The Tastemakers

by David Sax

  “Well, one of the three, anyway,” Roberts said with a chuckle.

  The meal unfolded over many boozy hours, with Brock pulling out all the stops to showcase his cooking, his heirloom products (ham from African guinea hogs he’d raised, ember-roasted carrots he’d grown), and what he could do with Anson Mills grains. There were bright, briny roe from sunburst trout sprinkled on a smoked trout pate atop crisp, earthy crackers baked from Anson Mills red fife wheat; Anson Mills airy popcorn served with a startlingly buttery popcorn miso and pea stew; a buttered slice of chewy, dense, flavorful bread made from Anson Mills grits, oats, and benne; chocolate chess pie with toasted benne seeds and benne butter; and finished with Robert E. Lee cake baked with Sea Island red pea flour. Each dish was presented with a minimal rustic elegance. In one, Brock plated what looked like two small, thin rice crackers on an earthenware plate and topped them with some sort of cream. The waiter would explain with great ceremony that these were actually crispy fried beef tendons, topped with a truffle cream. I bit in, and the deep flavor of beef stock quickly emerged from that lithe airy crisp, with the rich, woodsy funk of the truffles tying it back to the earth. It was one of the most amazing, epic, and yet somehow humble meals I’d eaten in years.

  As the cocktails and wine flowed (and flow they did—we’d already had three different drinks before the first course even arrived), Roberts got to talking about what drove him to keep pushing out new tastes and trying to forge new trends, like China Black. Seed research these days was becoming digitized. Agronomists could sit at a computer, sequence a grain’s DNA, and concoct new varieties without ever having to step foot in a field. A connection to the land was being lost and, with it, the sense of place and culture that came along with agriculture and with eating something grown on a farm. Yes, Anson Mills was a company that existed to sell grains to high-end customers (their products are much more expensive than their competitors’), but at its core Roberts saw his mission as part of a “Robin Hood syndrome.” In 2003, when the company began taking off, he founded the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, a nonprofit that funds research into heirloom grains from the Carolina Rice Kitchen and distributes those grains for free to interested farmers around the United States as well as cofunding research projects with the USDA, such as the China Black trials. “My mission is to recover something from extinction and make sure the avenues to scale it up are open.” Already, he had distributed up to seventy tons of seed entirely free, including donations of Einkorn wheat to the radiation-ravaged farms around Japan’s damaged Fukushima reactor, and aided the southwest’s Hopi Native Americans in recovering their nearly extinct blue corn crop. To Roberts, Anson Mills was just the means to fund and publicize the work he was doing at his foundation.

  “The public doesn’t respond to the system [behind the growing] at all. They just think the product is wonderful,” he said, summing up the divide between the two sides of his business. “The public responds to taste if they have a good palate, which is why this goes back to the elite—getting the one percent interested.” It was a trickle-down approach to social change via food trends. Anson Mills grains composes a tiny percentage of the grain produced in South Carolina, let alone America. But because he had targeted the most respected, visible chefs in the world and had his company’s name on all their menus, Roberts had harnessed their visibility and influence as tastemakers, turning those grains into a trend and using the trends’ success (and profits) to further his mission of restoring the Carolina Rice Kitchen as well as the greater cause of saving American grains. The culinary trend he’d created was itself a kind of Trojan horse—for the social, environmental, and historical trends he truly cared about implementing.

  “I started this when I’m old,” Roberts said, “and that’s a good thing, because if I was young, I would have to prove a point. I just want to get enough seed out there that there’s a tipping point—that anyone can get China Black rice if they want to grow it and want to sell it. I think about my age, and I probably need to make money at some point. I’m on a decade-and-a-half startup.”

  Just then Brock came out of the kitchen, carrying two dark, handmade ceramic bowls and pewter spoons. A sweet, nutty aroma steamed out of them, and as he set them in front of us, we saw that each contained a mound of China Black rice, about half a cup’s worth, glistening and perfect. “We just cooked them simply in water, in a low oven, and added a little butter at the end,” Brock said, clearly pleased with the product. “Everyone in the kitchen was freaking out. It doesn’t need anything else. You understand the work that goes into it. It’s the best food in the world.”

  I had never eaten rice like this: straight and pure, in which I noticed the firm, al dente texture of each grain, its subtle fragrance of toasted earth, and the slick, buttery coating from the starch coaxed out of it. I could see how Chinese emperors would have demanded this rice in tribute, hoarding it for themselves, like gold and rubies. It was rice that tasted like candy. It was a grain as art.

  “It’s nuts,” our waiter said, looking over us as we savored it. “Chef Brock gave us each a little spoonful, just a few grains, and it reminds me of ice cream. The density has that pop to it. Oh man, it’s incredible.”

  “Sean, I haven’t eaten this in three years,” Roberts said, his nose hovering over the bowl with an ear-to-ear grin. Suddenly, the years of work, the high hopes and crushing disappointments, were evaporating for him like the steam coming off the rice.

  When our dinner ended at eleven that night, five hours and far too many drinks after it had begun, Roberts ordered a cup of strong black coffee, which he downed in several gulps. I could barely stay awake at the table, but he was going to drive two hours to his mill in the town of Columbia, sleep there for two hours, and start milling seeds at three in the morning to prepare orders for shipment the next morning, when he would meet me at another rice plantation, then drive another four hours to Charlotte, where he would catch a flight back home to New York that night. Here was a man who was hitting the stride of a twenty-year-old at an age when most men were thinking about retirement, and in his mind, Roberts’s trendsetting had only just begun. He was a farmer and advocate and dreamer who had tapped into the fantastic trendsetting power of chefs and leveraged that to change the way the culinary world ate its grains. As he drove off into the night with the Camry’s seatbelt warning bell clanging away (he never wears them), I thought of something Dr. Anna McClung said about Roberts when I asked whether he was a trendsetter or just plain nuts.

  “Well,” she replied without a pause, “I guess most trends start with eccentric lunatics.”

  “You definitely have to try the quinoa locro,” said the waiter on my first visit to Picca, a popular restaurant in Hollywood run by the Peruvian-born chef Ricardo Zarate. Hollywood servers are remarkable creatures. They’re the alphas of the waiting world: the top tier of aspiring actors who are both better looking and vastly more dramatic than servers in any other city. After his initial five-minute introduction, in which he explained Picca’s concept (basically, an upscale Peruvian cantina), its signature spirit (pisco, a grape brandy), and ingredient (aji amarillo, a bright, spicy yellow pepper), our server let us in on a little secret. “You know, it’s good you came on a Monday night, because that’s industry night,” he told me and my three friends, locking eyes with each of us to seal in the enthusiasm. “It’s when all the chefs and food bloggers come here.” At that moment, as though he were acting on the waiter’s cue, in walked Danny Bowien, the chef of San Francisco’s hotspot Mission Chinese Food, with a crew of beautiful friends, all dressed liked they owned an upscale vintage clothing boutique, and they sat at the table behind ours. The waiter beamed, then pushed us toward the quinoa locro once more. “Trust me,” he said, “it’s big on all the food blogs.”

  We obligingly ordered it, along with nearly a dozen other small dishes that expressed Zarate’s signature elevation of Peruvian flavors, all in an atmosphere that’s similarly loud, boisterous, and Latin but with crisp
Japanese design elements like a robata-style open grill set behind a wooden bar. I started off drinking an Apricot With Your Pants Down, a cocktail of Italian pisco, apricot brandy, lemon and cane juice, Aperol, seltzer, and a spritz of “juniper air,” which gave the first sip a forested whiff. My friend Marko ordered a perfect pisco sour, the Peruvian national cocktail: pisco, lime and lemon, and a beaten egg white, a drink that the menu claimed was “shaken like a Polaroid picture.” There was a whimsical, cutesy element to much of the menu’s descriptions, all of which would have been annoying had the food not been so damn good.

  The chicharrones de pollo was the first dish to hit the table: a pile of golden fried chicken skins, like schmaltzy chips, which we dunked in a spicy rocoto pepper aioli. There was a salad of sweet baked pumpkin chunks in a tangy miso sauce; a tiradito of firm sashimi-grade tuna, brushed with miso and seared to a caramelized crust on the outside, then dressed with a soy ceviche dressing; and a trio of mashed potato causas topped with smoked salmon and aji amarillo yogurt. The pumpkin stew with fried egg, raspberry-sized kernels of Peruvian corn, parmesan cheese, and fried crispy tomato strips was definitely worth its hype. In all we had around ten small dishes, all great, but the waiter was right in his enthusiasm for the quinoa locro (a bright, brothy squash, pumpkin, and quinoa stew). A deep, satisfying dish of comforting ingredients whose bright flavors shone through, the quinoa locro exemplified Zarate’s cooking style, with the humble food of his roots remade as something unexpected and even daring.

  “I’ve never eaten anything like this,” my friend Kyle said, and we all chimed in, mumbling praise while strategically eyeing the last bites of quinoa lying unguarded in the bowl.

  In the battle to establish the next food trend, chefs are the equivalent of Marines. Many aspire to join the top ranks of their field, but few are chosen. Most cannot survive the grueling hours, the physical and psychological hardship, and the shockingly low pay it takes to get to the elite ranks. Their dreams of becoming the next Top Chef champion evaporate during that initial service rush, as orders pile up, proteins overcook, sweat pours from their bodies, and their bosses hurl verbal abuse. For the few who do endure, there’s still no guarantee of success. Everyone wants to be the face of the next big dining trend, but that success is as much a product of serendipity as it is of raw talent and hard-earned experience. Significant new trends often come from unknown chefs cooking out of restaurants scraped together through sweat, tears, and a few maxed-out credit cards as the multimillion-dollar temples of dining created for big-name chefs often fizzle upon opening, their only legacy being a for-lease sign in a picture window.

  Chefs are the creative class of the food world. Sure, the majority of chefs cooking in restaurants aren’t culinary Picassos and Beethovens. Most execute the same recipes day in and day out because the dining public expects a high level of consistency in restaurants, and for good reason. No one wants their roast chicken and potatoes reinvented each time it’s ordered, but even in the most tightly controlled kitchen there’s a degree of inventiveness, whether it’s the chef’s ability to look into the fridge and concoct a nightly special from an abundance of turnips that someone ordered or her idea to use sesame oil instead of olive oil in a salad. Occasionally that slight change, brought on by a combination of experience and imagination, of circumstance and dumb-assed luck, leads to a dining trend that can raise the fortunes of that chef and their restaurant. If it is big enough, a chef-created food trend even has the power to fundamentally alter the way we all eat.

  Today, chef-driven trends are more powerful and visible than ever before. The media attention chefs have embraced over the past two decades, brought on by the rise of the Food Network, competition shows such as Top Chef (which releases twenty-one freshly minted “celebrity chefs” into the restaurant world each season), and a ravenous online ecosystem of food blogs, review sites, and social media opportunities, has not only cemented the idea of the chef as artist and celebrity but has also given chefs everywhere a vastly greater audience, well beyond those who actually come into their restaurants and eat their food. The popularization of chef culture is a change to the industry as powerful as the invention of recorded music for musicians. Before the phonograph, bands and singers could only build their audience and influence on the stage, one show at a time. Once they could sell records, however, their impact was limited only by where those recordings could sell. Today’s chefs are no different. No longer constrained to their physical kitchens, they can create and shape food trends quicker, more widely, and with a greater impact than any generation that preceded them. Their ideas trickle down from a single kitchen to a city’s restaurant scene, spreading out across nations and oceans, until one day you find yourself asking the butcher in your supermarket whether he carries beef cheeks, without even knowing how you developed a taste for them.

  Chef-driven trends can take several forms. The most significant and longest lasting is an introduction of a comprehensive style of cooking and eating, and this trend is almost more philosophical than technical. It affects not just restaurants and their menus but also the way food is cultivated, sold, and cooked at home. One of the best examples is the trend started by cook and personality Alice Waters at her restaurant Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971 in Berkeley, California. “Chez Panisse is the ultimate manifestation of the baby boomers’ contribution to the American food revolution,” wrote David Kamp in his history of American dining, The United States of Arugula. “These are folk who revel in the fact that they changed the landscape, man.” Waters’s high-minded cooking, which focused on the provenance of ingredients more than specific recipes and flavors, set the mold for the farm-to-table ethos of fresh/local/seasonal/organic dining that trickled down from a few select hippie spots serving “California” cuisine to large national chains such as Chipotle, which now boasts about the ethics of their meat and produce sourcing, and the existence of supermarket products like Heinz Organic Ketchup.

  Trends started by chefs can also take the form of entirely new business models for the food service sector. In 1989 Nancy Silverton, a Los Angeles–based pastry chef, opened La Brea Bakery, which focused exclusively on artisan breads. In the wake of La Brea’s highly publicized success, in which Silverton was credited as the queen of sourdough, specialized artisan bread bakeries and accompanying bakery cafés popped up all over the world, creating two new categories of businesses that barely existed before. Then, in 1998, Silverton and her partners opened a new plant where they made partially baked versions of their loaves that could be instantly frozen and shipped nationally and then finished off in the ovens of stores and restaurants so that the bread tasted as though it had been freshly baked. La Brea Bakery soon became the largest specialty bread supplier in the country, and the success of their product again revolutionized the bread industry, putting high-quality, fresh-baked bread within the reach of anyone with a freezer and an oven. “It turned the American people into a far more sophisticated bread-eating customer,” said Silverton. “The consumption of that style of bread is here to stay.”

  A chef can initiate a trend around specific flavor profiles, popularizing a mixture of ingredients and seasoning that gets incorporated into everything from other restaurant dishes to the new flavor of potato chips in your local supermarket. In the 1980s New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme made Cajun cooking a nationally recognized phenomenon. Although Cajun cuisine had a rich cultural history in Louisiana, melding French, Indian, and African American cooking methods and flavors, Prudhomme’s largest impact seemed to be around his so called blackened spice rub, which involved dipping fish or other proteins in butter, then dredging it in spices that include thyme, oregano, chili pepper, peppercorns, salt, garlic powder, and onion powder, and searing the protein in a hot skillet. Although Cajun budin noir blood pudding and crawfish bakes never became household staples in places like Minneapolis or Vancouver, nearly every seafood restaurant still offers blackened fish, and the mere mention of a dish as “Cajun” triggers a famil
iar association with something that’s spicy, fragrant, and darkly crusted.

  Finally, a chef’s trend can take the shape of a single, iconic dish. In 1991 the molten chocolate volcano cake burst forth onto the world’s dessert menus like the buttery peak of Vesuvius. Though French chefs in New York claim to have been the originators (most vocally Jacques Torres and Jean-Georges Vongerichten), others credited new-wave chefs in France, such as Michel Bras and Alain Ducasse, with the individual warm chocolate soufflés and their gooey centers. They are so simple to make, so economical and consistently delicious (who could resist a warm, liquid bite of chocolate sugary butter?), that they are still a mainstay on menus over two decades later. Like cupcakes, they became a universe unto themselves, with innumerable variations (spiced Mexican chocolate, white chocolate, raspberry chocolate) and a trickle-down economy of volcano cakes that had them appearing on menus in places like Applebee’s and as premade hockey pucks in Costco’s freezer section, ready to heat and serve.

  Ricardo Zarate believes he is a chef with the potential and desire to start a trend like these. Since 2009 the forty-year-old has opened three high-profile restaurants in Los Angeles, each presenting a different variation on his modern, Japanese-inflected interpretation of Peruvian cuisine. His cooking has garnered favorable reviews from local critics, attracted the praise of other chefs, and made Zarate a known name in the Los Angeles culinary landscape. Increasingly, that reputation is going national. He is an aspiring tastemaker, but he is also a good example of how difficult it is for a chef to actually start a food trend.

  Zarate was born in Lima and is broad shouldered with a full head of shiny black hair. He has a wide Cheshire cat’s grin and the plump cheeks of a newborn baby, which are often bearded or covered in stubble. The eleventh child of a housewife and a taxi driver, Zarate grew up in a crowded, modest house where every one of his dozen siblings pitched in. At twelve years old each child was expected to enter the kitchen and assume the position as the family cook, occupy it for six months, then hand it off to the next in line. “There was no choice. It was your duty, but I liked to cook before that,” recalled Zarate over a coffee one day at his restaurant Mo-Chica in downtown Los Angeles. “I was always trying to sneak myself into that position.”