Where Do Top Restaurants Get Their Spices?

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Black pepper is one of the most common seasonings, so ubiquitous that “salt and pepper” are almost a given in recipes and provided without question on tables. Yet most Americans don’t actually know what black pepper tastes like. It’s not just a dusty bit of light heat on your tongue; it’s fruity, floral, citrusy, tingly, piquant. 

“The first time I tasted it, it was sort of a revelation,” says Ethan Pikas, the chef and owner of Logan Square’s Cellar Door Provisions restaurant. “And I love black pepper, so it was a match made in heaven.” 

The match was with the Tellicherry black peppercorns from The Reluctant Trading Experiment, a spice retailer based in the Chicago suburbs – and that black pepper is what launched the company.

Scott Eirinberg, The Reluctant Trading Experiment’s founder, was in a different business altogether years ago; he founded the children’s furnishings company The Land of Nod in 1996 and sold it to Crate & Barrel in 2010. He had traveled the world sourcing fabrics and other materials for the brand, meeting a supplier in southern India named Divakar in that work. 

“He started talking to me about spices that grew near his home in Kerala,” a historical center of the spice trade, says Eirinberg of Divakar. “I really didn’t have any background in spices or food, and I was very reluctant – which is how we came up with the name Reluctant Trading – but because he’s a friend of mine and he was very excited about this pepper that was growing near his home, I eventually said, ‘Go ahead, send me some samples.’”

Eirinberg was blown away when he tried the pepper – as were friends, family, and chefs in Chicago to whom he started bringing it. Think about the difference between an exceptional extra virgin olive oil and cheap cooking oil, or between an insipid out-of-season tomato from the grocery store and one fresh from the vine in summer. They may as well be entirely different products.

Eirinberg saw a business opportunity. “Farm to table is obviously a strong movement for restaurants,” he says. “I thought, why can’t we do the same with spices?”

Beyond searching for high-quality sources throughout the world – the “to” of “farm to table” extends further for spices, which grow in tropical climates – Eirinberg says much of the distinction between Reluctant Trading’s spices and more widely available sources lies in how quickly they are shipped and used.

“Spices were brought here by the container-load, often changing hands many times, sitting in warehouses for long periods of time, where spices go stale and lose their aroma,” he says. 

“They won’t go bad, they won’t make you sick if you eat them three years later or five years later. They just won’t have any taste,” he adds.

“When you open a bag, the fragrance is like no other,” emails Lee Wolen, the chef behind restaurants such as Boka and Alla Vita, about Reluctant Trading spices. “It’s something I had never experienced before when we started using them.” 

Wolen uses everything from Reluctant Trading’s cardamom and cumin to salted black peppercorns from Cambodia and sea salt from Iceland. Since 2012, when Eirinberg started selling Divakar’s peppercorns as Reluctant Trading, he has expanded into other spices, coffee, salt, a few spice blends and flavored salts, and aprons, all of which are also available to buy online by regular consumers in addition to restaurants. But he has only added a new product when he feels he has found something worthy.

“We made the decision up front not to try to be a one-stop shop. We wanted to just carry things that we felt were superior to what’s out there,” he says. “Everything we carry has been vetted by chefs.”  

A couple chefs have even partnered with Reluctant Trading to create blends for customers, like a pho soup blend from Los Angeles’ Nguyen Bui and chai, masalas, and curry powder from Portland, Oregon’s Bollywood Theater. That restaurant’s chef, Troy MacLarty, had to change the proportions of his recipes when he started using Reluctant Trading spices, according to Eirinberg, because they were “so much more vibrant and stronger.”

Wolen’s experience has been the same. “You save money by using their product, as in many applications you don’t need to use as much due to the potency and high quality of the spice,” he emails.

Thanks to the robust flavor of Reluctant Trading’s black pepper, it allows Pikas to pare things back and intensify the qualities of the products he highlights in his minimalist, hyper-seasonal cooking at Cellar Door. (He does use other spices from Reluctant Trading as well, including coriander and fennel seeds and green and white peppercorns.) “If I can achieve everything with salt and black pepper instead of augmenting with lots of other spices or whatever it might be, that’s my preference,” he says. “Whatever the product is that I’m cooking, if I can showcase it in as elemental and essential form as possible, then I feel like I’m doing a better job. That’s my goal.”