November 08, 2011 Food & Drink » $20 Dinners

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$20 Dinner with David Sweeney 

The Dynamic Dish founder talks clean and healthy food with the 'true urbanite' in mind

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James Camp

click to enlarge David Sweeney is the chef at the Bakery at Cakes & Ale - James Camp
  • James Camp
  • David Sweeney is the chef at the Bakery at Cakes & Ale

Receipt

Couscous: $1.98
Chickpeas: 76 cents
Crushed tomatoes: $3.29
Garlic: 53 cents
Ginger root: 70 cents
Yellow onion: 97 cents
Lemons: $1.05
Coriander seed: 25 cents
Cumin seed: 36 cents
Fennel seed: 24 cents
Mace: 66 cents
Brown mustard seeds: 19 cents
Paprika: 47 cents
Black pepper: 34 cents
Mustard greens: $3
Peppers: $2
Mint: 50 cents
Puerto Rican GA sweet potato: $1
Cilantro: $1
Tax: 47 cents
Total: $19.76

The balcony of chef David Sweeney's third story loft apartment is overgrown with wisteria. The climbing vine runs across the railing in tangled, beautiful clumps of green and brown and reaches all the way down to the soil below. As a chef who has staked his whole career on simple, good ingredients, on the connection between his food and the soil it comes from, it seems right that he lives in a place quite literally rooted to the earth.

Though he was born in Georgia, Sweeney grew up in Europe, an Army brat following his father to assignments in Germany and Belgium. When his family moved back to the States, though, Sweeney stayed behind, living mostly in Munich and working in fashion for houses such as Gucci and Ralph Lauren. But he says, "I was always having dinner parties, always entertaining, and I dreamt of having my own place." Sweeney says he wasn't interested in becoming a chef: "I didn't go to culinary school. I studied nutrition, but I did that auto-deductively." Instead it was a passion for healthy food, for what he calls "the peace of mind" granted by clean food, that led him to leave fashion and start a small health-conscious catering business that served Munich's thriving film and fashion industries.

Buzzwords like "local," "organic," and "natural" are thrown around so often now it's easy to feel like they mean nothing, especially when you can buy a bag of "Natural Cheetos" that sports a picture of rolling farmlands. But in the midst of that trendy faking, eating with Sweeney is a reminder that those words actually have real, direct meaning. When talking about working with farms to source ingredients for his first restaurant in Atlanta, the much-beloved but now closed Dynamic Dish, and about the pleasure of making clean, healthy food for people as he does now at the Bakery at Cakes & Ale, he pauses and then says, "This is my mission in life."

With that sort of evangelical passion, it should come as no surprise that he's planned a dinner with much more in mind than just the finished dish. "I wanted to put together a local meal with the individual with a bike in mind, to make sure that the true urbanite could do this," he says. He bought a number of his ingredients from Sevananda, dried chickpeas, couscous, spices, and so forth, but the meal's standout ingredients were picked up from the Grant Park Farmers Market and Truly Living Well, an urban farm located in the Old Fourth Ward.

Sweeney has a remarkably balanced manner in the kitchen, neither slow nor hurried as he works his way through peeling sweet potatoes or trimming mustard greens. He sips at a glass of red wine while toasting a Moroccan mixture of spices in a cast iron pan. He has a distaste for flash, for gimmicks and tricky preparations. "Those molecular chefs, they're just reinventing the Dorito," he says. As the aroma floats through the room, he instead talks about his admiration for Rashid Nuri, the founder of Truly Living Well.

Sweeney and Nuri met about five years ago, when Sweeney moved to Atlanta to be closer to his family. Walking through the farm with Nuri, Sweeney says, "I took one bite of the arugula he was growing and immediately had this nostalgic rush of eating a salad in Sardinia." Praising the farm's methods, he says, "The way I think of ingredients for a soup is the way he thinks of the ingredients of his soil. He has this energy and he puts that energy into his food."

The meal that Sweeney cooks is simple, unfussy. Instead of showing off his culinary chops, he's focused on making the techniques accessible for this dinner, so that true urbanites can pull it off. He worries for a moment that not everyone has a coffee mill to grind the spices, but then interjects, "But everyone has a towel and a hammer right? They could just do that, right?"

He casually arranges a vegetable tagine, couscous, and mustard greens in a bowl. He drops a few springs of fresh, potent mint into mugs for a refreshing mint tea and brings the dishes up to the rooftop deck above his loft. It's the opposite of flashy. There's nothing gimmicky on the plate, just as there was nothing tricky about his work in the kitchen. The food, though, is humbling. The soft, savory greens are perfectly balanced by the crunch of mustard seeds. There's an unmistakable warming comfort in the tagine brought on by the intoxicating play of cumin, fennel, coriander and peppers. Even his simple couscous comes alive with the depth of ginger. It's a meal so vibrant with fresh ingredients, you could close your eyes and imagine yourself standing in an idyllic farm far, far from the city. Yet, here it is on a rooftop in the Old Fourth Ward, with the sun setting between skyscrapers and graffitied walls as the MARTA train rattles into the distance.

Next: Three delicious recipes from David Sweeney

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