In French, roux is a base used in cooking: one part butter, one part flour.

Ryn Adkins and Rohan Thakore named their locally-sourced dining business Roux because they view food as the base for culture and community.

Adkins and Thakore are both fifth-year industrial design students. Roux is “a pop-up dining experience cross-pollinating food and design,” as defined by Adkins and Thakore, who is a former staff writer for The Daily Orange.

The two travel to different cities, hosting dining events with menus and art that are tied together under a central theme, and serving up each location’s local fare — a fresh take on catering.

 

Nothing’s off the menu for Roux. In Vermont, they’ve served heritage pig pork buns and smokehouse brisket tacos with rhubarb salsa and blueberry hot sauce. In Utica, they’ve served pear chutney, popcorn and 6-year-old homemade prosciutto. On Euclid Avenue, they’ve served beer-battered fried pickles, hop-brined chicken and stout cake.

While the millennial model of entrepreneurship, heralded by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Wall Street investors, is rampant on college campuses, Adkins and Thakore aren’t confining Roux to this mold, they said.

They aren’t in it for fortune and fame; their business objective is to be authentic, using food as a medium to tell stories about cities and people, especially local farmers.

This semester, Roux has further increased its presence in Syracuse and at SU. They occupied the pop-up space in Marshall Square Mall last week and have been collaborating on a couple events with local landlord Ben Tupper.

Tupper held a contest for his tenants: whoever paid all of their rent on time would win a free dinner catered by Roux. Choosing between several themes, the winning residents selected a beer-themed dinner to accompany their Halloween party.

During the dinner, Thakore and Adkins worked in tandem, making the meal in the tenants’ tiny kitchen, reading each other without much verbal communication in deciding who did which tasks. Thakore dipped pickles in the beer batter they had prepared ahead of time, while Adkins got the IPA cheese potato gratin ready. In sync and relaxed, the duo joked about their Halloween plans.

 

Starting in December, Roux is having a coordinated event with Tupper called the “Winter Meltdown.” On the corner of Euclid and Ackerman, they will be serving different types of homemade chili free to students, including a super hot chili made from Tupper’s homegrown ghost peppers.

“What they’re doing, these food events, and what I’m doing, making fun events for my tenants, could work together,” Tupper said of his relationship with the Roux founders.

While Roux is built on strong relationships with community members, it’s also built on the friendship between Adkins and Thakore. The two were first brought together by the TV in their freshman dorm lounge playing “Mad Men” on Sunday nights.

Their friendship deepened after connecting through their love of food, and now the two are more than business partners — they’re best friends and roommates. Some of their favorite shared activities include roasting a chicken they picked up from Greyrock Farm in Cazenovia, New York or watching an episode of “Chef’s Table” on Netflix.

While neither of them are professional chefs, Adkins and Thakore were both taught at a young age to value food. Adkins grew up with a cross-cultural palate that blended French and Southern-style cooking. Two-hour treks to Whole Foods and feast-like dinners were hallmarks in her large family. Thakore was raised on healthy Indian dishes that his mother, a dietician, made from scratch. He grew up watching cooking shows, dreaming of becoming a chef.

The summer of 2014, Roux had their first major event, called Salt City, which told the story of the salt industry in Syracuse. They served a seven-course tasting menu, and every dish had an element of salt, and many of their ingredients were locally sourced from Syracuse. They served about 25 people, mainly close mentors and professors who supported their idea.

It was through their first event that they immersed themselves in Syracuse’s local food scene, checking out various suppliers — Italian markets, Asian markets, farmers’ markets — and building relationships with store owners and farmers.

One of Roux’s goals is to use food to help push forward the revamping process of cities they’ve had events in like Syracuse and Utica, and make people become enthusiastic about their hometowns.

In the future, both Thakore and Adkins said they want to continue working with food and design. Ultimately, Thakore said he would like to become a chef and work on a farm, while Adkins hopes to continue working to increase food access.

Said Adkins: “Everyone touches food, everyone loves food, and if you can kind of bring those two cultures together — the farming industry and the city’s past — you can bridge those two worlds and get people excited about where they come from and what the future of that city can be.”

Published on November 8, 2015 at 10:43 pm

Contact Alex: aerdekia@syr.edu