The Tastemakers

by David Sax

  Though there are several varieties of black Chinese rice dating back thousands of years, the rice labeled as IAC600—Roberts’s rice—is a relatively recent creation. In 1994 a Brazilian crop breeder named Candido Bastos imported several strands of black rice from China and began selecting from their breeds for varieties that grew well in São Paulo state. Though dozens of other black rices existed on the market, almost all cultivated in China, the strain that Bastos isolated had surprisingly aromatic flavor properties when grown in Brazil: a nutty, fragrant bouquet and taste, making it desirable and unique for cooks. Bastos eventually contacted Dr. Anna McClung, research leader at the Dale Bumpers Rice Research Institute in Arkansas and one of America’s foremost rice breeding authorities, to see whether this black rice might be something that the American market would respond to. McClung grew out a test patch and checked for problems. She contacted several commercial rice farmers, but none were ultimately interested in growing it because of the color, which created a quality-control nightmare in a production facility. “Because it’s black, it looks like a weed seed if you mix it in with regular rice,” said Dr. McClung over the phone. “It’ll contaminate your white rice in processing, and vice versa. People said forget it. Unless you are only farming black rice, it’s a pain to work with.” McClung turned to Anson Mills and Roberts, who she had worked with previously on other rice varieties the company sells. “You need someone like Glenn who can say, ‘I know there’s a market for this, and I’m going to bite the bullet and do what it takes to bring it out.’ ”

  In the second year of the seed’s development McClung split the breeding crop, which contains plants that act like parents for producing seeds, into two, growing one in Arkansas and the other in Puerto Rico in order to expose it to different climates at different times of the year. The seeds flew down to the Caribbean, first-class freight, and returned in the spring, as first-class bushels, to be planted again in Arkansas. In the fourth year the testing continued, and McClung and Roberts, who has funded most of these experiments out of his pocket, sent IAC600 to a food science laboratory in Louisiana to test its nutritional, milling, starch, and other characteristics, all of which were very good and, in some cases, such as antioxidant levels, excellent. “When you’re going that far, that’s when you realize whether you want to let others grow it,” says Roberts. “Then you have to find growers who are willing to take it.”

  By the fifth year enough rice was available to do a few taste tests, so Roberts took some of the precious grains into his kitchen and cooked up a pot. “I said, ‘Wow, that’s tribute rice, and it’s beautiful!’ It had a great inkiness, and the rice wine I made was amazing.” The crop was stabilized, and slow-scale production began on a sixty-six-day yield cycle, from spring planting to fall harvest. In 2009, with a steady supply just a season away, Roberts began talking up China Black to the chefs in his vast network, initially approaching some of the most trusted and powerful tastemakers in his circle and, indeed, America—California’s Thomas Keller, New York’s David Chang, Chicago’s Charlie Trotter, New Orleans’ John Besh, Sean Brock, and others—with the promise that his next delivery was going to contain a fantastically aromatic black rice that would be a perfect fit for where their cooking was going. There was a ton of interest from the chefs, who couldn’t wait to get their hands on China Black.

  “Then,” Roberts recalled, with a shake of his head and a chuckle, “the seeds crashed.” The seed stock was already limited, and for some reason the facility storing the seeds accidentally sent Roberts the breeding seeds (the parents), basically the foundational DNA of the crop, that were irreplaceable. Without knowing what had happened, Roberts planted them, only later realizing he’d basically put China Black’s entire family tree into the ground, with no chance of recovery and no ability to replicate easily. “It was like slaughtering my prized breeding bull and selling it to me as steak,” Roberts said, still smarting at the monumental screwup. Everything had to start back at square one, and only now, in the spring of 2013, had Roberts gotten back to the point at which China Black could be grown as a trial on a decent enough scale to provide samples to a few chefs. Not only that, but in the past year the trials at Clemson with China Black had not gone well. “It’s probably the worst of the six varieties out here,” said Harvey, as an alligator slowly crawled into position nearby, under the oblivious herons. “The field conditions weren’t the best last year, and the plot wasn’t level.” Most of the crop hadn’t survived. The fate of China Black was resting in this little plot plus the others around the country, all of which amounted to no more than a handful of acres.

  “If we get a hurricane,” Roberts said, “Hal and I will be sitting here saying, ‘Well, that was fun, let’s do it again!’ ”

  We left the farm and drove back toward Charleston, stopping for lunch at the Glass Onion, a sustainable soul food restaurant that served some of Anson Mills’s products. Over a buttermilk-battered fried chicken po’ boy, beers, and a platter of shrimp and grits, Roberts told me how he’d become the nationally recognized tastemaker of American grains.

  Glenn Roberts was born in Delaware, though his mother was originally from South Carolina, and her family included preachers and mule farmers. He mostly grew up in La Jolla, California, near San Diego. His father was both a professional singer and aerospace worker, and his mother owned restaurants in La Jolla and, later, Marin county, near San Francisco. Though Roberts grew up in the kitchens of these restaurants, with their French-speaking kitchen staff and Continental menus, he never really picked up the hang of cooking (he says he can make one dish really well, but not a meal). His mother, however, taught him what she knew about the Carolina Rice Kitchen, making traditional dishes at almost every family meal. Over the years Roberts, who is a restless and adventurous soul, has dabbled in a number of things. He flew jets in the Air Force, sailed around the world on yachts, rode horses, drove long-haul trucks, crewed on shrimp boats out of Charleston, and even tried his hand at growing corn, working at a cotton mill, and making moonshine (which he still has a soft spot for every so often). Eventually Roberts settled into restaurant consulting, working with chefs and owners on everything from concepts and menus to architecture and construction, a discipline that demanded that his pulse rest firmly on the latest food trends. He opened, closed, and revived restaurants in California, DC, and the South, getting to know the country’s emerging top chefs, such as Thomas Keller, before they were household names. By the 1990s he had settled down in Charleston.

  Anson Mills came about thanks to a stroke of bad luck. In 1998 the Smithsonian Institution was conducting a series of historical dinners focusing on the railroad cuisine of the post–Civil War era, and they asked Roberts to help put one on in Charleston. He began working with a historian to learn about the cuisine from that time period, leading him to the Carolina Rice Kitchen, which had been named by historian Karen Hess. Roberts wanted to serve the rice that was central to many of those recipes, a strain called Carolina Gold, and he ended up at the Turnbridge Plantation just north of Savannah, which is one of the few places where that rice was still growing. Arriving late in the day, he looked out over the flooded fields of Carolina Gold rice, their stalks lit by the glow of the setting sun pouring across the water like spilled paint. “Man, it was gorgeous,” he said, the image still in his eyes. Glenn Roberts fell in love with growing rice right then and there. The first thing he did after leaving was send his mother a bag of that same rice for her approval. “She flipped out. She hadn’t seen anything like it since the Depression.”

  Unfortunately, the Smithsonian dinner turned into a disaster. The church group that was cosponsoring the event had no idea how to properly store the rice, and when Roberts opened the bags in the kitchen, an hour before service began, the precious grains were full of corn weevils, a common agricultural insect. He freaked out, then calmed down, told the kitchen to switch the order of the meal around, grabbed a few busboys, and got down to the dirty work of salvaging the rice. “Imagi
ne sitting in a pair of Gucci loafers and an expensive suit, picking dead bugs out of rice for three hours,” he said. “It fucking sucked.” At the end of the night what stuck in people’s minds was the food, and the reaction they’d had to the rice more than made up for the agony of its execution. “I decided a lot of chefs would like that rice,” Roberts said. “It was the real thing.” Anson Mills began the next day.

  Roberts started growing corn right away because he had done it before and it was easy to cultivate quickly, and he used the proceeds to finance his first crop of Carolina Gold, which was more labor intensive. Using historical records and seeking out seed experts and backwoods farmers, he began pulling together a breadbasket of heritage southern grains, most of which were no longer commercially available. Anson Mills brought back native blue corn, heirloom yellow hominy corn, yellow flint popcorn, traditional couscous, Sea Island red peas, Carolina Graham wheat, Sonora white wheat, Einkorn wheat, Italian grains like several varieties of polenta, farro, buckwheat Taranga, and a whole slew of Carolina Gold products. Everything was grown using traditional, organic, sustainable methods, including hand harvesting, to retain flavor, preserve soil integrity, and keep a historical continuity with the grains. Multiple crops shared the same soil in rotation because they complemented each other’s flavors and doing so improved soil health. Rather than use large commercial rollers to mill corn, hull rice, and grind wheat, Anson Mills operated with antiquated equipment, like granite mill stones, so the product retained a traditionally coarse texture, which affected taste tremendously because it left many aspects of the grain, such as the germ, intact. Anson Mills products, which require very specific storage and cooking instructions (they are not shelf stable), are packaged simply and sold directly to the chefs Roberts knew from his past life in the restaurant business. He asked them to spread the word, and their enthusiasm for his products soon grew within the upper echelons of America’s culinary tastemakers.

  The first product that Anson Mills put on the map was grits. Grits are technically a very simple product, with origins in Native American culture, and are made of coarsely ground cornmeal. Over time the varieties of corn used to make them had grown so efficient that grits were practically devoid of all taste. The large industrial mills that ground down kernels to cornmeal did so with pulverizing force, resulting in a grit that was much too small and uniform, with the plant’s germ, where much of the flavor is stored, largely destroyed. However, grown at organic farms in three states, the heirloom corn for Anson Mills’s grits, in varieties such as Carolina Gourdseed White, John Haulk Yellow, Burris White, and Boone County White, is naturally soft, hand harvested, and stone ground, resulting in an uneven appearance and large grits that are hearty in texture and ready to soak up flavor. David Chang, the chef and owner of the Momofuku group of restaurants, first encountered Anson Mills’s grits in 1999 when he was cooking at Craft, a restaurant run by chef Tom Colicchio. “No one was using the grit cut at that time,” Chang recalled, noting how chefs like Colicchio and Mario Batali first used it to make Italian-style polenta. “It shows you where American dining has gone. No one was going to put grits on a fine-dining menu. Then [fine dining] became a little more rustic and slowly evolved from there and grew.” Chang’s own shrimp and grits dish, made with Anson Mills grains and laced with ramen stock and soy sauce, was a nod to his own Korean American–southern roots and was one of his first standout hits at Momofuku Noodle Bar, his flagship New York restaurant. As word of Anson Mills’s grits spread from kitchens like Chang’s, the demand among chefs soared, and grits became a must-have item on menus around the country, prompting others to grow and sell their own stone-ground grits in imitation of Roberts.

  “Glenn Roberts’s reputation began spreading like wildfire years ago when he first reintroduced us to the proper grit and to Carolina Gold rice,” the New Orleans chef John Besh recounted. “Word spread through the upper-echelon kitchen ranks by word of mouth.” Besh, whose grandfather had ground his own grits, hadn’t seen a proper grit in decades. “Then came Anson Mills, who in turn inspired others to begin milling again. I credit Glenn with this renaissance of not only the mill but of southern food and culture as well.” Charleston soon became a food destination at the center of this movement, on par with San Francisco as a magnet for culinary tourism, as hush puppies, shrimp and grits, and fried chicken dishes began populating menus all over the country, from fine-dining spots such as Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago to small neighborhood bistros and even national chains such as the Cheesecake Factory.

  During our lunch at the Glass Onion I tasted the shrimp and grits Roberts had ordered, piled in a wide bowl with pan-fried fat prawns and thick slices of spicy Andouille sausage. These were Anson Mills hominy grits made from John Haulk corn grown nearby, cooked in the Charleston style by quickly boiling them in milk. Their color was a deep, custardy yellow, but there were flecks of brown and caramel in there as well. I didn’t really expect much; having tried grits many times before, I’d always felt their taste was somewhere between baby’s cereal and unsweetened oatmeal, but these were something entirely transcendent. Buttery, sweet, and chewy, they had the consistency and heft of perfectly scrambled eggs, and I found myself actually pushing aside the shrimp and sausage to get every last bite of grits that I could.

  Today Roberts runs Anson Mills with his wife, Kay Rentschler, a cookbook writer and journalist who met Roberts when she came to write about him and his grits for the New York Times in 2004, and she fell in love after he sent her home with his only bag of yellow nixtamal grits, which, she said, “blew me away.” She works out of New York and Martha’s Vineyard, testing recipes to accompany the two hundred–plus grains the company now sells—a daunting task, considering the need for historical accuracy as well as precision in cooking what are very temperamental foods. Though Anson Mills grains are freely available for purchase online, according to Roberts, direct-to-consumer sales only make up 4 percent of the company’s $3 million annual revenue, with roughly four thousand restaurant clients, ranging as far afield as Italy and Japan, being the main driver of the business. Each year it’s been in business the company has grown between 20 to 25 percent, almost all of it driven by more chefs and restaurants coming to Anson Mills for their grains. Aside from his work in the field, Roberts works closely with chefs who buy his products, sometimes talking on the phone with them, often as they’re in their kitchens, to explain not only the cooking process but also the cultural legacy behind what they are serving that night. That hand-holding and his attention to personal relationships has really paid off. “We know what chefs want, we know how to deliver it the way they want it, because we’ve all been in the restaurant business. We’ve all worked with some of the best in America. I’m a rotten cook and a terrible chef, but if I work with chefs, I become better,” said Roberts, ordering a second beer. “The idea behind what we do is only dealing with concepts we can make relevant to the American public. We stumble across things that can become relevant. We were never restricted by trends. We set our own trends.”

  Each year Roberts picks one new food he will push out to his clients, and this year, if everything works out in the fields, he is hoping it will be China Black. The combination of its flavor, the stark black sheen of its color, and the story of its history make it a grain he believes could eventually generate revenues of $1 million annually. Though other rice producers, such as Lotus Foods, sell varieties of imported black tribute rice (grown largely in China), these mostly lack the deep aromatic flavor of the organic, American-grown China Black that Anson Mills is bringing to market. Even before it was available, the company’s website listed several products it hoped to sell, from straightforward China Black rice to black rice grits, black rice flour, black rice polenta, crème de riz, and a toasted black rice powder. With its high antioxidant levels, Roberts imagined being able to sell some of the by-product for health supplements and saw the potential market of pastry chefs as a particular springboard into a food trend. “This must be beg
ging for some sort of out-of-the-way crazy congee rice dish,” he said enthusiastically.

  Roberts was also driven by a desire to redeem China Black’s fortunes after the crop’s failure in 2009. “When the seed went away, the beatings I took from the chefs were brutal. I’d promised it, and when chefs want stuff, they want it now. They don’t want to wait.” For the sake of Roberts’s reputation and that of Anson Mills, China Black had to succeed and become a trend. “I promised the chefs I’d do it. I failed, and now I’m coming back and tripling down on it.” When I asked Roberts how he planned to create a demand for China Black, he told me the marketing plan was already done. His strategy was simple: choose grains that will be relevant to chefs, put those grains in their hands, and use the chef’s own star power and network to kick-start the trend. In short, let the clients do the work for you. “I just gave two thousand dollars of rice to Sean,” he said, with an all-knowing grin. “I guarantee you within two weeks from now Anthony Bourdain and David Chang will be sitting somewhere together, eating this very rice I gave Sean today.”

  We sat down for dinner at McCrady’s a few hours later as the restaurant slowly filled with well-dressed Charleston families, led by men who wore seersucker suits and bowties and opened car doors for their wives and daughters with a gentlemanly grace. Roberts was still in his dusty jeans and boots, but the restaurant’s staff greeted him with a hero’s welcome. After all, his name graced the menu under the section devoted to the local farmers whose products Brock used, crediting Roberts and Anson Mills for Grains, Knowledge, Inspiration.