Issues → September/October 2007 → Feature Stories →

(Tod) Murphy's Law: Buy Local, Eat Local, and Prosper

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(page 3 of 4)

But the Barre operation had problems, and they could be summed up this way: too small. The diner itself had only 60 seats, and the kitchen was considerably smaller than any of the home kitchens you see in a magazine photo shoot. It was a cramped and greasy alcove, with no room for the machinery that might have made it more efficient. So French fries meant a guy cutting potatoes with a knife, which meant high costs, which meant that one day in the summer of 2005, Murphy put a sign on the door saying that he was shutting down for a month. A month turned into a year, and plenty of people thought Murphy was finished.

But it's hard to keep a good idea down. Early last fall, The Farmers Diner reopened, half a mile east of Quechee Gorge on Route 4. It's a different world from downtown Barre, where the diner sat next to an Aubuchon hardware store. Here it's in a rusticated, tourist-cutesy strip mall, complete with a toy locomotive that kids can ride in an endless circle. Whereas there used to be cops at the counter, here you'll more likely find vacationers, which means you can charge a little more. Not a lot -- but a burger might run you $8.50, not $6.50.

It's bigger, too -- there are 120 seats, plus room for 40 more people outside in the summertime. And the kitchen is much roomier. Now there's a machine that can take a sack of Vermont potatoes and turn them into a pile of French fries in just minutes. And that frees the cooks to do other things -- like produce the homemade English muffins that have become the restaurant's new calling card.

Still, says Murphy, the diner remains too small to really make economic sense. What it needs are siblings: two or three more scattered around the state that he can serve from a central commissary kitchen in Quechee. The machine could be making French fries for all of the outlets, and the ad budget could be spread across three rooms full of munching patrons.

And, more to the point, the money that investors have put up to build these diners might come back with some profit attached. Plenty of communities across the state might welcome the idea: a Farmers Diner in Middlebury, in St. Johnsbury, in Bennington.

But of course this is the line of thinking that led to McDonald's. Once upon a time, it was a single restaurant, too, with a small machine to cut French fries. But the more restaurants the company opened, the higher the returns, so it just kept growing. Now the chain's manufacturing plants peel, slice, and freeze two million pounds of spuds a day. If you follow the logic of economies of scale, that's where you end up -- as far from local food as it's possible to be.

Which is why, Murphy says, he's got different ideas for expansion. The business model calls for growth by regions -- "pods," he calls them. Already, he says, investors in the Boston area are keen to open outlets there. Maybe they'd have five or six, served by their own central commissary kitchen. Probably they'd serve some different things: clam rolls, maybe.

In fact, if Murphy's scheme really works, there might be Farmers Diners across the country someday -- each one buying food from farmers in a close radius around the city, creating new opportunities for local farmers, and serving local tastes. You'd get the economies of scale that come from standardization: Murphy can wax poetic about "modular buildout," or about the fact that the walk-in refrigerator at every Crab House restaurant in America is laid in out in exactly the same way, so that managers can move easily from one to the next. But you'd still be local.