Best Food Writing 2012

by Holly Hughes (ed) (epub)

  Within minutes of arriving in the town of Axberg in northern Austria, Hans Reisetbauer, perhaps Austria’s most respected distiller, is making us coffee, and after hours on the road, we need it. We started the day just past dawn in the farmers market of Graz, where Kurt loaded my arms with sunflowers, tiny raspberries, dry pork sausage studded with pumpkinseeds, a huge bag of ripe apricots, and some slices of poppy-seed cake as he flitted from stall to stall, chatting with the vendors. “It’s good to talk to these old ladies,” he told me, as he handed me a squash. “They know best. This pumpkin? She told me you can cook the whole thing, leave the skin on. Makes good soup.”

  It’s the start of Reisetbauer’s busy season—he makes his living turning Austria’s best fruit into award-winning eaux-de-vie, or schnapps, and as we saw in the market this morning, the first fruit of the summer was already ripe. He distilled his first batch of raspberries the week before our visit; through the porthole in one of his copper stills, I see his first batch of apricots cooking away, bubbling like a pot of jam.

  Reisetbauer grows all of his own apples and pears on his estate, just outside the distillery; other fruit, like these apricots, he sources from farmers who grow fruit especially for him. “I have to find farmers who are as crazy as I am,” Reisetbauer tells me. He doesn’t look crazy, he looks like fun—like a retired actor, with an easy smile, graying hair pushed back, and shoulders as big as a bear’s. “Most customers want to see the perfect color of an apricot. Me, I want the perfect taste. I need the best fruit to make the best schnapps.”

  “It’s the same in the kitchen,” Kurt says. “You have to work with the farmers to get what you want. See, Johnny? It’s always the same.”

  “Once we have the perfect fruit, it’s up to us not to make any mistakes,” Reisetbauer says.

  Schnapps are not always pretty spirits—some are just fiery moonshine, roughly distilled by farmers and drunk by same to fend off cold, fatigue and boredom (and forget the cinnamon-and watermelon-flavored liqueurs called schnapps in the U.S.—they’re completely unknown in Austria). But schnapps can be magical; clear, high-proof spirits, enjoyed after dinner, that somehow evoke through taste and smell the sensation of biting into a ripe fruit, at the peak of its season, right off the vine—or better.

  Reisetbauer’s pear schnapps is better than any French poire Williams I’d ever had—as the flavors spread across my tongue and waft up through my sinuses, I have the illusion of tasting a pear with the backs of my eyes. His elsbeere (“serviceberry”) schnapps is the most expensive in the world; he needs more than 35 kilos of the rare fruit to make one liter of spirit. Last year, the only three bottles exported to the U.S. went to Wallse. It tastes like blueberry marzipan, in between layers of God’s own wedding cake.

  After an amble through his orchards, it’s time for lunch; we head to his kitchen in time to see his entire staff—farmhands, still operators and marketers alike—sitting down to eat with his young children. His wife plates slabs of the pork neck she’s been roasting all morning with hunks of browned cabbage, herb dumplings and a good ladleful of dark brown jus. Everything is perfectly cooked, and the gemütlichkeit, that sense of warm hospitality in which all Austrians take pride, has never been stronger. We all help ourselves to glasses of apple juice from the orchards outside.

  “Here’s where I fished for semling, that fish you had the other day,” Kurt says, standing on the grassy banks of the Danube in Wallsee, his hometown, a quiet village of about 3,000. “Up there, by those reeds, I caught eel and catfish.” While fishing as a child, Kurt would watch the river cruise ships pass by, some on their way to Vienna. He didn’t know much about them, but he knew they had cooks, and they seemed as good a way as any out of Wallsee. In the 1970s, aspiring Austrian chefs didn’t aim too high; if he paid attention and worked hard in culinary school, he might even make it to the kitchen of a hotel in Switzerland. Before Kurt, Wallsee’s only claim to fame was a castle that was once home to Archduchess Marie Valerie, daughter of Emperor Franz Joseph. Now it can claim a famous American chef, too. This fall, Kurt’s cookbook Neue Cuisine will be published by Rizzoli, and this fall he’ll return to Austria to receive the Decoration of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria, a prestigious award given by the Austrian president to citizens who promote Austrian culture abroad.

  His parents still live in town; so do his brother and sister. When we stop by his old family homestead, his mother, as hospitable and charming as her son, brings out a homemade plum cake and some coffee. I grill her for embarrassing stories from her son’s youth, but she comes up short. “When he was about 10, he made me a cake for Mother’s Day. After dinner, his brother said, ‘Kurt, where’s the cake?’ but Kurt just shushed him. It turns out he had hidden the cake under his bed.”

  “It didn’t come out right! I had high-quality standards, even then,” Kurt says.

  Our stay isn’t long; we have dinner reservations in Vienna that night. Before we leave, Kurt carries in bags bursting with the bounty of Austria’s fields, orchards, cellars and shops, and starts to unload them onto the kitchen table, despite his mother’s protestations: the market sunflowers; sausage studded with pumpkin seeds; bottles of Gegenbauer’s vinegar and Hartlieb’s pumpkinseed oil; fresh apple juice from Reisetbauer’s orchard; tomatoes from Stekovics’s miraculous vines; and from the farmers market in Graz, a small mountain of apricots. “We love it when Kurt comes to visit,” his mother says. She beams with pride for her son, the chef, who has made good in New York and is the reason Americans have heard of Wallsee. Then she looks distractedly back at the kitchen table. “But now I have to do something with all of these apricots.”

  REMEMBERING SAVOY

  By Rachel Wharton

  From Edible Manhattan

  North Carolina native Rachel Wharton has become immersed in New York City food culture since earning a master’s in food studies from New York University. A former food reporter for the New York Daily News, she is now deputy editor of Edible Manhattan and Edible Brooklyn and a contributor to GiltTaste.

  When Peter Hoffman announced that on June 18 he would shutter Savoy—the SoHo restaurant he has run for 21 years at the cobblestoned corner of Prince and Crosby—Manhattan learned it would lose more than just a fine dining landmark, a longstanding icon of its culinary landscape. Hoffman, you may have heard, promises to open a more casual, up-to-date place in the space by September. But when Savoy’s golden glow goes dark, with it goes the urban version of our very own hearth, our collective spiritual home—the kind of place where people gather around the fire not just to eat, but to commune with kin and take the long view of life.

  The hearth, after all, is a literal one: Until the end of next month, at least, the restaurant boasts two fireplaces, both used for cooking. The restaurant’s many regulars will long mourn the loss of Savoy’s cassoulet suppers simmering away inside the fire each fall in embertopped cast-iron Dutch ovens, and the shad feasts celebrating the return of that fish to the Hudson River each spring. For this year’s shad dinner, Hoffman and his executive chef, Ryan Tate, nailed the boned and bacon-larded fish to planks inserted right into the flames the way the Colonists did. In true Savoy style, they served those fillets with smoked shad fritters and a charred spring onion aioli; a briny-sweet bite of house-pickled fish tucked between a buttery crisp of bread and a layer of green garlicky omelet; and a wedge of its creamy roe with brown butter cream in a lemony sorrel broth.

  If you’d been paying attention at Union Square Greenmarket just a few days before, you’d have seen Hoffman tuck the sorrel into the back basket of his trademark giant tricycle, emblazoned with a sticker reading “The revolution will not be motorized.” That line is exactly the kind of idea those family-style, special-occasion dinners are meant to highlight. Savoy has long been Manhattan’s place not just to share in one season’s harvest and plan the next, but to critically evaluate what we eat, how we live and the American state of home economics, in the Wendell Berry sense of those words. (Berry,
for decades regarded as the back-to-the-land poet laureate, has personally spoken during one such Savoy dinner, as have Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Mark Kurlansky and just about every other living luminary in the farm-to-table world.)

  Savoy has always been a Greenmarket-showcasing pioneer, starting in 1990 when Hoffman and his wife, Susan Rosenfeld, opened its doors in what had been a shiny luncheonette. (And before that, a barber shop: The old painted pole still stands guard in the downstairs dining room.) Savoy has since steadied city souls with its über-sustainable sustenance: A crusty wedge of real bread redolent with rustic local grains and slathered with cultured Vermont butter; a snarl of saber-toothed dandelion greens slicked with anchovy dressing and crowned with a slow-poached egg laid by a hen Hoffman may have even met.

  True, if farm-to-table awards were given out by how much product a chef buys from local farmers, Hoffman wouldn’t win. Even combined, the volume at his two restaurants (Back Forty, his more casual spot, opened on Avenue B in 2007) couldn’t come close to a place like Gramercy Tavern, which could serve a hundred hungry locavores at lunch alone. He wasn’t Manhattan’s first cook to obsess over Union Square, nor would he score first-place for flat-out farm-driven deliciousness, either. Which is understandable: Many of the best city chefs regard ingredients with integrity as a win-win, but their main goal is taste; for Hoffman, one gets the feeling it’s the other way around.

  But Savoy never sought to be a Fine Dining Experience, as Blue Hill or Del Posto or Gramercy Tavern all are. It’s the kind of place to order a pint of local suds and a few fat slices of housemade mortadella at one of the city’s loveliest little bars, or where your Eileen Fisher–wearing aunt can come after her environmental book club for a wedge of silky, oil-poached wild-caught striped bass, perhaps paired with house-pickled ramps and spring’s first spinach with walnut-mustard dressing. And Back Forty is decidedly down home, an Alphabet City outpost serving outstanding burgers, berry crisps and beer milkshakes—dishes that Dan Barber, who long ago supplanted Hoffman as the locavore spokesmodel, would never offer on his extraordinary—and extraordinarily refined—menus.

  But while Hoffman’s fare may be more rustic than rarified, it’s often wonderful—and if you’re hungry for a heaping helping of meaning, he serves up multiple kinds of satisfaction. That’s because for him, farm-to-table is not a cooking style or a purchasing preference: It’s a belief system that’s just one piece of his progressive worldview. Ask him what he ate for lunch, and he’ll likely connect the answer to healthcare reform or congestion pricing or this morning’s op-ed about fracking in our foodshed.

  This is a man who would never willingly miss a single day at Union Square Greenmarket, and not just for the grub. Other chefs may drop in for a frenetic Saturday spree before hailing a cab (or simply send their sous-chefs), but Hoffman’s approach is to savor the experience. He’ll park that giant trike and lean against box trucks and benches for hours, discussing pests, peapods and parenting, what the Japanese nuclear crisis means for Obama’s energy agenda and whether it’s possible to taste the difference between maple sap collected in metal buckets and sap that ran through plastic tubing. (Hoffman claims he can.)

  There are hellos to the grad student working Flying Pigs’ stand (ever the mensch’s mensch, he asks after her dating life); a chat with the president of Abrams publishing company (“your bar was the best thing about working at Scholastic,” he says wistfully of his time in that SoHo office); and a stop to score ricotta at Dancing Ewe, a sheep dairy whose owners, like so many farmers here, credit Hoffman with their success. Hours later, the chef has still not bought the sorrel he originally came for.

  “That’s part of the whole point,” says Hoffman of all these exchanges, “there’s a conversation that doesn’t happen at Whole Foods.” Here you don’t just read a sign that tells you how much sea scallops cost; you spend 20 minutes talking with the fisher about the social-political-ecological meaning behind their place in history.

  These are all ideas he’s been pondering since adolescence. As a 16-year-old in Tenafly, New Jersey, in the early 1970s, he knew he wanted to do something “intellectually stimulating but still physical,” he says: “I didn’t want a desk job.” Seeking work connected to the natural world, he considered forestry and biology, but was set on a culinary path by an unlikely friendship with a retired commercial fisherman and a shot of a chef clutching vegetables to his chest on the cover of Time.

  The fisherman was Chris Letts, now a Hudson River Foundation frontman in his 70s who long ago introduced the teenage Hoffman to his lifelong love of the sea and to the concept of foraging via Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus.

  The chef was Paul Bocuse, the Frenchman famous for his farm-forward food. “I think the title was Cuisine du Marché,” recalls Hoffman of the Time cover. “I was like, ‘that’s it.’ I don’t think I even read the article.” (Skimming is not standard practice for Hoffman, who’s celebrated Proust with a four-course meal and counts New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik as a friend.)

  Hoffman decided to fast-track high school and took an entry-level job at a resort restaurant in Stowe, Vermont. The continental cuisine didn’t thrill him but the kitchen energy did. “I loved the theater of it, the community, the performance and the climax of Saturday night at 8:30.”

  When the weather warmed, Letts landed him a fishing gig back home, plucking writhing shad from nets off 138th Street, when the waters were still alive with the herring cousin heading up the Hudson River to spawn. (Hoffman chronicled the experience in this magazine in 2009.) But before he could go back to cooking, there was college to attend, as per parental demands. So Hoffman enrolled at UC Santa Cruz, where he counted gray seals for a professor and learned about the perils of the green revolution before dropping out to cook at a local restaurant. He again loved the line but, ready to come home, ignored a friend’s advice that he should go work at this place in Berkeley called Chez Panisse.

  Instead, back in Manhattan, he cooked at La Colombe d’Or, one of the first French restaurants in New York to serve rustic Provençal cooking rather than haute cuisine. That sensibility appealed to Hoffman—simpler food that wasn’t “Frenchie La French,” as he puts it. So did John McPhee’s 1979 New Yorker piece Brigade de Cuisine, about a European-trained chef in a tiny town in Pennsylvania raising his own trout and cooking what grew nearby.

  When the opportunity to master that kind of cooking arose, Hoffman jumped at the chance. He had wanted to study in Paris with chef Madeline Kamman after reading her book The Making of a Cook but her classes were full. “I got a phone call on the pay phone at [La Colombe d’Or],” he recounts: ‘“There’s been a cancellation,’ a voice informed him. ‘If you can be in France in two weeks, you can be in Madeleine’s class.’” He made it, and spent the last of his college money on three months cooking with Kamman, whose core concepts have formed the framework of his cooking since: that regional foods were rooted in geography and social history, and that the true way to cook was using, he recalls, “what was in the moment and what was in the market.”

  Those seem like no-brainers now that everyone has turnip tattoos, but at the time, the approach was just taking root stateside, coalescing as something called New American cuisine. Back home, Hoffman immersed himself in it, reveling in the food of trailblazing restaurants like An American Place, originally opened on the Upper East Side by chef Larry Forgione—“I ate my first morel in his restaurant,” Hoffman dreamily recalls—and the Quilted Giraffe, the quirky French farmhouse-y spot in Turtle Bay where Hoffman cooked alongside Ray Bradley, who would go on to be one of the Greenmarket’s most beloved farmers. He moved to the kitchens of Hubert’s on 22nd, a townhouse turned New American bistro where he met Susan Rosenfeld, who would eventually become his wife.

  They knew they wanted to open a restaurant, but first he would complete two more stints abroad—one in Provence with Richard Olney, the Iowa-born author of cookbooks on French country fare, the second at a restaurant in Japan. (�
�I saw an aesthetic that would bring the natural world to the plate,” says Hoffman of the latter trip, counterbalancing the French penchant for what he calls “manipulation of the natural world: dots and cubes and brunoise.”)

  Hoffman married Rosenfeld in 1988, and they set out in search of a space to open the restaurant they’d been imagining together. When they stumbled on that shuttered SoHo luncheonette, Hoffman looked up the lease in the city’s records. It was coming up for grabs, and thus Savoy was born in a fledgling artists’ outpost in the wasteland east of Broadway, a lifetime before direct trade macchiatos proliferated and shoppers’ stilettos provided the sidewalk soundtrack. Susan worked the simple, 40-seat dining room, behind which guests could glimpse Peter in the tiny kitchen. He made connections with local farmers and fishers and foragers, cooking their harvests into dishes like marinated halibut with cucumber salad and braised duck with Concord grape puree. In 1995 they annexed the upstairs apartment, got a liquor license, and put in a bar and a working fireplace. The Times noticed, and critic Ruth Reichl awarded the restaurant two stars.

  Hoffman was still Savoy’s sole chef, and his handiwork would go on to become signatures of a scene: He has an “instinctive understanding of vegetables,” Reichl wrote, a way with salads (“you will instantly be seduced”), plus a penchant for breaking rules: “Who would expect that rosy slices of grilled peppered tuna in a vinaigrette based on the classic Catalan romesco sauce (ground nuts, peppers and tomatoes), would be served with good old American onion rings? Fabulous onion rings, I might add, made of sweet red onions.” Reichl nailed the feel of the place itself: “The small restaurant is so casual, so comfortable and so unpretentious,” she wrote, “that it is hard to believe it is in Manhattan.”