April 2002

It used to be that when you wanted to hang with chefs, you had to stay up late and know the right bar. But looking around NYC's Union Square farmers' market early on a Saturday morning, it seems as if many chefs aren't staying up so late anymore. Sure, Bill Telepan from JUdson Grill has a brand new baby girl, and Peter Hoffman from Savoy has been coming here for years. But then there's Sara Jenkins from Soho's Il Buco and the crew from Blue Hill picking out beets. And what of that gaggle of clog-footed, white-coated escapees from a kitchen discussing the finer points of bintjes and la rattes, as if those were rock bands and not potatoes?

Asking around, it seems as if New York is not alone in having an unusually high number of pros foraging for produce. Matt Overdevest, a forager and cook at L'Etoile in Madison, Wisconsin, tells me it's become so competitive at his local farmers' market that he practically needs to camp out to beat other restaurants' chefs to the goods; across the country, Martin Bournhonesque, who manages San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market, can rattle off a roll-call of market-going chefs two pages long.
  Now it's true that going to market to buy food is not an entirely original idea. "I grew up in Italy going to the market; it's what I'm used to doing," says Il Buco's Jenkins. She's one of many, like Cesare Casella from Beppe or Cyril Reynaud from Fleur de Sel in NYC, who can't break themselves of the habit. "In Italy, in France, people go to the market not just to buy food," Julian Niccolini of Four Seasons explains. "Even in my town in Tuscany, every Thursday the entire village gathered at the market. It's a social event."
  But in the States, is doesn't work that way. Ask Joel Patraker, assistant director of New York City's Greenmarket, who has tried everything to hook chefs on local growers' foods in his 18 years there, from starting a company that delivered farm-fresh produce to restaurant kitchens to schlepping the stuff himself door-to-door. "I used to show up asking, 'Hey, have you tried these great tomatoes yet?'"
  Most chefs these days do their shopping by phone, fax and e-mail, calling in orders to large purveyors who can deliver everything from paper doilies to potatoes overnight. Why would a chef want to add a morning trek to the farmers' market to an already long and physically taxing day, when perfectly good produce is just a dial away?

in the market
"We have great purveyors here," admits Craig Stoll at San Francisco's Delfina, "but it just isn't the same. I mean, this stuff at the market comes out of the ground that morning and it's on the plate that night." For all the advances in transportation, there's still nothing fresher than picking up produce the same morning it was picked, and these market-going chefs taste the difference.
  That difference might seem obvious if you've grown up on a farm or eating locally-grown fresh food. But many haven't been that lucky ("I grew up on Spaghetti-Os," said San Franciscan Annie Gingrass, who buys even the flowers for her 12-seat Desiree from the farmers' market), or, if they have, it's hard to stay connected in a big city. "You can get lost in the kitchen not knowing what season it is," Joseph Manzare at Globe in San Francisco finds. "Going to the market keeps me in tune with the seasons. You can taste it in the produce, like favas: First they're starchy, then a little sweeter, and then wow - they are so good."
  That "wow" is an addictive experience, a reason to return every week. "When I worked for Alain Chapel in France," JUdson Grill's Telepan says, "he would go himself to the market and hand-pick food for the restaurant. That was an amazing influence. It inspired me to think about what was in season and go from there." This approach is completely contrary to the American ideal in which consistency is often valued above all, but the benefits far outweigh the detractions for these chefs. At the market, they can let the produce decide the evening's menu; if they've discovered something mind-bendingly good, the chance is there to show it off. "It makes for an incredible connection," Stoll says of his daily-changing menu. "What you serve is entirely determined by what's available. If it rained and they couldn't pick it, it won't be on the menu." To cook by the market means to be able to think on your feet and be creative with what's at hand, even if there's not much. "In Italy, there's only so many things available in each region," Globe's Manzare points out. "You're forced to come up with all different ways to serve them."
  Some people might find that sort of limitation hard to handle, but these chefs find it inspiring, part of an interconnectedness they're searching for. "If you go two or three times a week, it's exciting to see the radishes come in, then watch as they get bigger, and then hard and woody; or watch the change in the basil into the fall," Jenkins says. And chefs hear about these changes from the farmers. "I almost always learn something there, because we're talking about production," says Hoffman at Savoy. "Like how something was grown, why it's tasting better now than it was last week, why something is really delicious, how the season affects it. Why potatoes sometimes get holes in the center and what you do about it."
  This sort of knowledge can't be taught: It needs to be seen, smelled, tasted in order to really get it. That's one of the reasons why Chez Panisse recently dissolved the forager position they are often credited with inventing. "It was time to reconnect with things," said Alan Tangren, once forager, now pastry chef for CP. "The chefs were becoming very dependent on the forager for thinking about what was in season or what it means to be ripe." Without regular visits to the market, it becomes easier to forget the nuances of flavor across the seasons, even something unforgettable like the taste of a tomato at its true peak.
  And this is also when the 'culture' part of agriculture is lost. "Traveling through villages and vineyards in the Old World, I've come to realize what a wonderful thing it is winemakers do," says Odessa Piper, chef/owner of L'Etoile and wife of wine importer Terry Theise. "Not unlike dairy farmers making cheese, grape farmers are taking grapes to the next octave, which is wine." She and these other chefs are doing as the winemakers she refers to do - not changing an ingredient's key, but lifting it into a new range, with all its inherent flavor, plus an added resonance drawn from the place and the people who raised it.

on the plate
"These kids who get out of school, they've learned all this fancy stuff that they want to try out," says Manzare. But the cooking in kitchens like his is entirely different. "I try to teach them that if you've got these great vegetables, the best thing you can do is to leave them alone. I mean, if you've got petrale sole grilled on a fire, a little lemon, lemon thyme, olive oil, some of Andy's [Griffin, of Mariquita Farm] potatoes...you're in heaven."
  It used to be chefs were judged like skaters, on the finesse of their sautés and tournes, the dazzle of their presentations; Chez Panisse was a lonely exception in that it could serve simple food and attract a paying crowd. Now, Globe sells out dinners centered on heirloom radicchio, NY's Craft presents every component on its own plate, and Delfina has people lined up out the door for their simple roast chicken with a side of broccoli.
  The most basic reason for this change is that these chefs spend a lot of time and effort procuring these ingredients, and they don't want to cover them with a blanket of hollandaise. As Stoll puts it, "Look: I woke up early, drove down to Marin and back, I'm destroying my Jetta, and I hand-picked this stuff myself for you."
  Of course, that effort wouldn't matter if Delfina's diners didn't appreciate it, but judging from the accolades it (and every restaurant mentioned here) receives, diners do. "We realized that we didn't need to make it showy to make it impressive," Stoll says. "Our customers are at the farmers' market; they see us; they know what's available."
  Perhaps more importantly, chefs' attitudes have changed, too. "I think there's a consciousness among cooks that the best stuff comes from the ground, not from mastery of technique or smartness," says Patty Unterman, who has been feeding San Franciscans on market produce at Hayes Street Grill for 23 years. That change recalls the movement in winemaking in the States, with ambitious wine producers beginning to characterize themselves more as "winegrowers," those who work to preserve the flavor of the grape, not manipulate it. It's a trend that sommeliers in these restaurants applaud. "I search for wines that aren't very oaked, that aren't too lush," says Beth von Benz at JUdson Grill. "Bill's food has very little sauce; there's a purity of flavor I try to match with wines that have a similar purity of flavor." At Craft in NY's Gramercy Park, Matthew MacCartney keeps the balance by taking a cue from chef de cuisine Marco Canora. "I think of the wine list by ingredient, like Marco does with the food," he explains. "One ingredient, one grape, and I try to find expressions of those ingredients that are as clear as possible."
  But there's often more to it than taste. Look at the lists at any of these restaurants and notice how they're filled with quirky, small-production wines. These sommeliers hunt for wines just as the chefs hunt for produce, searching for the unusual varieties, the small, unheralded farms, the wineries that focus, like these farmers, on quality rather than quantity. "We like to buy from producers who farm on a small scale," Hoffman says about the food he buys for Savoy. "I look at wine in the same way. We don't have any negociants on the list." Wines from a negociant might be just as good as the rest of the wines on his list, but it's the philosophy that counts for Hoffman. The goal is to make the wine list more than a list of drinks, rendering it instead a statement of beliefs and a part of the restaurant's identity.

on the farm
"It used to be that there were two or three standard vegetables, each grown to full-size maturity," remembers Pat Kuleto, whose San Francisco restaurants Jardinière, Boulevard and the new Martini House in Napa are marked by American chefs who have a particularly strong devotion to local, seasonal produce. "The biggest difference Alice [Waters] made was in getting people to grow baby greens." That may be an understatement, but it underscores what Waters did for the marketplace. Her quest for the best local foodstuffs unearthed a wealth of produce that California did not even know it had or that it could learn to produce. When she opened Chez Panisse in 1971, there wasn't a farmers' market in Berkeley; even 20 years after that, Tangren remembers having trouble filling a request for mâche for some visiting French chefs.
  Now chefs go to the market to keep up with what's new. "I'm religious about going, even if I'm not buying," says Arnold Wong, who runs the kitchens of bacar and eos in San Francisco. "Purveyors tend to be large companies, and they're dealing with even larger farms. So some produce will never make it through to you. If a farmer has only six cases of apples, well, it doesn't matter how good they are; a big purveyor isn't going to deal with them."
  What's changed is not only that these chefs have given these small production farmers' goods a stage, but that the farmers grew themselves a niche. As Nora Pouillon from Nora's in DC points out, "The only way for small family farms to compete is to find a niche: Tomatoes at fifty cents a pound doesn't work." So when Chez Panisse wanted mâche, someone responded and planted it; when L'Etoile's Piper put crosnes on the menu, other farmers began to look at those crunchy little tubers as a viable crop. Now both can often be found at markets across the country.
  The farmers have also realized that there is a demand for produce that takes more effort than conventional crops. "For me, there's an enticing challenge in growing a product that is especially useful to chefs," says Bournhonesque, who for a time ran a small farm. "Or to find unconventional ways to bring interesting things to them - like arugula: Postrio wanted just baby leaves; Zuni wanted the small to midsize leaves off fully grown plants for their nuttiness and fuller flavor." It takes a lot more work to be so accommodating, but these farms are small enough that they can cater to a chef's exact wish. One of Stoll's favorite farmers even dropped off a seed catalogue last January and asked him what he wanted to try, and in Madison, L'Etoile's pork producer experimented with the animals' feed until Piper was pleased with the result. The market has become an ever-expanding library of flavors for these chefs, where new foods, or new ways to enjoy traditional foods, like hyacinth bulbs or the side-shoots of radicchio, are constantly being introduced. The chefs are actively involved in the quest, smuggling in seeds or paging through old texts looking for forgotten crops that might be rejuvenated. As Patraker, who has mounted a box for questions about unusual foods at the Greenmarket, says, "If there's enough interest, and if you can grow it, then someone will buy it."

in the world
But the relationship that has been forged between chefs and farmers goes far beyond finances. What motivates people like the Four Seasons' Niccolini to make the hour-long trip from his home in Westchester to the Union Square Greenmarket every Saturday morning is, at the base of it all, that he knows the farmers, and they know him. "It's nice to support people who are growing things we'd like to eat," he says. "The issue of where food comes from is very important. Let's face it; these people don't do it just for the money. They do it because they believe in what they are doing, and so I have great trust in them. Going to the market gives me tremendous hope."
  "Going to the market makes people more aware," Wong says. "I think we've all kind of realized that we have to rely on each other. It's easy for a large restaurant to cop out and just use a major purveyor. But if we don't support the farmers, they won't be there, and they struggle just as we do."
  This awareness of one another is beginning to extend beyond the immediate community of the market as well. In late 2001, Larry Bane, the director of operations for Jardinière, started what he calls "a convivium of progressive restaurant folk."
  "I was thinking that Jardinière makes purchases of about five million a year. With that, we can have some impact," he says. "But then I was thinking, if there were twenty restaurants that wanted organically grown beans, well, there would be a substantial dent in the commercial green bean industry and an influx in the organic. Or imagine if we all said that we don't want this stuff delivered to the restaurant in styrofoam." This group of restaurateurs gets together to talk about topics like sustainable fishing, agribusiness, composting and recycling for the restaurant industry, and even things as basic as environmentally-friendly cleaning products. Their concern is not just for the food, but for an environment that everyone wants to live in; it involves seeing the restaurant as a microcosm of the larger ecological picture.
  This sensibility extends to the wine list, too. "For me, the most important thing to know is what the winegrowers are doing," says Eugenio Jardim, wine director for Jardinière. "I want to support those who are being responsible, because we all have a responsibility to this planet." This realization has kept the focus broader than on the quality of the food, taking in personal relationships, too. "We grew up with the growers, and we have similar goals," Chez Panisse's Tangren says, "so they've been able to transition with us. They may not be at an end point, like organic [production], but they are going in the right direction: Those are the ones we want to support."
  Perhaps Globe's Manzare puts it best: "Hey, I get to talk to the farmers," he says. "They're the only people who love this as much as I do."
  Which is as good a reason as any to get out and forage for yourself at the local farmers' market.