Green tea noodles. (Zhang Wei/China Daily)
It's about 2:30 pm and Brandon Trowbridge is startled by my arrival to interview him. He's totally forgotten about the appointment after a busy morning, and has just started his lunch.
Trowbridge is the chief chef and menu designer at Tribe Organic, a hot spot among Beijing foodies for its healthy and organic fare, which he helped two Chinese women launch in 2014.
He also runs a Southern US-styled restaurant, NOLA, which he helped the owners establish in 2009, one year after he arrived in Beijing.
Born in 1982 in the Mississippi Delta city of New Orleans, the 32-year-old American came to Beijing at age 25 to work in a French hotel as chef de cuisine, after working in fine-dining restaurants in California after his college days.
Prior to that, he'd cooked in small Mexican restaurants during high school to help pay for his college tuition, starting as a vegetable cleaner.
That range of experience helped him see many different ways to cook, and Tribe Organic is quite a demo of such flexibility.
The two-story restaurant has a semi-open kitchen, square tables, handmade chairs and signature terrazzo-tile floors, all ready to serve almost 100 diners in a sitting. The operation runs with a large "family" of about 35 employees.
It has the feel of a crowded and rather noisy cafe: The founders' original idea was to open an organic take-away coffee shop. But Trowbridge's background as a chef prompted a shift away from sandwiches, cakes and drinks to designing quite a large menu of healthy organic food.
"They told me they wanted organic food, but just 'organic food' doesn't make healthy food," Trowbridge says, insisting that being chemical-free isn't enough by itself to make the food healthy.
His menu－salads, main courses, staples and drinks－tries to make everything as nutrient-dense as possible, without empty calories (calories from solid fats or added sugars), such as white flour or sugar, because everything put into the mouth should give the body something that it can use, Trowbridge adds.
In English and Chinese, the menu has items marked that are vegan, vegetarian or gluten-free, and lays out the health benefits, such as healing, high in fiber, antioxidants, and probiotic.
It is also very international, reflecting Trowbridge's life as he travels, eats out, and learns from friends from different countries.
It's a Western-style restaurant, and many of its staff members speak English. The chef recently developed Tribe's own version of xiaomian, a traditional numbingly hot noodle soup from Chongqing, inspired by a friend from the area.
