The Entrepreneur Behind New York’s Latest Health Food Craze

Marco Canora has long been a chef’s chef, turning out seemingly simple dishes that require years of training to prepare consistently and well. He’s received wide-ranging accolades for his restaurants, including Hearth in New York City’s East Village. Yet today Canora is achieving new fame for a food that takes almost no skill to make, uses no fancy ingredients, and is completely unglamorous: bone broth.

Bone broth is exactly what it sounds like: a pile of animal bones, covered in water; some vegetable scraps; and often a bit of cider vinegar — all boiled until the bones crumble. But despite — or because of — its simplicity, bone broth is having a moment. It’s long been popular among some athletes and the paleo crowd, but now, thanks in large part to Canora, it’s going mainstream.

As a chef, Canora has been sipping bone broth for years, which may have been the only healthy part of a diet that until recently consisted largely of bread, butter, cigarettes, and alcohol. Like many chefs, he describes his early years in the business as “a boatload of stress and no sleep and no exercise.”

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It remains to be seen whether Canora’s business — premium prices and labor-intensive ingredients included — can really be scaled beyond the hipster, wealthy, food-obsessed enclave of downtown Manhattan. But Canora has already started preparing to market his broth to a larger audience, even trademarking some slogans (“Rethink your hot beverage” and “The world’s first comfort food.”)

That’s probably a savvy move. After my visit to Brodo, I stopped by Everyman Espresso, then a Starbucks, and finally a Panera looking for a place to sit and work. Inside Panera, I was greeted by a two-foot-high sign that said, “Introducing Broth Bowls.”

If Canora wants to remain at the forefront of his new craze, he’ll have to move fast.

The Huffington Post