by Steven Doyle
Each day you will find Tom “Spiceman” Spicer trudging through his 11,000 square foot garden or making deliveries to his wholesale restaurant clientele. Spicer maintains an urban garden in the same complex as Jimmy’s Food Store and next to Urbano Café at Bryan and Fitzhugh in Dallas.
On his tiny plot of land Spicer grows cash crops that are highly desirable to the restaurant and bar trade, but he does a bit of retail business out of his store front where he usually offers a unique selection of mushrooms, sometimes foraged by the Spiceman himself, and a selection of greens.
On the afternoon we visited Spicer he had a burgeoning crop of arugula, mints, basils, radishes and an assortment of micro greens that chefs are fond of decorating your plate with.
Spicer gave us the “bottle of wine tour”. That’s where you bring in a crisp and cold bottle of Italian wine from Jimmy’s and you walk the grounds tasting unusual plants such as his radish pods. These siliques grow when the radishes go past their growing cycle and after flowering. The seeds and pods are tender and crunchy, with a slight spiciness to them and make a terrific addition to a salad.
The night before our visit to the garden we had experienced Spicers arugula at Central 214. Chef Graham Dodds enjoys working with his farmer buddy and have extensive history together. You will often find Spicers garden mixes on Dodd’s menu, including those mushrooms in various forms.
You can buy an assortment of the mushrooms in what Spicer calls dime bags. These are a pound selection of the mushrooms the shop offers that make for excellent soups, stir fry and other accompaniments for your dinner plate. Choose from at least ten different varieties depending on the season, always fresh and plump.
A visit to Spicer’s always nets some great take home goodies, and often some fantastic stories. On a very good day he will pull out his guitar and play a few tunes.
Today Spiceman’s is offering arugula, nasturtium buds, flowers and leaves, lemon basil, sweet basil, salad Burnett, assortments (chocolate, orange and spear), radishes, red vein sorrel, green sorrel, malabar spinach, rat tail radish pods, Mexican mint marigold, kafir lime leaves and more.
Spiceman’s also is offering an assortment of legumes today including purple hull, Crowder, lima, zipper creams, pintos, creamers and black eyes. You can also still find fiddleheads in the showcase for $9 a pound, and domestic white truffles for $20 a pound.
Visit Spiceman’s FM 1410, a large slice of Americana, at 1410 N. Fitzhugh in Dallas.
