Cultivating Their Sources: Chefs and Their Gardens : Fresh Ingredients: Some chefs prefer to grow their own.
It’s a fundamental fact that no cook, however creative and capable, can produce a dish of a quality any higher than that of the raw ingredients.
--Alice Waters
For Ken Frank, this is the week tomatoes are due. If all goes according to plan, customers at his La Toque restaurant on the Sunset Strip, may bite into slices of tasty Champion tomatoes (“a good old American hybrid,” Frank says), dressed only with slivers of elephant garlic, some cucumber, a few leaves of fresh basil and a sprinkling of good extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper. Everything but the oil and salt and pepper will have come from Frank’s backyard.
“I don’t have enough time or space in my garden to grow everything for the restaurant,” Frank says. “But some of this stuff, specifically basil and tomatoes, you can’t buy as good as you can grow.”
The tomato eater who feeds on supermarket tomatoes, even upscale supermarket tomatoes, will instantly realize that Frank is not exaggerating after a bite of a Frank home-grown. It’s not that he grows hyper-specialized varieties; besides the hearty Champion (“I just got the seeds at the Hollywood Nursery,” he says), Frank grows two French varieties--”a really good, medium-sized tomato called Carmello,” he says, “and a new one I’m trying this year called Lorissa.” (The French breeds will arrive fashionably later in the season.)
“I’ve tried a lot of varieties--some with just stupendous fruit,” Frank says, “but they weren’t terribly efficient. Unique and pretty is wonderful, but there’s more to food than something that’s, you know, candy-cane-colored. I’d rather have something that produces consistently well and tastes great.”
The difference, then, is the immediacy of a just-picked tomato. Frank, who lives in Laurel Canyon, a few minutes away from his restaurant, usually picks the day’s harvest in the morning, just before he heads to La Toque for the lunch shift. Sometimes, he’ll run home between meals.
“I grow corn,” Frank says, “not very much, and certainly not enough for the whole restaurant, but a couple of times a year I’ll pick a little for special customers. If they’re coming in at, say, 12:30, I’ll run home just as we open at noon, pick it real fast, come back, and have the water boiling. That first half hour is like magic--the corn is so sweet, as if you’d dipped it in syrup. You almost want to say, ‘who put sugar on this?’ ”
Frank’s home garden, started in 1986, also produces tarragon, edible flowers (nasturtium and Johnny-jump-ups), lots of baby lettuce varieties, raspberries (“they’re descendants of raspberries my parents have been growing for 20 years, he says), peppers that Frank says are “hot as hell,” and lots of basil.
“I have a small restaurant, but I could easily spend $10 a day on basil,” Frank says. “So I figure at $60 a week, it’s worth planting five dollars worth of basil seeds. Besides, a lot of the time the basil you buy is ratty by the time you get it.
And commercial farmers generally don’t pinch just the top, which is the best part, they cut whole branches. Growing my own, I can pick it fresh the way I want it every day. It grows like a weed. In fact, when it really goes into production, from say, mid-July, through November, we give it away by the grocery-bag-full. It’s amazingly prolific stuff. Of course, during the winter, after the plants go to seed, I’m stuck buying it.”
Frank grows three types of basil: opal, or as Frank says, “the purple stuff”; cinnamon, which he says is “just seductively flavored”; and green basil, which he uses for pesto.
In his lettuce patch, Frank grows baby red romaine, baby bibb, and his favorite, lola rosa, a slightly curly red-leafed Italian lettuce. With these, Frank serves a mix of baby lettuce varieties, not as a salad basic (he has to rely on outside producers to supply the lettuce for his larger salads), but as an accompaniment to a special dish, or a palate perker in the context of a multi-course meal. Sometimes he’ll use the greens in hot salads, one with foie gras, and another with warm wild mushrooms and creme fraiche dressing.
But the most important rule Frank cooks by when using his own produce is: keep it simple. “It’s hard to do better than a just-picked tomato,” he says, “why muck it up?”
He has the same philosophy for the garden itself: “There’s not a drop of pesticide or chemical fertilizer in my garden,” he says. “There are no aphids, either. It’s all organic. I use chicken manure and fish emulsion, lots of compost. All the clippings from my garden get recycled. It’s the best way to do it. The Chinese have been organically farming for 4,000 years, way before agriculture became sophisticated. Now people are realizing, hey, you know what? They were right 4,000 years ago.”
But, Frank, who’s never comfortable being trendy (he’s still waiting for arugula to go out of style), isn’t a purist on the subject of organic produce.
“Honestly, ‘organic’ has never been the most important thing to me,” he says. “I think the whole business is overrated. I try to get fresh produce that looks good and tastes good. A lot of it ends up being organic, but you know, I get boxes of tomatoes from Mexico that aren’t organic. That’s life in business. And the organic stuff isn’t always better--sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, but it’s not automatically better. I’m not ready to say, it must be organic or not at all; we’re not there yet. We’re getting there. A lot of the big farming operations are going more organic. They’re finding that they don’t want to use pesticides and that people don’t want them. So I think everything’s moving in the right direction. But I’m not going to go on the rampage about it.”
It’s the fruit in this country that got Tindaro Pettignano into the garden.
“I’m shocked by the quality in the stores here,” says Pettignano, the chef and owner of La Pergola in Sherman Oaks. “It all looks very big and beautiful, but the taste is nothing.”
Pettignano, known as Tino to his customers, moved to the United States 10 years ago from Italy. He grew up in Messina, Sicily, where he worked in agriculture until he was 18. Then went into the restaurant business with his brother.
“In Italy the fruit also looks good,” he says, “but when people go to the store, they judge it by how it tastes , not how it looks. Sometimes fruit can be a little smashed, but it still gets bought if it tastes good. I think fruit is harvested more ripe where I come from--we give it time to get some flavor.”
It’s not surprising that when Pettignano decided to open a restaurant two years ago, he also started a garden.
“I grow my own thing because it’s so hard to find good things for the restaurant,” he says. “You buy lettuce in the store and then get some from my garden and the difference is enormous. After you know what the real thing is, you don’t want to buy the other stuff.”
But when La Pergola first opened, Pettignano didn’t have the space to grow everything he needed for the restaurant. His first batch was grown on the restaurant’s roof. Later he started cultivating the front and back yards of his house, which is just 50 yards from the restaurant; it still wasn’t enough.
Early last year he noticed an empty space close to the restaurant and started scheming. “I asked the lady who owns the land if I could put a garden on the lot and she said, ‘sure.’ ” Pettignano says. “She’s owned the land for 30 years and doesn’t want to build again; she told me I can lease it for as long as I want.”
With that go-ahead, Pettignano turned what was once a parking lot (“People were using it as a trash dump,” he says) into a lush, 6,000-square-foot garden.
“We’ve got corn, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, bell peppers, romaine and red leaf lettuce, arugula, broccoli, cauliflower, grapes, peaches, apricots, figs, strawberries, and really beautiful raspberries and boysenberries, real delicious. We make sorbets and ice cream with them,” he says. “And I make the garden look beautiful with flowers, too. I’ve got all these roses and sunflowers, so beautiful.”
It’s obviously a labor of love; Pettignano doesn’t save money by growing his own.
“It cost me a lot of money to set up a water system and close off a path around the garden,” he says. “I have a full-time gardener, too. And everything’s organic. I figure it’s cheaper to buy than to grow, but it’s so different.”
On certain specialized items, however, Pettignano does save money. “Swiss chard is hard to find,” he says. “One small case costs $18. But the ones I grow in my garden are big and delicious. And I can grow Maui onions in my garden, too. At the store they’re $6 a pound, but I was counting yesterday and I have 400 pounds of Maui onions--each one is one-and-a-half pounds.”
With his onions, Pettignano makes Maui onion soup or he grills them and tosses them in a field salad. “But I couldn’t do those dishes if I had to buy,” he says. “Those onions cost more than meat!”
He pauses to take a breath and then sighs. “You see,” he finally says, “the difference when you grow your own is enormous.”
