I had first met Rick the previous spring, when he had stopped by Fore Street Restaurant to deliver an armful of the first wild greens of the season – wild sorrel, lamb’s quarters, and tiny milkweed buds that day -- which would appear in almost their natural state on the plates of Sam Hayward’s diners that night. That is Rick’s job from April to November: he is a professional forager, going out into the fields and forests all over New England, from the Berkshires to the White Mountains, to the Rangeley Lakes region and downeast, to harvest the wild bounty of the land. In spring and early summer, this can be every kind of green in its short season—stinging nettles, wild chives, fiddleheads, Solomon’s Seal, ginseng and sassafras roots, ramps (a wild leek), white carrots. Beginning in June and running through the first hard frosts, he gathers an incredible variety of wild mushrooms, from delicate red chanterelles, butter and oyster mushrooms, to porcini, orange chanterelles, hedgehogs, hen of the woods, black trumpets, and a whole host of others I had never heard of before. This late in the season, we were after the white gold of the woods, a mushroom so highly prized, so unusual in its flavor, so hard to find—and so expensive-- that Rick calls it “the truffle of Maine.”
We were in search of the matsutake (pronounced maht-zoo-TAK-ay). As its Japanese name indicates, it is a mushroom highly prized by Asians and with a long and rich tradition in that culture, where it is celebrated for its spiritual as well as culinary benefits. Depending on its scarcity, the Asian markets have been known to pay from $20-40 a pound for it wholesale, which is why you almost never see it featured on restaurant menus here. Although Rick counts many of the best restaurants in Maine as his clients (Primo, Hugo’s, The White Barn, the Harraseeket, Café Ufa, Excelsior in Boston, among others), the matsutake he saves for his special customers, chefs like Rob and Sam who appreciate its unique flavor and who love surprising their guests with an unusual delicacy unusually prepared.
A few moments after Rick’s arrival, we were heading into the mountains, a place whose name I can’t reveal except to say that it was so secret that it had taken the special pleading of Rob and Nancy to wangle me an invitation. The night before, on the phone with Rick, I had made the mistake of asking him casually where exactly we were going. He sighed. “Michael,” he said after a long pause, “I could tell you…but then I’d have to kill you.” Although he was joking, it was my first lesson about foragers: they are close-mouthed, and necessarily so as their living depends on the long, slow accumulation of special, very intimate knowledge-- the season and especially the location of foods that cannot be cultivated, only found in the wild.
A few hours later, miles from any village, river, or other landmark (I didn’t even know what state we were in), Rick pulled off the road. As we got out and put on our boots and knapsacks, Nancy grinned and spread her arms to the heavens. The clouds had vanished, leaving in their place a blue sky and bright sun, which prompted Rob to grumble, “We could have ridden the bike!” Rob the chef magically turns into Rob the secret motohead on his days off, and, indeed, he and Nancy, both in dark shades, jeans and jean jackets, Nancy with a bright green kerchief holding back her long black tresses, would not have looked out of place on a Harley that day.
Rick was again hurrying us along, this time up the steep bank on one side of the road and into the woods. There was no trail, no marked entrance, and, for the rest of the day I would find my head swiveling this way and that, trying to figure out how Rick knew where he was and where he was going.
“If you see moss, is that a good indication of where you’ll find them?” Rob asked as we started to climb through tangles of blueberry and accumulated deadfall, over large granite boulders slippery with lichen.
“No.” Rick answered. “Mushrooms grow where they want to grow, where they feel comfortable being.” And with that Zen-like remark, he doubled his pace straight up the face of the steep slope, the rest of us huffing and puffing behind. Almost at the top he stopped and looked around.
“So how did you find this place?” I asked him.
“Well, I started about ten miles back that way,” he answered, pointing down the long valley that spread out below us. “I’m not religious or anything, but something points me in the right direction. See, here,” he said, pointing to the trees at the top of the slope, “here the trees go into beech and oak, no hemlock, so I’m not going to bother going any further.” Later, he would explain that many mushrooms grow in symbiosis on the roots of trees, but only certain trees. This is why Rick carries binoculars, to survey the surrounding landscape, and sometimes a GPS, when he is scouting new territory. Of course, as he’ll tell you, it is not just knowing the trees, but the orientation of the land to wind and sun, the make-up of the soil, the drainage, and especially the weather. “If it rains for three days in July,” he told me, “I know ten spots where I can go a week later for lobster mushrooms.” And no, he won’t tell you where those spots are even if he will reveal very generally his methods. (In this he reminded of an old Frenchwoman, Marie-Josée, my neighbor when I spent some time in that country a few years back. During porcini season we would talk for hours about mushroom-hunting and mushrooms, what they liked and how many she had found. Not once did she vouchsafe a single specific place that I might find them, however.)
Rick hopped a few hundred feet back down the slope and waited for us to gather around. “Now we start at the bottom, and first you look up the mountain and let your eyes kind of try to see them against the ground. They like the slopes at this time of year, and you find them in groups, growing in a line or a circle. They look like little white heads popping up out of the moss. See? They’re all over the place!” We didn’t. He pointed, then walked a half-dozen paces to one side and bent over a sparse bed of moss and rock, out of which barely protruded what looked like several pale round lumps. He pulled out a knife, knelt, dug carefully down, and then held out his palm to us.
On it lay the first matsutake of the day, a white stalk about an inch and a half in diameter and about four inches long which bulged out into a wider knob at one end. The knob was almost beige, and covered with darker scales. “This is what we call a #1,” the highest and most expensive grade. “See, the cap,” he touched the knob, “hasn’t begun to open up yet.” As the mushroom matures, the cap changes shape, spreading out from a dome to a flatter circle, with gills on its underside and a thin veil stretching from its edge to the stem. He pointed to a ring of light flesh just under the cap. “That’s the veil, which hasn’t come out yet. A #2, it’s just started to open, and you can see the veil.” He knelt again and cut a few more, leaving the smallest and carefully tamping the dirt back into each hole and replacing the moss after he removed each one. “That way there’ll be more next year.”
“The #1s are more pungent, spicy,” Rob explained, “the ones that are more opened up, the #3s and #4s, they’re more user-friendly,” with a milder flavor and less intense smell, he meant, and therefore more appealing to those, like myself, who were used to the more earthy, darker flavors of mushrooms like porcinis and portobellos. We passed the matsutake from hand to hand, and when my turn came, I lifted it to my nose and inhaled deeply. It had a very rich, very intense, almost spicy smell that reminded me distantly of exotic spices like asafetida, cumin, mustard seed, and nutmeg, the whole overlaid with a hint of those heavy perfumes made of things like camphor, musk, patchouli, or sandalwood.
“I’m going to go up higher and grab some up there. You guys think you can find some down here?” he asked mockingly.
“The first time Rick brought us here,” Rob explained, “we couldn’t find anything! So he drew a big circle on the ground and told us to stand in it.”
“Well, they weren’t finding them very well. They needed the help.”
“We still couldn’t find any,” Nancy added, laughing, “And it turned out Rob was standing on one!”
“I treasure the ones I find without you pointing them out to me.” Rob cracked. We found another bed, and, when I looked up, Rick had vanished. “They’re not like chanterelles,” Rob said as we worked, digging down around the stems and slicing them off below the level of the soil. “When you find one, you find a bunch, and they’re big and heavy, too.”
This was true, as, a few hours later, we retraced our steps to the car, two plastic shopping bags bulging with the results of our labor, more than thirty pounds of matsutake. ”It’s my favorite mushroom to cook with,” Rob was saying as we slaked our thirst. “It’s different from every other, the king of mushrooms, and from Maine. To have something so decadent that you just yank out of the woods….” He looked at the overflowing bags and smiled, and I could tell he was thinking about cooking with them. What might he make, I asked. “It’s very dense, the flesh, so you have to slow cook it in a wet environment. If you sauté it, it gets hard as a rock. I might make a matsutake consommé, with button mushrooms. Or sous-vide it,” meaning seal it in a plastic bag, “with butter, thyme, garlic, water. You simmer it for three hours. After that, you can freeze it, then slice it very thin. We make a lobster and matsutake dish like that, thin slices of each.”
Rick began to tell the forager’s equivalent of fish tales, except that these were true, the 47-pound hen of the woods mushroom he delivered to Fore Street the year before, and the trophy he had his eye on this year, still growing, that might even beat that. He also told us about how he’d been arrested more than once when the police, seeing him bound out of the woods with a sack of mushrooms, had assumed he was after things illegal. He’d once spent a weekend in the Rockland jail, waiting for the arrival of a DEA agent, who told the locals that their “drug seizure” was nothing more than common chanterelles, the only ecstasy the mushrooms capable of providing of the gastronomic variety. “Now I go and introduce myself, tell them what I’m doing. I’ve taught a lot of rangers about mushrooms, given them some to taste. They give me a wave now when they see me.”
He yawned, and said he had to be going. He’d been up since 4 a.m., his usual rising time in full season, when he spends 60-70 hours a week in the woods. Our expedition was only his second stop of the day. Climbing into his car, he turned and said, “Hey, you know, on the way in I saw a nice hen-of-the-woods on one of those oaks along the water there. Might want to check it out.” That would be just like Rick, spotting a mushroom out the window of his speeding car – and generously offering it to someone who shared his enthusiasm for all things wild.
Note: When I asked Rick what the best way was to get started hunting for mushrooms, he said, “Buy a guide, join a mushroom club, and go out on organized hikes with an expert.” Rick organizes edible mushroom discovery hikes, half and full day, for small groups in summer and fall. He can be reached at (207) 653-9554.
Open yearround, breakfast and lunch Tues.-Sun. 7am-2pm, dinner Thurs.-Sat. 5:30- 9:30. Hors d’oeuvres $3, first courses and salads $6-$9, entrées $10-$15, desserts $5. Reservations suggested.
Pull up in front of One Fifty Ate in South Portland—what was once a boatbuilder’s shed with, today, a working marina on one side and the neighborhood mechanic on the other—and your first impression might be that the owners have gone in for shabby chic in a big way. Adirondack chairs grace a narrow, creaky porch right off the sidewalk, the screen door sags, and the clapboards could stand a lick of paint, as my grandmother used to say. Happily, once inside and tucking into your first course, you’ll discover there is nothing shabby or overly chic about the food. The café is owned and run by a loose cooperative of five chefs, bakers, and pastry artisans --Josh Potocki, Allison Reid, Sonny Swanberg, Bob Johnson, and Guy Hernandez, former restaurant comrades who migrated from North Carolina a few years ago. If they have one thing in common, it would appear to be the refreshing notion that simplicity is paramount, something reflected in everything from the décor to the china and most apparent in the unpretentious menu choices and their presentation.
The single, high-ceilinged room holds but twenty-five diners at tables whose tops are made of dull steel. Funky art interrupts bright walls of yellow and green, and, in the back corner, shelves hold colorfully packaged bulk restaurant supplies. The dinner menu is a long card the size of an envelope, three choices each of five courses, the descriptions of each dish somehow more intriguing for their brevity: “macaroni salad”, “trout and fresh succotash,” “down home tomato pie,” and “long cooked chicken and rice,” for instance. The wine list is equally succinct, never more than dozen modest, fairly priced bottles, mostly whites and reds chosen to complement rather than overwhelm the food and as likely to come from Spain as Sonoma.
Although working kitchens open to the dining room are quite the rage in high-end restaurants these days, one gets the impression that here, where a half wall and a pass through allow diners to glimpse some of the action, necessity dictated the design. It is a small space, wildly active, and one from which spill all sorts of tantalizing smells and sounds, stimulating the appetite just as much as the plate of 158’s own absolutely fresh, highly aromatic sourdough bread that arrives at the table shortly after you do.
Though they may subscribe to a “keep it simple” philosophy, this does not mean these chefs’ dishes are overly plain or lacking in flavor. One starter, for example, arrives on a small oval plate, three slices of cold boiled potato, each with a dollop of warm crème fraîche, and then a half teaspoon of intense, salty salmon caviar. Or that tomato pie, which has but five ingredients – a butter pastry crust, fresh tomatoes, homemade mayonnaise (yes, mayonnaise), a sprinkling of grated parmesan, and an afterthought of basil. The flake of the crust, the sweet bite of the tomato, the rich mayo, and the sharper flavors of the cheese and single herb all combine to show just how intense and satisfying simplicity can be.
One Fifty Ate began life as a bake house, taking over what had been an expensive Italian restaurant. (Today, the bakery lives on as the Neighborhood Bake House and Market at Willard Square, another of their cooperative ventures.) Josh and Allison, the original partners, began two years ago baking bread, bagels, scones, and muffins, moved into serving lunch, then expanded into a dinner service, taking on the other partners in the process. “We’ve been working in restaurants most of our lives,” Josh says, reeling off their combined CVs, an impressive list of southern Maine’s better venues, Fore Street and Street & Co. among them. “We don’t want to be that.” He explains emphatically. “We’re not trying to be that.” The choice of what kind of food to cook was obvious to all of them from the start. “Allison and Sonny and I, all of us, we really loved our grandmothers’ food. We all had incredible grandmothers and are passionate about keeping their food alive. They cooked so simply. I make a lot of my grandmother’s recipes—pirogis, stuffed cabbage. That tomato pie is from Allison’s family. The slow cooked chicken and rice, that’s a riff on one of Guy’s dad’s recipes.”
A short menu offers them other benefits as well. They can take advantage of truly seasonal foods (grilled late-summer peaches and prosciutto, anyone?), and thus offer a wider variety of choices, particularly for those from the neighborhood who may stop in just for a few appetizers. “We started out changing the menu weekly,” Josh observes, “but a few dishes we’ve kept on so we can work on them. If you just have a dish on the menu for a weekend, you can’t fine tune it.”
While they may be cooking their grandmothers’ creations, that fine-tuning is also in abundant evidence. Take that old standard, macaroni salad, here a separate course. It is served in a modest white cereal bowl, it is made with little pasta elbows and bits of pickle, celery and onion, but right there all resemblance to that picnic standby ends. The pasta is cool, the sautéed lump Peeky Toe crab meat on top warm from the pan, the whole sauced with a delicate vinaigrette laced with tarragon, chives, and peppery buds of fresh thyme.
Simplicity is, of course, a double-edged sword. French cooks say, “Sauce hides a thousand sins.” Here, there is no sauce, and each dish must therefore rise or fall on the merits of its few ingredients and how they come together. Consider that succotash under the herb-crusted trout filet. In many restaurants, it would be a mushy filler while here it is summer on a plate – crisp green and wax beans, melting butter beans, sweet corn, a bit of tomato and all of these fresh, bright flavors knit together with scraps of salty bacon.
The desserts, too, will take you back to another era. At the end of summer, chocolate bread pudding, peach dumplings, and blueberry sour cream pie were on offer, and they certainly brought me back to my grandmother’s kitchen. The dumplings are simple balls of biscuit dough, almost steamed in the peach juice, and the dish, like the bread pudding, which tasted more of rich cocoa than chocolate sauce, is not overly sweet, a pleasant change. At the bottom of the menu, too, they like to throw in the occasional surprise. “If you like those kinds of desserts, savory and sweet together, well, Alison makes an incredible olive oil cake drizzled in basil syrup,” Josh says.
One thing noticeable right from the moment you walk in, and one of the best signs you’re in for a good meal, is that the staff seems to be having as good a time as the diners. After opening the wine at the table, the cheerful waitress, Elizabeth, began pouring the glasses right off. Catching a perhaps puzzled look at the absence of the cork-sniffing, first sip of approval ritual, she smiled and shrugged. “We’re not that kind of a place; we just pour it. We’ll take it back if you don’t like it, don’t worry!” Needless to say, the wine was fine, as was the whole experience of eating there, a neighborhood joint with no pretensions and modest in all respects except the caliber of the food on the plate.
Yves Jouffreau-Hermann of Clos de Gamot, one of the winemakers I had been writing about for the previous two years, invited me one late winter day to go along with him to the Maison de Vin, the regional administrative offices of the appellation of Cahors, to attend one such dgustation d'agrment. He invited me because he thought it would interest me and because he had taken it upon himself to ensure that my education in the French ways of wine was as complete and varied as possible, particularly if I were going to write a book about it. The jury is generally made up of winemakers, wine wholesalers, an enologist or two, and a few of the local officials; today's group was going to taste five ross, two dry whites, and one sweet white, all of whose makers hoped to be able to put "Vin de Pays du Lot" on their labels, and thus get two to three times more euros per liter than otherwise.
By 10a.m. most of the members were milling about outside the tasting room, gossiping and trading news about the previous harvest and how the new wine was coming along. Here, by the way, if you're picturing some quaint 18th century stone building with old wooden floors and smoke-blackened beams, you can give it up right now. The Maison de Vin is one of those unfortunate blocky, stucco-covered 1970s abominations, all concrete and steel, with all the charm of a hospital, an antiseptic place where, glancing about into offices and rooms, my first impressions was that I might as well have been in a state welfare office or tax department, so little was wine in any form in evidence.
Monsieur X, who was the ringmaster of the day's ceremonies, finally arrived with the key and let us in to one of the oddest spaces I have ever seen. The room was sixty feet on a side, entirely open, with a modest platform at one end. The rest of the room was taken up by what looked like library carrels in rows, basically wooden desks with walls on the left and right but, in front, not a wall but a wide railing whose purpose was a mystery to me. Monsieur X invoked the gravity of the day's events, handed out scoring sheets, and the jury, some 15 strong, each took a seat at one of the carrels, as did I.
Earlier, on the drive in, Yves had explained that he and his wife, Martine, volunteered every year to participate because they thought it was important - important to stay in touch with their fellow winemakers and what they were doing, important to maintain the quality of the wines of their appellation. Even so, it was burdensome. The jury didn't just gather, taste, grade, and leave. No, before the first sip was gargled and spat, the two had gone through six half-day workshops that began with an examination of the physiological and behavioral bases of wine tasting, its techniques and methodology, and ended with test tastings at which benchmarks for the various criteria had been set. Test tastings? Benchmarks?
"Well, take acidity, especially in a white wine." Yves said. "When is a white wine flabby - lacking acid, and when is it sour, with too much acid?" Essentially, and here I am simplifying to an extraordinary degree what is a subtle and complex process, they had tasted together samples of wine manipulated in various ways to sketch out rough benchmarks for the various descriptors of how the wine looked ( la vue - its appearance), smelled (le nez - the nose), and tasted (la bouche - in the mouth). For acidity, a sample might have either naturally lacked acid (confirmed by testing) to fix the low end, and then been doctored with increasing amounts of citric acid to establish the upper end. The descriptors within each category can describe things quite obvious - the color of a ros should not be orange but some shade of pink, and definitely not red. They can also be maddeningly opaque: the four descriptors for a ros under "Nez"are intensity, cleanness, finesse, and complexity, and ross are the least complex wines to judge!
We sat, each in a carrel, each carrel outfitted with, to the left, a miniature stainless steel sink whose faucet was controlled with a foot pedal, to the right a translucent light panel whose illumination helped us judge the color of a wine. Corks began to pop, and, from my place in the back row, I then heard the first notes of a what became a chorus of clinks, the gentle scrape of wineglasses being swirled on the stainless steel of the tabletop, the distinctive whooshes, gargles, and spitting as the room began to taste en masse, the whole punctuated with the periodic susurrus of various sinks going off and on, throats being cleared, and the muted words of tasters talking to themselves.
I was just wondering if I should stand up and ask for some wine when a disembodied hand appeared at the front of my carrel and slid a bottle labeled only with a numbered tag along the front rail. I poured a sample, then slid the bottle to the right, where another disembodied hand reached for it. We were tasting the ross first. I looked at my tasting form, my fiche technique,which asked me to rate first the appearance of the wine on a scale of 0 to 5 in two subcategories of intensity and orange-ness. Intensity. Hmmm. The wine was very pale pink, so I gave it a 2, acceptable. Orange-ness? Yves had told me that an orange tinge in a ros is a sign that it is already beginning to oxidize, the constituents that give it its color already coming apart and falling out of the wine. In other words, the orange is a sign of a poorly made wine. This ros had no hint of orange about it, so I gave it a 4. And then the next bottle appeared. I glanced down at my fiche, noting that I had four more evaluations to make under Nez, and a further seven under Bouche.I skipped to the next sample, quickly pouring, swirling, and then sniffing.
Intensity, cleanness, finesse, and complexity. I could handle that. I stuck by nose in the glass and inhaled. Yaggh! Now, here's a thing about tasting new - five months old-wine. It stinks. Literally. Many of the leftover chemical constituents of fermentation do not have a pleasant odor. Given sufficient time, they disappear all together, and the ordinary consumer has no idea the lovely buttery/vanilla notes of their chard were once masked by the unforgettable pong of a teenage boy's gym socks. Yves again: "You have to taste past the stink, Michael. The odor of fermentation, that sits on top of the wine, but you can still perceive what else the wine has to offer." He was right, of course, and when I went on to taste this sample, it confirmed what my nose had been telling me. This wine had a fault, a rankness in the nose and mouth that signaled something had gone wrong during its making. I failed it down the line.
By this time, I had passed on two more bottles without even trying to taste them, deciding to concentrate on the Bouche descriptors in the next sample, a white. Intensity, acidity, fruit/floral, bitterness, richness, persistence of the alcohol, and something called franchise, which I never did figure out. I swirled and smelled, took a sip, spat, sipped and swallowed, passed on the next two bottles untasted, and set to work. Okay, right off, this was a very light wine, both in color and body and richness. After an initial burst of fruit in the mouth, it just sat there. Not enough acidity. It had a sugary quality rather than a sweetness I could tie to any flavor (vanilla has sweetness, for example, as do all the jam fruits), and, being so light and flaccid, there was no persistence of taste, or alcohol, on the back end. Failed.
I had just begun to take up the last sample when, as if on cue, everyone else rose and handed in their sheets, then gathered in small groups to discuss their scores. Of the eight wines we had tasted, four failed. Bummer. That meant their makers would have to sell them, probably in bulk, as vin de table, for pennies a liter. They were not worth the cost of the label, bottle, and cork.
I related my amazement at the speed with which the others had tasted, the whole event having taken less than fifteen minutes from start to finish. "It is a thing of first impressions, Michael." Yves' wife, Martine, advised. "You shouldn't think about it too much, just react to what is in the glass." She is right, I'm sure, but I'm still thinking about it.
]]>The subjects that have drawn me in as a writer-so far, shipbuilding on the Maine coast, the life of a rural French restaurant and its village, and the winemaking families of this book - are all bound up in tradition and authenticity. My experiences have led me to conclude, in broad strokes, that our customs and traditions don't just have a value, they have a price when they are lost, and it is never a bad thing to examine them in detail, to deeply consider the implications of that loss, the price we pay when a world open to us is closed to our children and their children after them. Within each book, I have shared my observations, in particular looking at those rare phenomena of the modern world in which the old ways stubbornly cling to life, enduring and adapting. Some kinds of history, it turns out, are pretty hard to kill.
Today, in every winemaking country, there is an epic battle raging which has everything to do with these notions. The press identifies the combatants variously as the New World vs. the Old World, or technological winemakers vs. traditional winemakers, corporate agribusiness vs. the small winemaker, "international" style, varietal-based wines vs. appellation wines. Simply put, it is far easier for a corporation to sell a standardized, branded product line with its predictable price points, production costs, and return than to bring to market something, like wine, which, by its very nature, tends to vary every single year. What the ordinary consumer does not realize is that the outcome of the first skirmishes of this battle is already determining what is in their glass, what they can buy at the market. More nefariously, what they also don't realize is that, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it is now possible to manipulate wines in a thousand ways - with rot retardants to yield riper grapes, with laboratory yeasts known to produce certain flavors, with reverse osmosis machines to remove water or alcohol, with oak chips or tannin powders added to the fermenting tank, for example -- to create wines that have trademark tastes and smells, wines that have been, in effect, standardized, too.
Traditional winemaking is built on the idea of appellation, that the actual place from which a wine comes - its landscape, geology, and climate, the way the vines are tended, the centuries of savoir-faire that the family winemaker brings to his craft, that all of these are more important than the kind of grape he is growing. Many Americans, however, tend to associate their tastes with a particular kind of grape, and our winemakers (and more and more foreign ones, too) are happy to cater to our desire to see zin, or chard, or merlot, or cab painted boldly on the front label, and, once the bottle is opened, even more boldly on the palate. Beyond uselessly broad geographic areas, we do not have appellations here, and besides, the whole idea of appellation is one which arises out of hundreds of years of winemaking experience and history, neither of which we yet possess. (A valiant group of mostly smaller California winemakers are fighting the legal and cultural battles to begin to limit and regulate what can be called, say, "Napa" wine, but they've a long row to hoe and are meeting with fierce resistance from the Gallos, Diageos, and Constellations of the region.)
We are a notoriously impatient people, and, in a rush to establish our own identity in wine-trampling the traditions of other cultures in our haste-I believe we are making a mistake. We need to learn to walk before entering the sprinter's blocks, to listen and take what is good from others instead of defensively running them down as old-fashioned or behind the times. The world is a large enough place for the expressions of thousands of winemakers, but that huge variety, that lovely chaotic landscape of wines as various and distinct as the landscapes they come from, that is under threat.
As a consumer, your choices determine the future. The supermarket wines will always be there, unchanging, branded monoliths. Go to your local wineshop. Avoid any place where every shelf is stuck with tags enumerating which wine guru gave what pointless grade to the wines. Do you let the waiter order your dinner at the restaurant? The furniture salesman choose your living room sofas? Ask. Taste. Learn. Above all, enjoy. Wine is supposed to be about pleasure, not an onerous burden fraught with risk. Remember that, and you can still have lots of fun while doing good, too.
]]>Open year-round, Tues-Sat, 5pm-close.
Although Maine abounds in humble eateries, it is rare to find a restaurant both unpretentious yet ambitious at the same time, particularly off the beaten track in Waterville. Porte Rouge, which takes up the ground floor of an old house off College Avenue, began a year and a half ago as chef Wes Johnston’s culinary school final project, one that has drawn in the whole family and looks to keep them busy for some time to come.
Stepping through the red door – Porte Rouge, in French -- on a cold winter’s night, the first thing that draws the eye is the crackling fire in one corner, a comfortable sofa to its side. The waitress, who turns out to be Wes’ mom, Marilyn, invites you to have a seat and warm up before showing you to your table, one of only eight in a space that could easily hold more. The room is cozy, intimate, with simple touches – rich plum brocade under the white linen tablecloths, muted light from old-fashioned chandeliers and wall lamps, heavy swagged curtains to keep out the cold– that bring to mind Grandma’s house in its unprepossessing comforts.
That simplicity extends to the à la carte menu: a soup, three or four choices of first and second courses and desserts, a modest range of wines presented on a cart rolled to your table with no folderol and less ceremony. “It’s unusual.” Wes explained charmingly. “But most of our customers want their wine by the glass. I’m trying to catch up on the wine list, but I only just turned twenty-one. My dad and I are working on it together.”
Dark-haired, baby-faced, and filled with earnest, genuine enthusiasm for his craft, Wes is prepared to go at his own pace, and to adapt his food to his clientele. “I don’t have a huge urge to do more than twenty-five dinners a night. Then the quality goes down.” He said. “This is a meat and potatoes community, and people expect certain things” when they go out to eat, he continued, explaining his generous servings and interesting side dishes. Indeed, the vegetarian main dish (there is also always a vegetarian entrée), a phyllo-wrapped cheese, oat, and vegetable strudel, came with, yes, a few roasted potatoes, but they were tiny, purple-fleshed, and accompanied by a ragout of daikon radish, shiitake mushrooms, and baby corn. Meat and potatoes with a twist – and without the meat, although so robust was the dish that its absence was not noticeable.
Catering to a community of simpler tastes, however, certainly does not prevent him from slipping a little elegance onto every plate. A pan-roasted shrimp cake, nicely crunchy on the outside and packed with Maine shrimp on the inside, came garnished with a half-dozen plump fries, but it was the accompanying corn and tarragon relish that made the dish. Squash soup seems to crop up on restaurant menus with the first frost (and is often greeted with as much enthusiasm), but Wes’ rich maple-pumpkin velouté, served in an oversized plain china coffee cup with no floating bits of this or that to distract from its intense flavors, reminds you what this simple soup can be.
While this chef’s classical French training may be muted in what he puts on the menu –pork and lamb loin, filet mignon, and herb-crusted salmon being the other main dishes on offer that night, you only have to look under his meats to find that pillar of Gaullic cuisine, the sauce, in decadent abundance. Happily for us, no one seems to have told him that such rich essences are out of fashion, and, even better, he makes them as they should be made-- using the pan your meat was cooked in so all those lovely cooking juices end up in the final product, along with lots of butter! You will find your fork returning, as if of its own volition, to that dark pool for just one more taste long after the last bite of meat has disappeared from the plate.
That love of sauce continues on into the desserts, which can be either quite simple or downright complex. The tropically-colored five-flavored sorbet sits in a pool of caramel, the cheesecake (whose crust manages to re-create the crunch of an Oreo but with about ten times more chocolate flavor).
Two notes that Porte Rouge hits just right were things noticeable in their absence. How refreshing to find a menu whose every ingredient is not endlessly pedigreed with provenance and weighty place names from half way across the country. Most of Wes’ meat comes from Joe’s Meat Market, of which he says, “If you live in Waterville, well, it’s been around forever and you just know it’s got the best.”
He also has a light touch with the use of seasonal ingredients, which are there in abundance on his late fall/early winter menu but not in a way that hits you over the head. “I just try to make a menu that, yes, is seasonal,” he said, “but that isn’t a fad, that won’t lose its style that quickly. I draw from colors and textures. For this menu, I concentrated on color. I wanted you to recognize that the leaves are changing color and so is the food on the plate.”
It’s hard not to like such a refreshingly simple approach, particularly when the result is a very accomplished, satisfying meal for which you haven’t paid a king’s ransom and which is served with a great deal of charm—by Mom.
Open year-round, Mon-Sat, 5pm-close. Soups and salads $6-$8, first courses $8-$12, main courses $17 - $28, desserts $6. No reservations.
Pull up at Joshua’s Restaurant in Wells on a Friday night after dark, and you immediately have the impression that a warm sanctuary awaits you on the other side of the door. A restored 1774 house of sober visage, warm light spills from the ground floor windows and doorway, and peeking around the back, a wall of more windows, those of a recent addition, give you a glimpse of happily nattering diners at tables on one side and a working kitchen on the other. Once inside, your impressions are confirmed: floors of wide pine and bright maple, old brick fireplaces, and Indian shutters in two open rooms which take their colors, if not their atmosphere, from the Colonial palette. To the left, a cozy bar beckons, often the refuge of latecomers who can enjoy a full meal without feeling left out of the action. To the right, a large room opens before you: waitresses and waiters in nicely formal black and white bustle about with plates and bottles of wine, the air is filled with auspicious aromas of cooking, and a wrong turn at the far end reveals the kitchen in full press, its proximity adding a nice energy to the room.
Josh’s mother, Barbara, runs the front of the house, and that white-haired fellow glimpsed lending a hand here and there is Mort, his father, who is also the restaurant’s farmer. This is not an affectation or a hobby, for in many ways it seems, the restaurant is almost an outgrowth of that organic farm not five miles away, which the family started more than thirty years ago and from which they made a living selling vegetables and baked goods to restaurants from Ogunquit to Portland.
“I was raised on the farm.” Josh says. “I played in the fields, and all of our food came from it. If you wanted to eat something, it was out in the garden. We also had organic beef, pigs, chickens.” It was where he learned to appreciate food in its natural state, “that spring lettuce is so buttery it almost melts in your mouth, but then in the fall, it has a meatier taste to it.” It was where he learned the art and craft of farming and raising animals, how to butcher chickens and pigs, all experiences which instilled in him a deep respect for natural ingredients so evident in his cooking.
Thirty years old and self-taught, he spent eight years cooking in the restaurants of others, in Oregon and Ogunquit, before setting out on his own a year ago. In keeping with its very American setting and his own upbringing, Joshua’s plates are unfussy and honest, with nary a trace of “tall food” or other pretense. It is a place where you can almost always identify exactly what you are eating because it has not been pureed, sprouted, strained, jellied, stuffed, foamed, preserved in aspic, or otherwise manipulated so much as to lose its natural essence. “We’re farmers.” Josh says simply. “Food should speak for itself, which is why I pay so much attention to purveyors, because I don’t want to have to do a lot to what comes through the door. And when it’s from our farm, I never have to worry.” Out of season, and for things Mort can’t otherwise provide in sufficient quantity, Josh relies on largely organic produce and meat, fish, and poultry from local sources.
Everything here is made from scratch, which is one reason the restaurant is only open for dinner. Josh’s day starts mid-morning, when he has the chance to work with one of his favorite ingredients, organic flour. “I love making bread,” Joshua says. “It gets my day underway. And I know that sometimes the customers don’t realize it, but the first thing they put in their mouths is the first thing I made that morning.”
You can start with generous salads or a bowl of the daily soup, but it is a little further down the menu that Josh begins to strut his stuff, with first courses like chunks of tender lamb with mustard and coriander served skewered on rosemary stems which infuse them with their flavor on the grill. Or the seasonal house flatbread smothered with an ever-changing variety of interesting combinations: grilled asparagus and pancetta, lobster and pesto, roasted red pepper and grilled shrimp, fresh mozzarella and basil and garlic oil. As Josh says, “the flatbread is just a vehicle!” The mushroom confit—sliced portobellos, shiitakes, and whole tiny buttons slow-cooked then tossed with a truffle-scented butter and shaved parmigiano reggiano—is a rich, dark testament to the glory of that chef’s mantra – “slow and low does the trick.”
Except in the depths of winter, when he works with a reduced staff, he also offers “sliders,” a trio of small tastes served on a bird’s eye maple cutting board where the “vehicle” can be anything from endive leaves to crostini to a homemade potato chip and the toppings a bit of grilled lamb with chutney, an oyster or thin-sliced scallop, or a small brochette of beef or fish.
There are eight to ten substantial entrees to choose from (and always a vegetarian choice), with two stalwarts always on the menu. One, and probably the most traditional thing he serves, is a filet mignon served with a classic sauce of pinot noir and beef glacé. The other, his most popular dish, is Atlantic haddock in a caramelized onion crust spiked with chive oil, an earthy wild mushroom risotto balancing the lightness of the fish. You can find unusual but not outrageous pairings here--pan roasted scallops with pumpkin risotto and roasted beets and mushrooms, for example, which are so good they prompt the home cook to wonder, why didn’t I think of that? Or, in warmer seasons, perhaps a seared halibut over sautéed spring greens, with roasted ramps and fiddlehead ferns simply dressed with tomato vinaigrette in a pleasant jumble on the side.
Because the portions here are ample but not overly so, you’ll probably want to choose from the short list of desserts. There are richer selections like maple walnut tart and fudge pie --two things this family has been making for more than twenty years, but also simple fruit cobblers, pies, and crisps, all served with the restaurant’s own vanilla ice cream.
By the time you walk out the door, you will certainly understand Joshua’s motto: “Fresh food, simply prepared.” You will also be replete, your daily travails assuaged by an experience good for body and soul, and one which keeps our farmers farming and our fishermen fishing. What more can you ask of a meal than that?
]]>After I was invited down to Portland for an oyster tasting at the Old Port Sea Grill, I first tried to remember the last time an oyster had passed my lips. It had been quite some time, but not for any reason I could put my finger on. If youre like me, oysters are just not what pops into your head when you think about going out for some fresh seafood. In the pantheon of the foods of Maine, many the bounty of our clean, cold waters, we tend to think, particularly in warmer weather, of the steamed lobster, crab rolls and cakes, scallops, steamers, plates of mussels, fried clams, and grilled sea bass and salmon. Why not the oyster?
Quite simply, theyre not inexpensive, got a bad rap long ago as potentially harmful, and up until quite recently hadnt been raised locally in any quantity for decades. If you could get them, you werent sure how fresh they were or where they came from.
Well, I am happy to report that Jeff Leeber has set out to change all that and to help re-establish the Maine oyster to its proper place served on the half-shell, garnished or not, over a bed of cracked ice, at his restaurant on Commercial Street. Half the fun is going there on a busy weekend night, sitting on a comfortable stool at the long bar, a gracefully curving affair of smoky polished concrete, watching as the counterman plucks fresh oysters from the deep well of ice and opens them in front of you. Two slates hang above it with the varieties available that day, a parade of names local and exoticGerrish Island, Spinney Creek, Chesapeake Bay, Kumamoto, Quilcene-- that tempt the wise into trying a selection.
Sitting at a corner table one afternoon with Leeber and his equally intense young chef, Chris Bassett, a friend and I slurped our way through everything on offer as the two filled our heads with their accumulated oyster wisdom. As Chris labored with his stubby oyster knife, several things became quickly apparent. They are obsessed by oysters and go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that what is set in front of you is the cleanest, freshest, most carefully handled oyster youve ever eaten. Clearly, theyre hoping youll come to share their obsession.
Right now I have seven varieties on the menu, four from Maine, Chris told us, and we can have as many as twelve during the summertime to give people a taste of all the different waters. Each specific water you pull the oysters from makes them taste different, just like a grape that may be the same variety but grown in a different region will make wine that tastes very different.
As well as providing a rich mix of river, bay, and gulf environments, Maines cold waters have one important advantage. Oyster producers in more southerly locations, particularly the Gulf of Mexico, dont have the luxury of having these beautiful deep cold waters that make a natural refrigeration process. Jeff said. With good tides and unpolluted water, Maine oysters, in his opinion, are naturally cleaner and fresher. Those same waters, combined with our fierce winter weather, however, can be a curse as well as a boon. The Sea Grills oysters come from places as various as Freeport, West Bath, Eliot, New Haven, and Edgecomb, among others, but are not always available in the depths of winter. Some are harvested by scuba divers, Jeff continued. Sometimes the waters too cold, the currents are too strong. As well as a good variety of Maine oysters, we do source from far away. he added. The Kumamoto, you dont see that in most places. Thats a seedling originally from Japan and now harvested in Washington State.
Finally, Chris set the oysters in front of us, perching the plates on raised stands, so you dont spill the liquor as you lift it to your mouth, he said. They were as different in appearance as one could imagine. Some had ruffled shells like a pleated skirt while others were as flat as a shovel blade. The most popular oyster at the bar is the meaty Damariscotta, from New Haven, a medium-sized, not overly rich, or even salty oyster when compared with the Penobscot, which has a stronger flavor and more of the tang we associate with this shellfish. The tiny, dark Kumamotos are not much bigger than your thumb, but have an intensity that provoked my friend to call them the single malt of oysters. By the time we got to the sweet, almost woody Gerrish Islands, I was reminded of a chef telling me once that the experience of eating an oyster with its liquor was like taking a bite of the sea. Sweet, salty, woody, musky, intensely oysterish, the particular words werent that important. What was fun was to taste and see what came to mind.
After the first plate had been emptied and I could begin to pay attention to more than the flavor, I began to notice a few more details of the thought that had gone into their preparation. First, each oysters shell had been scrubbed by hand with a brush. As they serve fifty to sixty orders of a half-dozen each night, thats a lot of hours spent at the sink. But they had also been cleaned inside, naturally, which is why there were no unpleasant crunchy surprises when you bit into them. Youre putting them in your mouth, Chris said, and a clean oyster, no sand or mud on it, that makes all the difference. Some shallow-water varieties go through a further process called depuration, where, theyre suspended on racks in flowing sterile sea water so that the oysters purge themselves of sand, grit, and contaminants, he explained. And then, finally, we check the body of the oyster after we open it and give it the nose test, just to make sure.
Lemon, shallot mignonette, or the thick house cocktail sauce (with a dollop of pure horseradish to turn up the heat), the choice of garnish is yours. But, when it comes to oyster protocol, Jeff is not at all a purist. Hot sauce, lemon, just horseradish it depends on what youre in the mood for. The same goes for the accompanying beverage of choice. The oyster can stand up to a lot of the lighter, white wines, he said, shrugging. But lots of people like a good beer, champagne, or even vodka. For the truly adventurous, the bar offers oyster shots, the oyster plunged into a shot glass of iced vodka with a dash of hot sauce, the whole to be downed in a gulp. The Sea Grill also offers a full menu (and more than fifty wines, too), but what you wont find on it, with a very rare exception, is oysters cooked in any way. After two hours in Jeff and Chris company and with the taste of the sea still fresh in my mouth, I found that perfectly reasonable.
The Old Port Sea Grill and Raw Bar is open seven days a week serving lunch from 11:30-3pm, dinner from 5pm-10 pm Sunday to Thurs, 5 pm to 11pm Friday and Saturday. Jeff has another location, the Falmouth Sea Grill, 215 Foreside Road Route 188.
By Michael S. Sanders
From Ogunquit to Castine, Maine certainly has its share of restaurants reaching for the culinary heights. None, I would wager, has ever dared to put sweetbreads, calves’ brains, tripe, and lamb’s tongue on the same menu, to serve you a single scallop as an entrée, or to prepare an entire five-course meal without a starch ever appearing on your plate. (I exaggerate, but only slightly). Enter chef Erik Desjarlais, a twenty-seven year old, largely self-taught rebel from Portsmouth, New Hampshire who may well change some of your notions of what a good meal can be at Bandol, his restaurant on upper Exchange Street in Portland’s Old Port.
Is Portland ready for the New England equivalent of a one-star Michelin restaurant—translation, a $60 five-course prix fixe menu sans wine? It certainly sounds ambitious, if not downright audacious. And yet, when you sit down at the table, its starched white tablecloth and white Limoges china playing simply off the black-painted trim and chairs in the intimate storefront space, you get the first inklings that someone has put a lot of thought into the whole experience. I notice three unusual things right off. There are only eight tables for twenty diners in a room that could pack in double that number. The menu is good reading all by itself. And a short fellow in chef’s whites at the counter in the back just off the kitchen appears to be not just fussing over every plate but also tasting a bit of it (handed to him on a spoon) before it goes out.
In keeping with its Provençal namesake, Desjarlais’ menu is heavy with French, if not Mediterranean, influence in both his offerings and his presentation. The prix fixe (there is a nine-course tasting menu as well) includes a light starter, entrée, main course, cheese, and dessert, generally with four to six choices of each. His food is loosely in keeping with the season and includes his interpretations of a variety of standards from all over France, such as, for our mid-winter meals, squash soup, snails in garlic sauce, foie gras, pot-au-feu, cassoulet, saddle of rabbit, and the aforementioned specialty meats. Along the way, however, the diner is in for many a surprise, all of them pleasant.
The first are the amuse-bouches, those unexpected tidbits meant to awaken your taste buds to the task ahead. A single petal of crunchy fried potato smothered with Iranian sevruga caviar over crème fraîche is followed, leisurely, by a single perfect oyster brimming with its liquor, arriving perched on a bed of coarse sea salt. “Little salty bites,” Desjarlais calls them, “And the best way to start the meal, with a small taste of bubbly.” The meal has hardly started, and he’s giving food away. Why? “It makes you feel welcome. It enhances the experience!” he said emphatically when we met a few days after my second meal there.
By the time the first courses appear, you have begun to relax and get into the rhythm of an experience in which half the fun is watching the food arrive and then admiring it. It takes two people to serve a soup here. One waitress delivers the empty bowl, a wide-lipped affair with a small dimple at its center. In it, in this case, lies a little package of duck confit. The second waitress promptly pours—from a white teapot the size and shape of a pear—not more than a half of a cup of brilliant orange, piping hot, squash soup over it. Twelve spoonfuls later, and my friend is staring disconsolately into his empty dish. Looking around the table, you realize that all the portions are small. Not miniscule, but small. My order of braised lamb tongue was three thin slices half-crunchy, half-buttery, hidden under a handful of crisp mâche bathed in a warm, tangy vinaigrette nicely cutting the richness of the meat. I want more.
“I’d rather have you finish your plate and wish you had two more bites,” the chef told me later, smiling just a bit cruelly. “But then, the next course comes, and by the end, you’re fully satisfied. I trust my servers to let the diner know that, yes, you can eat five courses and be happy. The entrée isn’t going to be huge. It’s going to be what I feel is the right portion size to go with the rest of the meal.”
Here, beauty, intensity, and flavor triumph over quantity every time. The cassoulet, for example, explodes all convention, consisting of perhaps a quarter of a duck breast gleaming pinkly in a robe of green cabbage leaves and one small piece of intense duck confit over a scant ladleful of white beans. Poussin, spring chicken, is two miniature drumsticks and thighs, perfectly roasted, on a bed of tangy bear’s head mushrooms and roasted salsify. Explaining the portion size and the missing starch, Desjarlais says, “I want my customers to be able to have breakfast the next day. There are certain things I feel you don’t need a lot of, filler, and the extra plate of mashed potatoes that comes with the six ounce portion of steak, I just don’t do that.”
The one thing served, I thought, in a veritable lashing, was the foie gras, on the menu in four different incarnations in my two visits. “In some other places, you get this really tiny piece, it’s gone in one bite, and you feel ripped off. They’re saving money because foie gras is expensive. But you don’t get the full experience.”
You want the full experience? Try the Torchon of French-grown Goose Foie Gras and Seared Duck Foie Gras with Medjool Dates and Toasted Brioche, basically, a hot and cold foie gras sandwich with date jam. This artery buster amply demonstrates two things: Desjarlais is a fool for foie gras and this is one time when too much definitely can be not enough. The torchon technique (literally ‘dishcloth’), Erik says, “is the closest thing to eating raw foie gras, the simplest way to eat it.” The process involves cleaning, binding, curing, and poaching the foie gras, many steps and much time over four days. Pan-seared foie gras is all over town, he points out. “There’s more gratification in the torchon technique because of the work that goes into it.”
Therein lies one key to this chef’s thinking, and by extension, to the excellence of his food. He doesn’t care how long it takes, and he’ll use the best ingredients even if it makes his food expensive. His menu is thick with specialty products and producers: Niman Ranch pork, Jamison Farm lamb, Bobo Ranch young chicken, Sunset Acres rabbit, Périgord black truffles and Alba white truffles, to name a few. “It’s important to know where the animal comes from,” Erik explained, “that it has been treated properly. And, to say it is Niman Ranch proves to the public that it comes from a reputable source [particularly] if I am serving braised, stuffed pig’s head. My servers know where things come from, how they’re raised, why it’s important. It’s part of the education we’re trying to give our diners.”
He goes on to talk about the preparation of tripe, brains, and sweetbreads, peeling lamb’s tongue, preparing that stuffed, braised pig’s head– all of which involve very intensive, time-consuming, and highly specialized techniques you don’t find in your typical restaurant kitchen. (Don’t shy away from these unusual dishes; tripe and sweetbreads both were not only delicious, but a refreshing change from that steak.) He is someone who clearly loves the mechanics of cooking, the process. “These are things that challenge me, that challenge my sous chefs, that challenge my servers who have to tell people what they are.”
The attention to detail evident in the first three courses carries on through the last two, with perfectly-ripened triple crèmes like Époisses and Vacherin spooned from their wooden boxes at tableside, and unusual American cheeses from around the country. Desserts—from insubstantial wisps of Varlhona chocolate mousse to authentic if petite tarte tatin and crème brulée and fruit sorbets—are works of art, light afterthoughts.
Two notes of particular interest: the wine list and the service. In keeping with the name, the wine list is, but for a lonely handful of Californians, a good half a hundred French wines with a heavy emphasis on the Languedoc, Provence, and Rhône regions. Many you don’t find very often in these parts, all are very fairly priced, and about a dozen are available by the glass and half-carafe, the latter a thoughtful innovation rarely seen in Maine. The table service strikes just the right balance between attentiveness and discretion, with very European touches evident throughout the three hours of your meal. You don’t return from the washroom to find your food cooling at your place, and you’ll find your napkin has been replaced if you do get up.
About the bill, which arrives accompanied by a final touch, a clutch of handmade sweets: it helps to think of your evening, instead of dinner and the theater, more like dinner as the theater.
Originally published by Downeast Magazine.
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