Rolling in Radicchio : California Farmers Cultivate the Palate of the Future With Vegetables of a Different Color--and Edible Flowers

A MIDDLE-AGED woman in a straw hat is stalking the aisles. She stops, sniffing an unmistakable perfume. Surreptitiously, she snatches up one of the jewels on display. She stands back, away from the crowd, and puts a big, beautiful strawberry in her mouth. She chews slowly, closes her eyes and murmurs, “Oh, my God.”

She is one of 1,300 restaurant chefs, produce wholesalers and impassioned food fans who have paid $20 a ticket to gather at the Oakland Museum and consume the best, freshest locally grown fruits, vegetables and even edible flowers at the sixth annual Tasting of Summer Produce. Alice Waters, owner of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, believes the show is the “most important food event in the country.”

The Los Angeles version, A Summer Tasting of California Farms, will take place July 31 at the Wholesale Produce Market downtown. Unlike the Oakland show, the Los Angeles tasting is not open to the public, which gives it a more commercial flavor: It really is a trade show. But the produce is just as exquisite, the wine pours just as freely, and exhibitors from some of the city’s trendiest restaurants serve free food. This year, City Restaurant / Border Grill again will participate, as will Sonora Cafe, Jasmine’s, Malibu Adobe, Trees, Chez Melange, 1000 Wilshire, Tuscany, Stepps, Ritz Cafe, Palm Court, Columbia Bar & Grill, Bistango, Angeli, Tumbleweed and Trumps.

The Los Angeles and Oakland tastings, combined with increasing numbers of local farmers markets and a growing supply of good restaurants that demand and pay top dollar for high-quality fresh and unusual produce, are making it possible for California farmers to live off the land and harvest a respectable profit.

Sibella Kraus, a former Chez Panisse cook who is now a produce wholesaler in San Francisco, organized the original Oakland exhibit. She recognized a need among restaurant owners for fresher, more unusual produce than could be obtained from wholesalers. Coincidentally, many local growers also were looking for markets that could distribute higher-quality vegetables. The tasting provided the direct link between the two. “Quality, freshness and flavor--that’s what this event is about,” Kraus says.

At the Los Angeles tasting, growers will bring traditional late-summer glories: red, yellow, purple and brown peppers; red, yellow, green and pink tomatoes; blood oranges; avocados, bananas the shape of fat, stubby fingers, and beans of every size and configuration, from large striped Dragon’s Tongues to -inch-thick haricot verts.

Small growers, in particular, would probably welcome more such tastings. Both north and south, growers credit these events with helping them reap real profits in an industry plagued elsewhere by uncertainty at best, disaster at worst, such as this year’s devastating drought.

One particularly satisfied tasting participant is Scott Murray, who with partner Fritz Klein operates Pacific Sunrise Produce in San Marcos, near San Diego. Murray helped organize the first Southern California tasting in 1986. “The first year I better than doubled my business,” he explains. “The second year, we added 100% to our customer base, and we expanded from 3 to 26 acres.” Murray believes that the tastings are an important showcase for growers like himself, who aim at the lucrative specialty market.

Murray’s latest offerings, which he will bring to the Los Angeles tasting, include the cape gooseberry, a small orange fruit with a tart-sweet flavor, and Malabar spinach. Looking to the future, he is planting an additional 20 varieties of bananas in his fields and hopes to eventually expand production to Mexico and the Caribbean.

“There are more than 6,000 different vegetables in the world, but the Western world has only about 200 that are popular, and most people could not name 60,” he says. “Twenty years from now, these (unknown vegetables) will be a big market.”

Unusual produce is becoming increasingly popular. Some restaurants and markets offer a rainbow of potatoes--purple Peruvians, yellow Finns, rose firs. There are pink and red lettuces, yellow watermelons, and gold, white and red-and-white-striped beets. The past few years have seen the blossoming of some of the most beautiful edibles of all: flowers. Pansies, nasturtiums, calendulas, tuberous begonias and roses are showing up on dinner plates as garnishes, floating in soups, or forming salads that look like Technicolor dreams. Maxine Sisson, who owns Maxi Flowers a la Carte, says she can’t keep up with the demand for the flowers that she grows on two acres in Sebastopol. “It doesn’t have to be a $50-a-plate dinner for someone to appreciate a flower in the soup,” she says.

The pursuit of new varieties of fruits and vegetables can be intense. Will Souza of Babe Farms, whose family has been farming for 106 years, devotes a large portion of his 1,600 acres in Santa Maria to baby vegetables, white carrots, green-meat radishes and orange cauliflower. This cauliflower “is supposed to have five times the beta carotene of a carrot,” Souza explains. He found this anomaly through a Japanese seed company, but he also works directly with French and Dutch seed companies to be first in the ground with the Next Big Thing.

Souza believes the production of high-quality, unusual produce has not come into its own yet. “(Supermarket operators) are showing interest. Here in Santa Maria, they are putting in a specialty line of produce in one of the chains. I didn’t think I would ever see that happen. One of them told me he thinks (the passion for specialty crops) is just coming on and won’t peak until 1991.”

Three months ago, Lucky Stores Inc. made available to its store managers in Southern California what it called a “broad selection” of baby vegetables, including teensy corn, squash, bok choy, beets and turnips.

Each manager determines whether or not these appear in his produce section. “We’re looking into edible flowers, too,” says Lucky’s communications coordinator, Judie Decker, at the corporate headquarters in Dublin.

Frieda Kaplan can claim some responsibility for specialty produce appearing in Vons and other supermarkets. This year, her Los Angeles-based wholesale-produce company, Frieda’s Finest, added purple potatoes and coquito nuts (like baby coconuts) to its line of 250 items, which included passion fruit, pepinos, feijoas and kiwanos. The latter three are melons from New Zealand. “As American health consciousness continues to grow,” says Ann Henry of Frieda’s Finest public relations department, “Americans are going to need to expand their tastes.”

Taste expansion is what the tastings are all about. Says City Restaurant co-owner Mary Sue Milliken: “It’s kind of an inspiration for everybody involved. Farmers get a boost and motivation, and restaurants get inspiration by being able to see all the produce. For the whole duration of a tasting, my mind is going a thousand miles an hour.”

There are thousands of farmers in California, but only about 50 or 60 will participate in the Southern California tasting in July. Although these growers and other tasting participants have little influence over the average American family dinner, there are enough gourmands who care passionately about specialty produce to make it a growing business.

They savor mizuna and mache, know the difference between radicchio and Belgian endive and have even learned to pronounce them correctly (mahsh; MIZZ-oo-na; and rad-EEK-ee-o, not rad-EESH-ee-o).

In the mid-’70s, Le St. Germain in Hollywood had to fly in its French sorrel from New York. To a chef in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s, fresh haricot verts were simply a fantasy; he couldn’t get them.

Today’s food lust, afflicting much of California and isolated points east, can be traced to a few innovative restaurants determined to obtain haricot verts, among other delights, and to the tastings, which helped put the chefs eye-to-eye with the farmers willing to grow those itty bitty beans.

One such grower, Stuart Dickson of Stone Free Farm in Davis, estimates that he can coax a $250,000-a-year gross from six acres, selling the produce to restaurants he has met at the tastings.

That ain’t hay.