Global Flavour, Local Colour

“Bruce, you must visit Italy, It Is Your Home.” Those words came to me from an eccentric and charismatic gentleman of great taste named Sante Losio. I met him through his company, Fiume wines; he was importing great organic, Italian wines and our restaurant, Millennium, had one of, if not the largest, best and most thorough exclusively organic wine lists in North America. On the evening in question he was enjoying his first vegan fine dining experience, and like many new diners at that restaurant, was learning that vegan and fine dining were not mutually exclusive terms. I was asked to join him for dinner that evening as the most logical liaison between our food and wine list. While working as Sous chef for the restaurant, I had also been enjoying the “job” of learning about wines and specifically our particular wine list, even to the point where a great deal of decision making regarding it had become my domain. In fact, it had been my suggestion that we take our list, which had been well represented for organic selections up until that point, that last step to becoming a specifically organic themed list. I even wrote the mission statement which they still use:

Millennium is committed to providing the highest quality epicurean experience with a minimum impact to our environment. Naturally, this mission extends to our wine list. Many people are unaware that wine made from organically grown grapes is not a new product that exists only in fringe markets. "Organic" is simply a new name for an artisanal farming method; in fact, the great winemaking regions of Europe would not have survived the centuries without the practice of sustainable agriculture. There are many names on our list that may not be familiar to you, but even more surprising will be the names that are. Many of the world's top wine producers are coming clean about "clean" farming and this list will grow to include the finest of their wines. To the best of our knowledge this is the most comprehensive completely organic wine list on earth which, in our opinion, makes it the best wine list as well.

Of all my accomplishments in the industry, outside of the branch, I am probably the most proud of that achievement. As I have written on this blog and as I wrote in “The Artful Vegan,” Millennium’s second cookbook of which I was a co-author, bringing the knowledge and understanding of organics to any larger audience was, and is, my life’s work.

Sante Losio is a fellow traveler in this journey; his commitment to organic wines was deep and heartfelt...an emotional act by a rational man. Sante, his heart, and his family are from Italy. When I share the anecdote of our meeting with friends, I imitate his rich Italian accent, but cannot reproduce the gravitas or the intention behind the words. For Sante to tell me Italy was my home was for him to claim me as one of his own, a comrade, a brother in arms.

When I was buying wine at Millennium, Italy had over 54,000 hectares of organic vineyards compared to a few hundred in the entire U.S. Italy is also home to a movement called Slow Food, a name which speaks for itself. Though I am not Italian, outside of the vegetarian world, the majority of my fine dining training is in Italian kitchens; I am proud of this experience and feel (I hope fairly) that it gives me an insight in to at least a small bit of Italy’s culture. In my experience, the Italian cooking tradition values flavour over presentation, freshness over technique (without diminishing the importance of presentation or technique) and quality of the basic ingredients above all else. Italian chefs are brand snobs, quick to ask which canned tomato or tinned anchovy were used, which prosciutto, which parmesan... This is to say, I don’t think it was my technique that impressed him. I think it was our ingredients.

Millennium could be described as an extension of the farmer’s market. Our produce was some of the best in the world. Northern California has a long growing season, rich soil and an even richer recent history of organic farming. From the 60s to the present, what started as a handful of environmentalists ‘returning to the land’ has turned into a giant industry where small farmers are celebrated and elevated to positions of honor in a thriving food culture that values variety, flavor, freshness and a loving hand over the thrift, travel-ability and consistency of size and color that seems to govern the majority of the North American vegetable business status quo. And in that market, Millennium, a vegetable-focused restaurant, was monster; we bought directly from farmers and producers who were at the very top of their game, and, thanks to the unwavering leadership of our chef, Eric Tucker, were toe to toe with the top restaurants in California when it came to one on one farmer/chef relationships.

In my experience most people have forgotten or never experienced the difference the qualities that good local organic vegetables bring to food. I’ve heard people who taste these foods say ‘it tastes like something I had when I was a kid.’ And it does, it tastes like a memory of how good food used to be.

After meeting Sante, I was invited to participate in the first Italian Organic Wine Conference (a precursor to EcoWineFest) in Los Angeles as a judge. Our visit also included a dinner that paired these wines with a five course white truffle dinner. White truffles from Alba in Italy are one of the most prized foods on earth, often costing thousands of dollars per pound. If you’ve experienced them, you know why, if you don’t, I can’t possibly explain it. As a result of this event, and our meeting, Millennium was asked to participate in a series of dinners in the San Francisco area also featuring white truffles with a five course dinner and wine pairing of our own. I’d love to share that menu with you, but all I remember are a yuba braciole (it’s a long story), an Italian Merlot by Fasoli Gino, and a porcini flambé, which we presented in the dining room with bright, giant leaping flames. I also remember the overwhelming aroma of truffles seeping in and out of every pore of my being. I was so elated by the evening that I, to this day, value it as the single greatest cooking experience of my life.

When preparing for a wine pairing dinner, in this case a wine and truffle pairing dinner, there is a creative or brainstorming session that precedes the event. We smell, taste, discuss, imagine and relate. We open our minds to ideas that help us deepen our understanding of the wine and of the foods involved. What food makes this wine better? What is about this wine that makes this food better? We are creative, yes, but here's the thing, we must also look to tradition. We want to explore something new, but to do that well, we must also look back to the classic pairings and learn; there’s usually a reason some wines are never paired with some foods as well as a reason why some wines are always paired with others. To not acknowledge and learn from that would be to pretend that we, like the industrialist posing as a farmer, knows what is best without regarding the importance of what has gone before.

Millennium often offered dinners that paired excellent wines with our unique food; it was a great way to not only showcase our creativity, but to celebrate a small winery which usually meant celebrating both a farmer and an artist (two of my favorite things) at the same time. The synergy of wine and food, combined with the opportunity to create something new by their combination is also one of the most satisfying aspects of the trade of cooking. I remember each of these events fondly, as they were, more often than not, also a milestone in my personal journey.

Another milestone in that journey came when I finally followed Sante’s advice and visited Italy. Nicole and I spent three weeks in 2003 visiting Venice, Milan, and working on small farms in Tuscany and Piedmont. We were in Tuscany for the olive harvest and our hostess graciously treated us to a taste rivaling that of the white truffle, a fresh pressed olive oil at the source. I’ll never forget that flavour or the sweet herbaceous smell produced by burning the pruned branches from the ancient olive trees mingling with the salty Mediterranean air. We watched the sunset over the sea each night and worked each morning in a grove that had been tended by human hands for longer than the entire history of the country of my birth. Later, in Piedmont, we spent an entire day peeling chestnuts for a chestnut butter that, when it was finally ready, made the hours of burnt fingertips being torn by stubborn shells seem nonexistent.

Thanks to Sante’s advice, I had learned something about Italy by visiting. I learned that it is a place where tradition and an understanding of food are crucial. The farmers of an area know how to make the best products that can be produced by their patch of soil, because they’ve had generations of trial and error to sort it out. How egotistical it is for us to think our “industrial” farming could be superior to the techniques arrived at in this manner! The followers of traditional foodways know that the best drop of oil is the first, that the chestnut butter will be worth the work, that the best wine is made from a certain local grape, and that the cheese from this cow on this hill will need this much salt and that much time to age.

After visiting Europe, I came back to Canada with a vision; an idea of an old world restaurant in the new world. The branch is not an Italian restaurant. I do make fresh pastas and breads, I’m even curing my own prosciutto; but I also serve recipes from around the world, North America is not the old world, it is a melting pot of cultures and to not acknowledge and celebrate the wealth of recipes we have to choose from would be just as silly as eating at a McDonald’s in Paris. But we can acknowledge the old world and it’s tradition in another and perhaps more meaningful way: in our ingredients.

As I said, the branch is not an Italian restaurant, but I do serve spaghetti and meatballs, a dish which is at once Italian and new world, almost a symbol of the place at which those two worlds collide. My spaghetti is not Rusticella D’Abruzzo, arguably the world’s best product of that class; rather it is organic and Canadian, and still excellent. My tomatoes are not from San Marzano, they are Thomas’ Utopia, an Ontario company. My meatballs are made with local beef and my cheese is not from Parma, it is from the Oxford Mills Creamery, about 10 minutes from the restaurant’s back door. It is a simple dish, exactly like you’d find anywhere and yet nothing like one you’d find any where else; it is not expensive, and in many ways it is the perfect expression of my philosophy: simple, honest, local, comforting, at once traditional and completely new, and prepared with love and care.

When I met my business partners Brent and Jenn Kelaher, I knew I needed to prepare a meal that would show them that I had the chops, and that partnering with me would not be just some crazy idea. I could have wowed them with one of the baroque vegan presentations from my cookbook; I could even have presented white truffles with a porcini flambé. But instead I served them...you guessed it, spaghetti and meatballs. Nearly two years have passed since that meal and we are all still pushing forward and sharing that vision with whoever cares to see it. It is a vision of new world food with old world care; a bit of tradition with a dash of creativity, or, as we like to say, global flavour and local colour.

Later this month, I am excited to announce, we will be presenting our first wine pairing dinner with Featherstone Vineyards, an Ontario winery that seems to share some of our vision. They are an insecticide and pesticide free vineyard (unless you count Amadeus, the vineyard’s falcon and in house pest control system...) They’ve even taken the gutsy move of cellaring some of their wines in Canadian oak. I’m looking forward to celebrating their courage and craft and to enjoying an evening none of us will forget.

I still appreciate what Sante said, and value our friendship, but these days, in retrospect, I think he got it just wrong...what he should have said was “Bruce, you must visit Italy, learn from it, and bring it home!”