Given Northern California’s produce obsession, a few restaurants attempted to maintain their own gardens, but most could not provide a large, steady supply. Mudd’s in San Ramon was opened by Virginia Mudd in 1981 with a “romantic idea about creating a garden and a restaurant that would fuel itself both inspirationally and contextually with things that were grown in the garden,” said chef Amaryll Schwertner. “And, in fact, many beautiful things were grown there, primarily herbs.” Although the restaurant had ten acres of land, “nobody understood the quantities that would be required to supply a restaurant,” so the garden produced mainly garnishes, or, at certain times of year, massive tomato harvests. “There were a couple of weeks when there were full-out tomatoes everywhere. I coupled up very quickly with Green Gulch down on the coast, because we had hot weather in the San Ramon area, and they had the cool-weather crops, and we quickly figured out that we could have more diversity on our menus if each of us contributed, so the cars were going back and forth.”
In addition to raising their own crops, people were interested in old-time skills such as pickling, canning, curing meat, and smoking fish. They wanted to avoid the preservatives and additives in commercial foods and to exercise control over the flavors and quality of these products. Sherry Virbila reminisced, “It was an extraordinary generation in that everybody learned from everybody else. [They] shared information. An entire generation of cooks was learning a lost art from scratch. Nobody wanted to cook the way a commercial restaurant cooked; that was a blind alley to go down. So it meant you had to learn how to do it from scratch, the way the older people used to do it in the country. When Pig-by-the-Tail [a charcuterie in Berkeley] opened, I was amazed. It was a bizarre notion that somebody would open a place and make sausages from scratch.”
Sherry remembered eating wild fennel for the first time, and tasting mussels and oysters harvested by the “eccentric local forager Dr. Jerry Rosenfield. That was a fascinating moment when you discovered that your own land had things that were unexploited. You could go out and find authentic ingredients of place.” Foraging has become hip today, but it was still a largely untapped market when Connie Green made a business out of it in the late 1970s.
CONNIE GREEN
Wine Forest Wild Foods, Napa
Connie Green began foraging for mushrooms in the early 1970s and turned her hobby into a commercial business in 1979, when she found herself gathering more mushrooms than she could eat. She approached restaurants to see if she could trade mushrooms for dinners.
“One day I took baskets of chanterelles into San Francisco. I decided to go to Nob Hill because at that time you had Fournou’s Ovens, L’Etoile, the Fairmont. I’m sitting there with baskets full of beautiful chanterelles, polished within an inch of their life, not knowing which way to turn.” A Swiss gardener working outside one of those hotels spotted her baskets and came running up. “He took me to the chef at L’Etoile, who looked at me and said, ‘Those are not chanterelles. They don’t grow in America.’ He wanted to show me what chanterelles were, and he opened a can. He said, ‘These are chanterelles. They’re small, they’re perfect’—and they were canned. I said, ‘But these really are chanterelles; they grow differently in America.’ And he said, ‘But no, they’re not French.’ He wanted nothing to do with them, and that place was closed in two years.”
Udo Nechutnys at Miramonte was one of the chefs who did snap up Connie’s mushrooms when she appeared at his kitchen door. Connie remembers that he “almost got tears in his eyes” when he saw them. Bruce LeFavour of Rose et LeFavour in St. Helena also “was all over it. He was a self-educated man with deep knowledge and went through great trouble to get good ingredients.
“A tiny bit later, Masa Kobayashi was at Auberge du Soleil. I knew that this was an internationally famous dude, and I polished some chanterelles and took them up there. He went over the moon and made everybody in his kitchen stop and look. Then he paraded them through the dining room. He honored me to a degree I had never experienced. These are very important people who remain locked in my heart.”
Connie also approached Thomas Keller at the French Laundry. “I left a note at the kitchen and he called me up giggling—this is a man who doesn’t giggle—and asked me to come down right away. He was so excited that I was a mushroom hunter—he was just on fire.”
Chefs who want to order a steady supply of mushrooms have to be taught that the wild varieties are strictly seasonal. Connie warns people who want to order fresh porcini for a set menu that they may be available for only a few weeks. “There are chefs that are locked up, and then there are nimble chefs—people like Todd Humphries [of Campton Place] and Staffan Terje [of Perbacco]—who can turn on a dime because they have deep levels of creativity.
“Back before California cuisine, this place was filled with Italians, Napa in particular. People would be speaking Italian in the grocery store. Gardens were everywhere; everybody had tomatoes and beans. Even a little 20-by-30-foot backyard was filled with vegetables. There were certain dishes on every menu that you never see anymore that I really miss. Everybody had malfatti, cannelloni, and seafood stew. Europeans understood how to deal with wild mushrooms. But in 1981, a lot of the prep guys, and some of the chefs, had never dealt with this stuff. I’m selling chanterelles for $13 a pound and here’s the prep guy cutting the tops off and throwing the stems in the garbage bin. And I was like, ‘Don’t throw those away! That’s my favorite part.’ People had to learn from rock bottom about what they were cooking.”
Connie still hunts mushrooms and sells about five thousand pounds a week, mostly in San Francisco.
With the support and encouragement of new restaurants, Northern California foragers, farmers, and artisans began to provide chefs with the quality and variety of ingredients they were seeking. Warren Weber of Star Route Farms personally observed the evolution of agriculture in Northern California. “When I came out in 1974, Marin County was dairy and animals, because it grows grass and is a cool climate and doesn’t have the deep soils that we like to farm real [massmarket] crops in. When we started it was the Zen Center [at Green Gulch Farm] and us. The kids on the ranches would go to Davis or Cal Poly and never come back home. They’d become veterinarians or something, but there was no place for them and the dairy industry was slowly going out. Now we have a lot of vertical integration in the dairy business—people making cheese, doing all kinds of stuff. We have horizontal integration where we have guys doing strawberries on the dairies or leasing the ground out to somebody who’s doing vegetable crops. We have sheep and sheep cheese and milk and goats and some fifty organic farms in Marin County. It actually looks like the thing that we wanted to see when we started, and it took that long for it to happen.”
The South: Food as Fashion
Historically, “Los Angeles never cultivated an image of fine cuisine,” said Russ Parsons. “People didn’t think of Southern California as a place to go out to eat. When the first good restaurants opened up—when Michael McCarty opened up, Michael Roberts, Wolfgang Puck, Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger—it was a shock. I remember the 1984 Olympics, and all of a sudden we were on the cover of every magazine, and it was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s actually food to eat.’”
Jonathan Waxman arrived at Michael’s after working at Chez Panisse. He recalled that “at Michael’s, it was Southern California sensibility versus Northern California. The flavors were much bolder. We were less afraid of making mistakes than Chez Panisse. The clients were so excited. People like Lillian Hellman, Ronald Reagan, and Mel Brooks were coming in, and Hollywood people, politicos, musicians like the Eagles. You would go to the table and they would grasp your hand, and they would say, ‘Thank you, that was delicious.’
“LA was much more receptive to change than Northern California