A small mollusk native to local restaurants keeps showing up in unexpected places: a hospital cafeteria, a food pantry, a community garden, a diner, beside racks of drying sea salt and bags of oyster seed.

The ‘Snail of Approval,’ Slow Food East End’s seal for “good, clean and fair food for all,” once clung mainly to restaurant doors and a handful of farms and vineyards. Now the emblem is inching its way through the region’s entire food chain.

The reach of the East End’s long-established Slow Food chapter has widened.

“We gave out 12 last year, and we’re probably going to hit 15 this year,” said Ralph Reinertsen, a board member and chair of the Snail of Approval committee.

That’s a sharp spike for a group that, by SFEE chair Maria McBride’s count, had only awarded “about 30 over almost 20 years.

“We’ve made it a priority to accelerate and expand the Snail program to include more than just eateries and farms.”

Those nominated must excel in at least two of the SFEE’s criteria: sourcing, environmental impact, cultural connection, community involvement, staff support, and/or business values.

Slow Food was born in 1986 at a protest against a McDonald’s opening at the foot of Rome’s Spanish Steps. It spread across Europe, and by the mid-1990s chapters were taking root on every continent. The organization has more than 1,500 chapters worldwide — full of farmers, fishermen, chefs, winemakers, artisans and consumers resisting homogenization.

‘Not a Michelin star’

The pandemic put a long pause on ceremonies and award events. With time to reflect, the SFEE board returned to the field with a wider lens. The acceleration isn’t about lowering standards but about discovering them in new places, the board members said.

“Slow Food is not a Michelin star,” McBride said. “It’s about their business practices. It’s the holistic approach: environmentally aware, sustainable.”

Sustaining comprehensive slow food practices can be time-consuming, labor-intensive and expensive.

“It used to be … the high-end restaurants that were getting it,” Reinertsen said. “Now we’re seeing restaurants that you can go to on a more regular basis.”

He looks for fairness in the workplace, saying that kitchens where line cooks have stuck around “10, 12, 15 years only means one thing: they’re being treated correctly.”

He said he’s watched the East End’s food identity evolve over the past decade.

“The symbiotic relationship between the farms and the restaurants are getting stronger and stronger,” he said. The same goes for local wine: “You go back 15 years … you would be hard put to find restaurants using East End wines. Now, if they don’t serve North Fork wines, people won’t go back.”

Reinertsen hailed C.A.S.T. North Fork’s food pantry, which received a Snail last fall.

“They allow the person to, in essence, food shop,” he said. “Most food pantries give the food to the person. C.A.S.T. allows you to walk up and down their pantry aisles and pick the food that you want to serve your family.”

The same thinking informed the 2023 Snail of Approval for Ecological Culture Initiative’s community garden in Hampton Bays — a volunteer-run plot where every harvest goes to a local pantry and neighbors drop off kitchen scraps for what McBride described as a “sensational” compost program.

It’s why farms and vineyards that treat their soil like a bank account for the next generation are prized by the organization.

“We do try to recognize people that have good soil practices above all,” McBride said.

‘Totally off the radar’

The most unexpected expansion of the program came last summer, when Peconic Bay Medical Center (PBMC) in Riverhead became the first hospital in the nation to receive a Snail of Approval.

Reinertsen had hip surgery there during the pandemic. He phoned his wife, raving about the food. She thought it was the anesthesia talking. But four months later, when he returned to fix his other hip, his wife got a taste for herself and was sold.

For McBride and the rest of the SFEE board, it was a lightbulb moment.

“It was totally off the radar,” she said. “But … talk about where it makes the most impact, where food is medicine.”

Reinertsen investigated, interviewed executive chef Chris Singlemann, traced the food sourcing, talked to staff, ate a lot of the food and then pushed the Snail into unchartered territory.

“Eight or nine months after all the publicity,” Reinertsen said, “I get a phone call from [Stony Brook] Southampton Hospital and the food service person says to me, ‘We’re as good as Peconic.’” He went over to investigate, and in April, the South Fork hospital was awarded a Snail of its own.

When Marissa Drago, owner of Main Road Biscuit Co. in Jamesport, learned she’d been nominated, she was thrilled, but braced for Reinertsen’s visit — even though he’s one of her regulars.

“He does a pretty arduous interview,” she said.

The former New York City caterer (pictured with her staff in the headline photo above) is about to celebrate her café’s ninth anniversary. She said she “feels really blessed that we have such great access” to East End farms and seafood. “My oyster farmer is a good friend, and my preferred farm is not even two miles away.”

‘Within 15 minutes’

Reinertsen’s interviews are friendly but forensic.

“We touch upon the things that are important to us, while also allowing the person to tell us what’s important to them,” he said. “You can tell within 15 minutes of the interview the pride the person feels in their entity.”

He remembered interviewing Gabriella Macari of Macari Vineyards.

“You could just feel what she was saying — ‘This is my baby. This is something special.’ She said ‘I would never treat customers or staff a way I wouldn’t want to be treated.’ We gave [a Snail] to First & South, where they say ‘I want to serve food that I’m proud of, that I would want to eat myself at a restaurant.’”

His longest interview was Sagaponack Farm Distillery.

“That lasted three hours,” he said.

He walked the sixth-generation potato farm, talked with the owner about the industry’s collapse on Long Island and listened to how the family pivoted to distilling.

Then he got a tasting, he said, “that ruined me for any other bourbon.”

Reinertsen is no pushover, though, his colleagues and interview subjects said. He has turned down nominees who misrepresented themselves.

“I also interview customers. I interview staff, and this is a small town. I know the North Fork. So I had to turn them down because we have certain standards and they didn’t meet them.”

Slow Food East End puts a lot of stock in their fieldwork, McBride said.  

“The one truly common thread [of award winners] is the pride they take in their work and the efforts that went into building the business this way.”

Local waters are the next frontier.

“We have some awards coming up for oyster farmers,” McBride said.

Reinertsen is booking site visits.

“We’re going to give Peconic Gold Oysters the Snail,” he said, noting that the award spawned two new nominations for other oyster companies.

Some of the expansion is just catching up to what the East End already is, but some of it is new territory. When Reinertsen submitted PBMC’s application to Slow Food USA, there wasn’t yet “a box to check for hospital food service,” he said.

National staff texted him to confirm: is this real?

It is now.

The Snail keeps moving in directions that would have seemed surprising just a few years ago.

There’s Disset Chocolate in Cutchogue, where owner Ursula Sala-Illa, who goes by the name Ursula XVII, aims to mold a snail-shaped chocolate confection for her award celebration. Cutchogue Diner also landed a Snail.

“I believe it’s the wave of the future,” Reinertsen said. “I believe that people are not going to settle. As more and more stories come out about this, people are going to be saying to the hospitals and to the nursing homes and to even the schools, ‘Why can’t you do it?’”

There’s even a food truck in Montauk angling for a Snail.

“I said to him, ‘I will come,’” Reinertsen said, “’but only in the off season.’”