If you are a fan of the Food Network's Diners, Drive-Ins and Dive with host Guy Fieri, you may have caught the Reno, Nevada episode in 2010 featuring Nancy Horn and her amazing DISH Cafe. Nancy is a former art teacher who opened her own restaurant in 2002 after operating a catering/personal chefing business for two years. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to ask Nancy about the experience and about Guy!

Hi Nancy! One thing I gathered from the DD&D spot was that the DISH Cafe is most likely on many people's "favorite restaurant" list. Would you say that is accurate, do you have a core group of customers who come to the DISH Cafe on a regular basis?

Nancy: Yes, we have customers who've been coming in since we opened almost 10 years ago! We know them by name, we know their order preferences, we know how their families are doing. It's kind of an around-the-kitchen-table kind of place. People say it's so homey in here they feel they should wash their own dishes!

You should absolutely take customers up on that dishwashing offer! Free labor is great! Can you tell me a little bit about the selection and preparation process you went through for Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives? 
 
A request went out to the Food and Drink Writer at the Reno Gazette-Journal, asking for possible candidates for the show. J. Wright is the writer. He suggested a group of places, and we were in that first group. The researchers called everyone and interviewed the owners, looking for from-scratch cooking with fresh ingredients. Most places were eliminated because they don't use fresh ingredients, don't prepare from scratch. They went through two groups of selections, about 40 restaurants in all. It took about a year for them to narrow it down to three places in Reno, two places in Truckee (Calif.). 

Clearly, you have a leg up on your local competition with your fresh approach. Was that part of your mission from the very beginning, to use fresh ingredients and work from scratch, or was it something you realized along the way?

From-scratch food is not a luxury, it is a necessity. You know what ingredients are inside each bite, and you can taste the love that went into the preparation. I would say baking from scratch is important. You can really taste the difference in cakes, cookies, frosting, scones, pies, etc. if you make them from scratch. Box mixes taste off, chemical, too sweet and not enough like the flavor of the food, like blueberries. Prepackaged or pre-made food tastes that way. It is so easy to make a vinaigrette; salad dressings in a bottle are just not good tasting and can ruin nice produce.

How do you balance the fresh, homemade, from-scratch mission with economical constraints? I know in my area that local, organic ingredients can cost more than others.

Balancing the cost of local food, organics, humane meat is not as much an economic decision as a moral one. I cannot really see using battery cage eggs, factory-farmed meats and strawberries in December and feel good about it. Our food costs are indeed higher, but because of our philosophy we are busy in the cafe, and turn away business daily on the catering side. We are blessed with business, and choose to forgo some profit to do the right thing. Because of that, we have had more opportunity than others, like being on Food Network!

I would like to think that I'd be able to tell the difference between the taste of "scratch" and pre-processed but my palate is amateur. What are some foods that you would tell home cooks and bakers that the effort of scratch is absolutely worth it, and others where pre-processed is perfectly suitable?

I would say good short cuts are: organic stock in a box, it’s pretty good, especially Swanson's. For pie crust, Pillsbury is nice and for locally made bread there are so many nice bakeries nationwide now! Whole Foods has great take-and-bake pizza and the pepperoni is humane. Ask your local bakery or Trader Joe's about buying pizza crust. For whole-cooked chicken, Whole Foods or local coops sell humane chickens ready to eat. Many local restaurants like Dish will sell you their dressing, frozen scones, soups, etc. so you can take them home and make a from-scratch meal using great ingredients. That is a great place to start.


Regarding you episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, what specific things did the producers for the segment ask of you before filming?

To prepare for the Food Network team to come we spoke on the phone with the show's researchers and producers many, many times, going though each recipe step by step. We narrowed it down to three dishes. The producer emailed a manual of sorts to help us prepare for them. Everything had to be very clean (not a problem for us), give them the latest copy of our health inspection (100/100), give them recipes and methods for each of the three dishes, and pictures of the interior and exterior, head shots of me and ingredient lists. Before they got here, we had to prepare to make each dish three times, plus extra ingredients for close-up camera shots. We had to be ready for them to be here for two days of shooting with a day in between, have all the food prepped, DISH shined and ready, etc. We had to have our regulars ready to come in both days to be in the shoot. We had to close for some of the time they were here to film in silence, and be able to cook with Guy. We had to write up a recipe for the Food Network site and submit it to them. Once they were done, we spent a lot of time on the telephone going over recipes, ingredients and copy.

Honestly, that's way more prep than I ever imagined!

Yes, and after filming we would get calls from the producer or the researchers frequently with more questions all throughout the year. They would tell us the tentative production schedule and that we were still in the running. It was so nerve-wracking! At one point we thought we were shooting in November, 2009, then we found out the shoot was in January, 2010. So things would change and evolve.

When I think of Diners, Drive-In and Dives it conjures up greasy spoons, unhealthy foods & over-indulgence. DISH Cafe does not appear to fit that mold. How do you categorize yourself?

DISH does NOT fit the mold at all. We are like your mama’s kitchen… only better. Sorry, Mom! I think we are SO into handmade, farm-to-table fresh ingredients that Food Network could not help themselves. We are in a category all our own, not really a diner, for sure not a dive, not a drive-in.

I really think our farm-to-table fresh ingredients makes us unique. When I opened the cafe almost 10 years ago, I used farm-fresh eggs and some local produce. It has grown to a large amount of produce and 30-40 dozen local eggs per week. No one in Reno can beat us on ingredients! We use lots of organic, humanely raised antibiotic-free meats too.

I often wonder when I watch Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives if Guy is actually paying attention or if he is just waiting to talk or taste the food. Can you comment on if he was genuinely interested in the food-making process?

Guy is a true professional. He was interested in our ingredients, tasted the soup of the day and loved it, and he tried to capture the essence of DISH while he was here. I loved working with his crew, they are the best people and the most helpful in getting us ready for our national spot. We were amazed at how hardworking everyone is. They were here for two days, a total of 23 hours of working and shooting. Two teams were here shooting at the same time, with five places to visit and coordinating between Reno and Truckee. I admire what Guy has done.

Well Nancy, we all admire you, thank you so much for sharing your story with us!

If you would like to learn more about Nancy Horn and DISH Cafe, please visit her blog, Dishing Up. There you will be treated to an inside peek at running a restaurant and some delicious recipes!

DISH Cafe & Catering
855 Mill St
Reno, NV 89502
(775) 348-8264 

 

Photos courtesy of Nancy Horn.