines that American diners expect to pay less for — it's easier to eat the cost of a $25 increase in spices when you're charging $300 a meal for a menu in a European tradition, rather than a counter-service Mexican restaurant. But chefs are getting savvy with their buying. Uong has been adding spice mixtures to oil to extend their shelf lives and drying fresh chiles for future use. Wong says his team has reached out to other local restaurants about buying nitrile gloves in bulk so they can take advantage of discounts.
But even if you spend all summer canning American tomatoes to avoid the 17 percent tariff on those from Mexico, there is the sticking point that some ingredients just aren't grown in the U.S., nor do they have a reasonable substitute. There is no domestic cinnamon production to tap into, no American turmeric or coffee or cardamom farm big enough to supplant international suppliers. 'I think it's going to be a reckoning,' says Wong. He's trying to keep Agnes and Sherman affordable like the diners it's modeled after, but at a certain point, diners are going to have to accept the cost of flavor, or risk their favorite places going under. 'Why is my fried rice so expensive? Food is politics,' says Wong. 'You don't get to exist in a vacuum and say you didn't want this. It's gonna affect you anyway.'
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