It was just another day at the office for Siller. The 32-year old is an avid yogi and has various sources of income: There's fermenting cabbage for Cobblestone Krautery, working with area schools on farm-education and gardening programs, keeping up his website, yosoybean.com, leading walks, and this - foraging for wild ingredients that he can sell to Philadelphia restaurants.
The Farm and Fisherman, Pumpkin, and Lacroix are his current restaurant clients, and all that his one-man operation can handle. The personal service he provides is something "you don't see often," said Pumpkin chef and owner Ian Moroney. "It makes me feel like everything in the world is not just business."
His clients also like what he's proffering: Unique ingredients, plucked from nearby earth just hours before. "A lot of times we are pulling stuff out of his box and putting it right on the plate because it's so amazing," said Moroney. He recalled with ease the stinging nettles, sorrel, and rare radish pods that Siller brought him recently. "We like to challenge ourselves and learn something new," Moroney said.
His natural life habits keep him lean, but strong. His fingernails are dirty; swarming mosquitoes don't bother him, and his mobile toolshed of a truck, where he is, sort of by accident, growing a potted tomato plant, looks like a display at a science museum.
Siller dedicates at least one day of his week exclusively to restaurant foraging, although he's constantly spotting things worth pulling over for. His eyes can't help but scan the terrain. Where others see messy lawns, unkempt parks, and unseemly grasses growing through sidewalk cracks, he sees digestible opportunities. Weed isn't a bad word to him; they are as alive and important as the neat rows of vegetables growing in his school gardens.
