snail tale

Sunset Room valet Lala Amina Nil keeps the Porsches humming in the parking lot.

Some are born to escargot, others have escargot thrust upon them. Such is the story of Walter Wall, 53-year-old owner of Growth Resources, a San Diego concern that consults with growers about organic fertilizers. “Snails can really scar citrus fruit,” Wall says by cell phone, as he ambles through a Ventura lemon grove. “But if you’ve got an organic orchard, you can’t use bait.”

The solution, it turns out, was to do what we all do--only on a larger scale. Under Wall’s direction, workers blanketed the blighted citrus groves, plucking thousands of petit gris snails from their hiding places. (Like many of us, the snails are not native, having been brought over by snail-snacking Portuguese in the 1700s.)

“We ended up with a lot of snails,” Wall notes. So he took them home to graze on organic lettuce and powdered milk. A few weeks later, Wall placed a box of the well-fed snails in front of Michel Richard, chef of Citrus on Melrose Avenue. The chef “put his fingers to his lips, blew a kiss and said, ‘Ah, petit gris,’ ” recalls Wall. “He hadn’t seen snails like these since he was a boy in France.” Richard bought 500 dozen on the spot. Soon Wall was shipping his gastropods to restaurants across the country.

Wall now limits his snail biz to a select few, including L’Orangerie, Citrus and Cicada. Does he eat escargot? “I have a hard time choking down those big French snails, but I love petit gris.”