The United States of Arugula (42 page)

“
MY REACQUAINTANCE WITH THE POST HOUSE COULD NOT HAVE COME AT A MORE PRO
pitious moment: just after a trip to northern California, where I was confronted with such ghastly combinations as sweetbreads with orange sections and red snapper with blueberries,” wrote Bryan Miller in the summer of 1988, his fifth as the
New York Times
restaurant critic. “From Kennedy Airport, I went straight to this eight-year-old East Side steakhouse craving meat and potatoes.”

The owners of the Post House were so pleased with Miller’s review that, for several years afterward, they bought full-page ads in the paper that simply reprinted the review, complete with its indictment of California cuisine run amok. By the late eighties, the backlash was in effect: combining fruits with meats and sweets with savories was fine if you had the palate and training of a Wolfgang Puck or a Jonathan Waxman, but in the hands of lesser imitators, the results were nasty. “What happened was, the craziness occurred—every chef in America tried to get thirty-eight ingredients in one dish,” says Michael McCarty. “Modern American California cuisine backfired: raspberries on everything, kiwi on everything.”

Indeed, the phrase “California cuisine,” like “nouvelle cuisine” before it, came to be so misunderstood that its original practitioners recoiled from it, unwilling to take the fall for some Delaware chef’s kiwi-halibut kebabs or Thai-spiced lamb chops adorned with squeeze-bottle squiggles of boysen-berry coulis. The kiwi fruit in particular, a brown, fuzzy, egg-shaped oddity that, when cut open, revealed a jewel-green, food-stylist-ready interior, became a symbol of culinary tackiness, the mark of a clueless chef or restaurateur trying too hard to be chic.
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But at the beginning of the eighties, food people exulted in the possibilities that California represented. If that state could produce its own cuisine, why couldn’t all the other regions of the United States? Larry Forgione, the chef at the River Café in Brooklyn from 1979 to 1983, considered this question more carefully than most. Until his arrival, the River Café, housed in a barge permanently docked along the East River, was a big-ticket tourist place that traded on its views of the water and lower Manhattan, with an afterthought menu devoted to infernal continental cuisine (“from a continent yet unknown,” Craig Claiborne cracked). But the restaurant’s owner, Michael “Buzzy” O’Keeffe, was feeling frisky at the end of the seventies and was eager to try something new. Soon, the duck à l’orange and chateaubriand were consigned to the dustbin, replaced, Gael Greene later recalled in
New York
magazine, with “a menu [that] mimicked a Rand Mc-Nally road map: Peconic bay scallops, Smithfield ham, morel mushrooms
and wild huckleberries and farmed buffalo from Michigan, fresh shrimp from Key West, Belon oysters and periwinkles from Maine.”

A member of the Culinary Institute of America’s class of 1974 (the first class to go through the CIA’s entire program on its new Hyde Park campus), Forgione landed his first big job at Regine’s, the New York branch of the Eurotrash Paris nightclub, which opened in 1976. Michel Guérard, the inventor of
cuisine minceur
, was the official consultant on the menu at Regine’s, but he liked Forgione and allowed him plenty of leeway in procuring his supplies. Gentle, bearded, and soft-spoken, Forgione seemed more like a scholar than a chef, and his scholarly bent compelled him to start studying old cookbooks and foodways to learn about the American culinary past.

“I had worked at the Connaught in London before Regine’s,” he says, “and, while their menu was mostly French, they always had these British traditional foods as specials, as trolley items—steak and kidney pudding, boiled silverside, chicken curry. It was a very nice thing for me to learn, how the past and the future worked in tandem. The other thing that happened was that the chef got a shipment of
poulets de Bresse
, the famous chickens, and it was almost ceremonial. I remember tasting one of the chickens and thinking, ‘Geez, this tastes just like chickens from my grandmother’s farm!’ All of a sudden, it clicked: that America has the great resources to produce quality ingredients. In Europe, I saw the difference: that farmers grew for chefs, and the everyday shoppers, the consumers, got to use the same products. Whereas in America, it was reversed: everybody was growing for the consumer, and the chef was stuck using the same products. I realized that that had to change. We had to get back to dealing with farmers.”

While at Regine’s, Forgione began building up a network of small-time farmers that he worked with himself, with no middlemen involved. He found a quail farmer in Griggstown, New Jersey, and a fellow in eastern Long Island who was willing to sell Forgione wild ducks killed on his hunting preserve. Forgione took up mycology, the study of fungi, and, through mycological circles, found a woman who educated him not only about wild mushrooms but about “wild edible plants like purslane and lamb’s-quarters, which is a variety of wild spinach.”

When O’Keeffe hired him to take over the kitchen of the River Café in 1979, Forgione, aware that he would be performing on a bigger stage, sought the imprimatur of James Beard. “I needed as much help as I could get, and I thought, ‘Who’s the greatest resource on American cooking?’ It was obvious who it was,” he says. Forgione, still relatively unknown, courted Beard by sending goodie baskets to the master’s West Twelfth Street town house filled with whatever indigenous ingredients he’d gotten his hands on: fresh morel mushrooms, wild tarragon, an antique strain of apple that the commercial growers weren’t bothering with anymore.

It worked. “He gave me a call, and came over to the restaurant and had dinner,” says Forgione. “From there, we became great friends, and I spent a great deal of time talking to him and being pointed in the right direction on things. Like, if you talked to him about butter, he could tell you about butter from Wisconsin and butter from Illinois and so on, and, because of his incredible recall, he could tell you exactly what each one of them tasted like. Julia Child, when you talked to her, would say, ‘Well, just buy butter from Brittany, it’s the best butter in the world.’ At the time, it probably was. But Jim was always focusing on America.”

Forgione’s greatest triumph in sourcing an ingredient, though, came entirely through his own industriousness. The flavor of that
poulet de Bresse
he’d eaten in London stayed with him, reminding him of the flavorful, undeniably
chickeny-tasting
chickens he’d eaten on his Italian grandmother’s farm in Port Jefferson, an old shipbuilding village on the north shore of Long Island. The potency of the farmstead taste memory shouldn’t be discounted; two great chefs who would come along in Forgione’s wake, David Bouley and Emeril Lagasse, also grew up with farms in their extended families, alerting them early on to flavor ideals that kids raised on supermarket foods didn’t know about.

Foremost in Forgione’s memory, after the way his grandmother’s chickens tasted, was how they left the coop each morning to roam a yard “where they could go out and scratch and peck for different insects and so on,” he says. “I just wanted chickens raised that way.” Finding such chickens proved a challenge, though, in the age of Tyson and Perdue, massive, high-volume
operations whose pen-raised chickens, like San Fernando Valley porn, offered consistency and enormous breasts but little in the way of lasting satisfaction.

But one day in 1980, the piano player at the River Café brought in a basket of multicolored, Easter-hued eggs that piqued Forgione’s interest. The piano player explained that the eggs came from a neighbor of his in Warwick, New York, a town just above the north Jersey border, who was raising Araucana chickens, an uncommon breed known for laying eggs with blue and green shells. “I figured if this guy’s crazy enough to raise Araucana chickens for Easter eggs, he might be willing to do this chicken project for me,” Forgione says.

The Araucana-chicken man turned out to be microbiologist and hobby farmer Paul Kaiser. Kaiser gamely agreed to take on the project, working with Forgione on trying out different mixes of breeds until they came up with the perfect roasting chicken. “I made a commitment with Paul that we would buy a certain amount of chickens from him every week—whether good, bad, or indifferent, we would take them,” Forgione says. “And in the beginning, they were terrible—tough, with concave breasts, and the meat not distributed properly. But if they were no good, we’d use them to make soup, or staff meals, or make a terrine out of ’em. The thing that made it successful for us was that there was a great deal of trust between the person buying the ingredients and the person that was taking the chance on the ingredient.”

After nearly a year of experimentation, Forgione and Kaiser found poultry nirvana in a large bird that was a cross between the Rhode Island Red and Plymouth Rock breeds, with ample breasts and a thick layer of subcutaneous fat that gushed flavor when melted by heat. Kaiser fed these birds an all-natural blend of grains he mixed himself, and, true to Forgione’s memory of his grandmother’s little farm, he allowed the chickens to wander his property, scratching and pecking for whatever they might find.

Forgione puzzled over what to call his special chickens on his menu, because, he says, “Back then, ‘natural’ didn’t really mean anything, ‘farm-fresh’ didn’t mean anything, and ‘farm-raised’ didn’t mean anything, because all of the big producers were using that terminology as well.” In his historical
research on chickens, though, he’d become enchanted with a description of a wild native American breed known as the prairie chicken. “It was in, like,
The History of Chicken
, or some ridiculous book like that,” he says. “It said in the description that the prairie chicken always stayed around the edges of a forest, for the protection and for the grasslands. It said that the chicken ‘freely ranged’ from this section to that section. So I just said, ‘Okay, well, how about “free-range”?’”

The Kaiser-Forgione chickens were received so orgiastically by the River Café’s customers and the New York food press that “free-range chicken” entered the gourmet lexicon—though, contrary to popular belief, it is not an official designation of the United States Department of Agriculture. When Murray’s Chickens, an all-natural poultry company, inquired as to what the protocol was for using the term “free-range” in its labeling, their head of sales, Steve Gold, reported to Forgione, “The government told us it’s whatever Larry Forgione says it is.”

FORGIONE WAS THE EIGHTIES
’ most celebrated proponent of American ingredients, but even the French were getting in on the act. In the new decade, upstart chefs like Jean-Louis Palladin of Jean-Louis in Washington, D.C., and Gilbert Le Coze of Le Bernardin in New York were fervent in their desire to refute what the New York restaurateur Drew Nieporent calls “the everything’s-better-in-France bullshit.” Nieporent, who in 1985 opened his first restaurant, Montrachet, in response to his experiences working at such hidebound places as La Reserve, remembers dealing with a pervasive mentality of “the butter’s better in France, the fish is better in France, the oysters are better in France, everything is better in France—the endless importing of Dover sole, foie gras in a fucking can, Perigord truffles in a bottle.” Then, he says, “Gilbert Le Coze showed up, went to the Fulton Fish Market, served you local fish that were five dollars a pound, and proved that, if well-treated and prepared, that stuff tasted as good as anything you’ll find in France.”

“Le Coze was the one who really helped me out,” says Jean-Georges
Vongerichten, who came to New York in 1986 to cook at the Lafayette in the Drake Hotel after an itinerant training period at the various Southeast Asian hotel restaurants where his mentor, the French nouvelle cuisine star Louis Outhier, had consultancy contracts. (Outhier was also the consultant at the Drake.) “The hotel was buying me fish from a middleman, where they went to the market, bought the fish, took it to New Jersey, cleaned it up over there, kept it on ice for a couple days, and
then
sold it to the hotel,” Vongerichten says. “I introduced myself to Gilbert and said, ‘Listen, I know you have the best fish in town. Help me out here.’ He said, ‘You want to see it? Come with me at five tomorrow morning to the fish market.’”

Daniel Boulud, who arrived in the United States in 1980 to cook at the European Commission in Washington, D.C., was also eager to make use of what America offered. When he moved to New York two years later to run the kitchen of the Polo Restaurant in the Westbury Hotel, he was shocked at how classicist and unresourceful the old-line French restaurants were. “Coming from France and having spent ten years with the greatest chefs in the new movement, it was like a time warp, twenty years behind,” he says. “It was still done in a very continental way. La Côte Basque and La Caravelle were stuck in the sixties and seventies. I wanted to be more creative than that.”
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