Anything That Moves (7 page)

Like humans,
Liometopum apiculatum
ants are opportunists; they will eat anything they can overpower, and, because they do not sting, they tear their prey to shreds. (They are also ranchers, tending flocks of aphids and defending them from lady beetles, in exchange for the aphids' surplus honeydew.) They burrow under boulders or at the base of trees, and live in colonies of up to fifty thousand members. Traditionally, they were hunted only by experienced
escamoleros
—the irrepressible image is of an ant with a Tejano hat with a lasso—but, according to Julieta Ramos-Elorduy, a biologist who studies food insects at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, their desirability has invited poachers, who overharvest and destroy the nests. The ants, which are most readily available in the state of Hidalgo, are also found in the southwestern United States. High prices have inspired North American foragers to get in on the business. “Recently at San Juan market in Mexico City, monopolizers informed us that small airplanes loaded with tons of the product arrived from the United States and sold it to the highest bidders,” Ramos-Elorduy wrote in a 2006 paper.

You can't really buy
escamoles
in America. The head chef at José Andrés's Oyamel, in D.C., has scoured local markets for them without success, though once, on a tip from a lady who overheard him complaining to his barber about their unavailability, he discovered some frozen Thai ant larvae (labeled as “puffed rice”) in an Asian grocery store in Virginia. José Andrés himself told me that he considers
escamoles
a delicacy, and if he could get them he'd put them on the menu at Minibar, his acclaimed six-seat restaurant.

At the first sign of spring, I called Quenioux. He had just closed Bistro LQ because of a problem with the lease, and said he was trying to get some
escamoles
to serve at Starry Kitchen, a downtown lunch counter owned by Nguyen and Thi Tran, who had previously run it as an underground supper club out of their apartment. Quenioux was about to start a pop-up there called LQ@SK. “Basically, you need to smuggle them,” he said of the ants. His connection, a Mexican man living near Hidalgo who brought them in foam cups in his carry-on luggage, didn't work anymore; the last two times Quenioux had placed an order, he'd prepaid, only to have his shipment confiscated by Customs at LAX.

A week before the soft launch of Quenioux's residency at Starry Kitchen, he told me that he had a line on some
escamoles.
He knew a guy who knew a guy who would bring them across the border from Tijuana; we simply had to drive down to a meeting place on the U.S. side and escort them back. We set a time, and I went to a street corner in Pasadena, near where Quenioux lives; when I arrived, a red Toyota Corolla was waiting. The window came down partway, and I heard someone call my name.

Originally from Sologne, France, Quenioux—pronounced “kin
you
”—grew up hunting, learned pastry in Paris at Maxim's, and worked in Nice alongside the German-born chef Joachim Splichal, who brought him to Los Angeles in the early eighties. He is a gentle person, with huge, pale green eyes, a bald-shaved head, a set of prayer beads around his wrist, and the endearingly antisocial habit of seeing everything he encounters as potential food: the deer near Mt. Wilson, which he hunts with a bow and arrow; the purple blossoms of the jacaranda trees; a neighbor's chicken, which he killed and cooked when it came into his yard. Usually, he eats chicken only when he's home in France; he thinks American chickens are disgusting.

Certain laws just don't make sense to Quenioux, like the one that prohibits him from serving a dessert made from chocolate hot-boxed with pot smoke. “What's one gram of marijuana, just to have the smoke infuse the chocolate?” he said. When he read in the news that there was to be a mass culling of fifty thousand wild boars that had crossed from Texas into Chihuahua and were destroying everything in their path—not fit for consumption, warned a government official—his first thought was, Shit, can we get a few of those? “Tamales!” Daniel, his sous-chef, said. “With salsa verde!”

As for the
escamoles,
“We do it for the culinary adventure,” Quenioux said. He has made blinis with ant eggs and caviar, and a three-egg dish of
escamoles,
quail eggs, and salmon roe. He has fantasized about making an
escamole
quiche, and, using just the albumen that drains out when the eggs are frozen, meringue. His signature dish is a corn tortilla resting on a nasturtium leaf and topped with
escamoles
sautéed in butter with epazote, shallots, and serrano chilies, served with a shot of Mexican beer and a lime gel. Insects are, to him, like any other ingredient: a challenge and an invitation. “Let's do gastronomy with bugs,” he said. “Let's make something delicious.”

Quenioux talked about
escamoles
all the way down south—their delicate eggy qualities, their wildness, their unexpected appearance (“condensed milk with little pebbles in it”), the responsibility he feels to train the American palate to accept them. “The insects will be the solution to feed all those masses, but how do you get insects on the daily table in America?” he said. “In the last twenty years, we grew here in America from iceberg lettuce to baby frisée, so the time is now.”

After a few hours, we arrived at a strip mall and parked in front of a drugstore, then walked toward the meeting place, a restaurant, where the
escamoles
were waiting. “OK, let's go,” Quenioux said, getting out of the car. “I've got the cash.”

The front door to the restaurant was open, and an old man with a drooping moustache was mopping the floor. “Hola,
señor
,”
Quenioux said. The old man pointed to a Dutch door, which led to the kitchen. Quenioux stuck his head in, and eventually a young woman wearing a dirty chef's coat and a white apron appeared. “You come for the
escamoles
?”
she said. “OK, I get for you.” She returned a minute later with a plastic shopping bag containing a large ziplock filled with half a kilo of frozen product. Quenioux handed her a hundred-dollar bill.

Getting back in the car, Quenioux opened the bag to examine the goods, a pale orange slush, scattered with clumps of oblong ant babies. “We got the loot!” he squealed.

•   •   •

T
he Starry Kitchen narrative, with its elements of amateurism, scofflaw pluck, and media savvy, is the kind of restaurant story you hear all the time these days. In 2009, when Thi Tran lost her job in advertising, she asked her Facebook friends what she should do. “Cook, cook, cook,” came the reply. Thi is first-generation Chinese, with a natural scowl. She is practical and modest, where her husband, Nguyen, who is Vietnamese-American, is boisterous. He often dresses up in Comic-Con-style costumes for food events, and displays a sign, referring to a spicy tofu dish that is a Starry Kitchen specialty, which reads “Eat My Balls.”

Inspired by Kogi—the Korean-barbecue food truck that started in L.A. and set off a national craze—Thi thought Vietnamese tacos might be good, and developed some recipes at home. Three weeks later, Nguyen told her, “We're serving out of our apartment this Sunday,” and flyered their three-hundred-unit building in North Hollywood. To him it was normal: like a lot of Asians he knows, he grew up eating in unofficial home restaurants. “In every ethnic neighborhood in L.A. there is someone doing something like this,” he said.

Within a few months, their apartment was the No. 1 rated Asian fusion restaurant on Yelp. (Providence, a fantastically expensive restaurant with two Michelin stars, was No. 2.) When the health department confronted Nguyen with the Twitter feed where he shamelessly touted specials and warned him to stop, Thi was unnerved, but Nguyen insisted that the intervention was a blessing. They moved the restaurant, which they had named after a popular Hong Kong cooking show, into a legitimate space in a large corporate plaza, and burnished their creation myth. “It increased our audience,” he told me. “We were seedy, and being caught validated that we really
were
underground.”

A week after the ant run, I was at Starry Kitchen, watching Quenioux get ready to serve the
escamoles
as an
amuse-bouche.
Nguyen bounded around, talking about his role in securing them. “I called everyone, from Laos, Cambodia, Thailand—all the sources I know got caught,” he said. He was thrilled about the air of the forbidden that the dish would confer. “It's going to be a great note to start on—not even the taste, just them knowing it was smuggled and it's ant eggs,” he said.

To complement a menu full of Asian flavors—teriyaki rabbit meatballs in miso broth, veal sweetbreads with shishito peppers and yuzu—Quenioux had decided to prepare the
escamoles
with Thai basil and serve them with Sapporo. “These are very spicy,” he said, placing an ample green nasturtium leaf on a plate. “I foraged them from my garden this morning.” There was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Just before the service, the waiters started to panic. “What am I telling them?” one asked. “I can't just go up to them and say it's ant eggs.”

“Tell them it's very exotic, and traditional in Mexico City,” Daniel, the sous-chef, said. I went into the dining room and sat down. “This is an
amuse
from the chef,” a waiter said, presenting me with the dish, a composition as spare and earthy as a Japanese garden. “It's smuggled-in ant eggs.” I rolled the leaf around the tortilla and bit: peppery nasturtium, warm tortilla, and then the light pop of
escamoles
bursting like tiny corn kernels. A whiff of dirt, a sluice of beer, and that was it. They were gone by night's end, but their fresh, succulent sweetness stuck with me. Unexpectedly, I had something new to crave.

I
got in 2K live crickets,” Brett Ottolenghi, the ostentatiously earnest, honest, perpetually worried young proprietor of Artisanal Foods, a fancy-food purveyor in Las Vegas, wrote me by text message. “Thinking I'd try to cook with them before offering to chefs. But the pen I made isn't working and they are escaping by the hundreds in my house.” Five minutes later, he wrote me again. “I think I'll have to live among them. There is no way I can pick up this many. A Chinese chef might help me cook some tomorrow.”

Las Vegas is among the top food cities in America, if you go by the number of superexpensive restaurants with famous chefs. Ten of the fifty highest-grossing restaurants in the country are on the Strip, and there are more master sommeliers in Las Vegas than in any other city in the country. Adam Carmer, the casino developer Steve Wynn's first hotel sommelier, described himself to me as “the No. 1 maître d' in town.” He says, “Other places, you might have four or five extraordinary restaurants in a state or in a country; here you have four or five in a hotel. For shoes, you go to the mall—that's what the food's like out here.” Almost forty million people visited Las Vegas last year. It is one of the places in the world where the outlandish ideas and hyperprecious ingredients of the food avant-garde meet the masses, and Ottolenghi is one of the people making introductions.

Ottolenghi specializes in the small run, the vaguely regulated, the hard to come by, and the about to be banned. He carries Utah clay, fresh Pennsylvania hops, and squid ink from Spain. One of his newest products, which he has yet to place, is
kopi luwak
—coffee beans gathered from civet droppings. The beans, which have an exquisite burnt caramel flavor, are extremely rare and can cost as much as $1,000 a pound. “I have some of the turds,” he told me, which makes presentations lively. He often says that he is on a first-name basis with three hundred and seventy chefs in Vegas—the executive chefs and sous-chefs and chefs de cuisine
at Jean Georges Steakhouse, Le Cirque, Daniel Boulud, barMASA, and dozens more—by which he may mean that he has forgotten their last names, or, if they are French, is unsure how to pronounce them. To the chefs, he is “the truffle kid”—for his first product, which he started selling online when he was thirteen—or Hamleg, owing to his tendency to walk through casino lobbies carrying the hairy, hoof-on hindquarters of a pig.

Because of its primary identity, as a place to gamble, Las Vegas attracts some of the broadest eaters in the world: high-rolling Asian whales. There are some who say that if the casinos were to stop serving shark-fin soup in the high-limit rooms—where it goes for $100 to $300 a bowl—the city's economy would collapse. But shark fin, a slippery, flavorless textural delight that is the pièce de résistance of formal Chinese banquets, is condemned by many as cruel and unsustainable. Sharks, whose numbers, including that of the “soupfin,” have diminished severely, are often de-finned live and then dumped back in the ocean to bleed out, get eaten, or drown. California outlawed shark fin in 2013, and there are efforts under way to ban it in Vegas. This is the kind of crisis that Ottolenghi calls an opportunity.

Among the many impostors in the food business, he hunts for authenticity. Don't get him started on what passes, in most people's minds, for cinnamon: the great majority of it is mislabeled cassia. He gets the real thing from its only source, Sri Lanka. But when it comes to shark fin, inauthenticity is exactly what he's looking for. He has found a company in China that takes tilapia tails—tail, like fin, is cartilage—and makes a faux shark-fin product that is identical in taste, texture, and appearance. There is just one obstacle: the customer. The whales, he says, want the real thing
because
it's rare. His next idea is to use sturgeon tails, which might prove desirable due to their prestigious association with caviar.

Ottolenghi prides himself on the fulfillment of outrageous and obscure demands. He has sourced pink pine nuts for Alessandro Stratta, the chef at Alex and at Stratta, two fine-dining restaurants in Las Vegas. “Just put them in my mailbox,” I heard him say to a tortilla-and-chili dealer who had located some in New Mexico. One Chinese New Year, he furnished the buffet at the Bellagio with four hundred pounds of fatted duck breast on less than twenty-four hours' notice. After the authorities forced Guy Savoy, a two-Michelin-star restaurant at Caesars Palace, to remove a popular guinea-hen-in-pig-bladder dish from its menu—the bladder was coming from a non-USDA-approved source—the restaurant turned to Ottolenghi. “They still get tons of requests for it, so they gave me the mission of trying to get domestic pig bladders,” he says. He called pig farms and slaughterhouses in four states. “I really exhausted every possibility. There's no way to get a pig bladder in this country—they're all ground up for dog food.”

•   •   •

S
everal years ago, Ludo Lefebvre, the dashing, volatile French chef who invented the pop-up restaurant and became a television star, was cooking at a restaurant in Las Vegas. He asked Ottolenghi for
piment d'Espelette,
a subtle chili pepper.
Piment
d'Espelette
is rare; the
zone de l'appellation,
in southwestern France, is only a few thousand acres. In powder form, the pepper can wholesale for $110 a pound. (Paprika is less than $8.) After initially working through an importer, Ottolenghi had decided to become one himself, making him, by his count, the third importer of
piment d'Espelette
to the United States.

That is how he came to spend a drizzly afternoon in the spring of 2010 in the tiny Basque town of Ainhoa, quizzing a young farmer named Claire about her production methods. Claire, who had rosy cheeks and a rippled Gallic nose dotted with moles, explained that they used only
pesticide biologique,
good bugs to eat bad ones. Chickens pecked among white plaster buildings with red tile roofs and peeling black shutters: Ainhoa's single architectural gesture. Claire invited us into one of the buildings and prepared a pepper tasting. As she swirled the powder in a little stemmed glass, causing it to clink—“Can you hear? It's very dry,” she said—she explained the properties she controlled for. The color should be a rich, oxygenated red, and the flavor, ideally, is a balance of fruitiness, toastiness, and
foin,
an aftertaste of hay. A Basque passenger of Columbus's, Claire said, had brought the pepper back from the New World.

The next day, Ottolenghi had a lunch appointment in La Alberca, six hundred kilometers away, at the headquarters of Fermín, the only Spanish producer of Ibérico ham approved by the USDA for sale in the United States. Ottolenghi was the exclusive source for Fermín products in Las Vegas. He woke at eight o'clock, checked the map, and set out optimistically. I had already been traveling with him for a few days and was afraid—of his navigation and of my endurance. Food people either stuff you or starve you. Ottolenghi, an ascetic, is a starver. At home, he often consumes little more than a kefir-and-raw-egg shake in a day. On the first night of our trip, we had stayed in San Sebastián, the Michelin three-star capital of the world, and I found myself alone at dinnertime, eating a grim vegetarian patty in the hotel dining room. Driving to La Alberca, we passed dozens of small towns and scores of restaurants without stopping to eat. I devoured bags of filling-station peanuts and, by the fistful, a loaf of soft gingerbread I had picked up in Ainhoa the night before.

In the late afternoon, we turned off the highway and onto a small road that hugged a mossy stone wall decked with wild red poppies and fried-egg flowers. On the other side was an oak forest. Young bulls bound for the ring relaxed in the shade. It was past four when we arrived in La Alberca, a pork-centric place where the hanging limbs and loins of cured Ibérico pigs serve as decoration for the tapas bars, and outside the church there is a statue of a boar, like a local saint. Just past town, we found the Fermín plant, an elegant structure built in the mid-eighties whose style referred to the area's medieval history: fieldstone facing, held in place by a loose lattice of half-timbers. Raúl Martín, a grand-nephew of the founder, led us down to a basement dining hall with tiled floors and an open fireplace, where Luis, a jug-eared cook with a double chin, was grilling cuts of pig meat: tenderloin, pancetta, ribs,
pluma
(“feather,” or loin tip),
presa
(collar), and
secreto,
a cut hidden away between the ribs and the fat. Rich smoke filled the air.

Ibérico meat is unctuous—up to 35 percent fat—and its most luxurious variety,
bellota
(acorn)
,
melts at room temperature. Bellota pigs, which are released into the forest in the fall to hunt for acorns, are so oily that they are known as “olive trees with legs.” Last year, Fermín slaughtered only five thousand bellota pigs, for a total of ten thousand hams, ten thousand shoulders. The hams cure for three years; the shoulders, which are bonier, take at least two. Retail shops charge $130 a pound for the ham. Bellota is what sells in Las Vegas.

Martín showed the way to a long wooden table piled with breadbaskets and wine and trays of chorizo and
salsichon
. Javier, a Fermín employee, joined us, and everyone started to gossip about ham, as Luis brought over platter after platter of cooked meat and Ottolenghi stood at an iron
jamonera,
cutting thin slices of bellota for the group.

“We sent today a bellota to the royal palace, for the heads of state of Europe,” Javier said. Ottolenghi nodded, and told an equivalent story of Las Vegas aristocracy. Had the Spaniards heard of Cirque du Soleil? Yes, Martín said. “Every Christmas, Guy Laliberté, who started it, buys three bellota legs from Robuchon's L'Atelier,” Ottolenghi reported. Then Martín held up a vacuum-packed shank. “This is one of José Andrés's ideas,” he said. (The chef is an importer for Fermín.) “It's ‘
corderico'
—Ibérico-style lamb, fed on acorns and dried. This is the only one in the world.”

Early the following morning, we watched the pigs get cleaned, stunned, cut, and hung on hooks from tracks that traced loops on the ceiling. Large men chiseled at them as if they were blocks of stone from which something more aesthetically pleasing could be coaxed. Then Martín showed us the room where the hams were cured—he called it “the bank”—and the breeding farm, so that we could see the Ibéricos alive. They had thick black hides, like toy rhinos, and brayed mournfully as they rutted and fought. A farmworker handed Ottolenghi several acorns of the variety that the bellota gorge on in the forest. Seeing an opportunity to impress his chefs with the depth of his knowledge, he pocketed them. Leaving Fermín, Ottolenghi asked me if I'd ever read
The Jungle
. “It's my favorite book,” he said. “It's all about how efficient the meat business is at using every part.”

•   •   •

O
ttolenghi, a Millennial-generation foodie who grew up watching exotic-food shows on TV, comes from mushroom people. His parents, Arturo and Hannah, seed the logs in their backyard in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with shiitakes; morels and chanterelles grow wild. Once, when the family was living in Ohio, before Brett was born and when his brother, Alex, was an infant, Arturo spotted a hardwood forest out the car window. Suspecting that it could be harboring chanterelles, he pulled over and found two solid acres of them. As Arturo tells it, “I picked a few, took them home, and called Chanterelle, in New York, and asked for the owner. I said, ‘I know this sounds crazy, but I'm in Ohio and I have some fresh chanterelles—do you want five to ten pounds?' She said, ‘Whatever you can ship. Anything I don't use, my friends at Dean & DeLuca will use.' Hannah and I parked Alex in a cradle with a mosquito net over it and packed up as many boxes as we could, took them to the airport, and that same evening all over lower Manhattan people were eating our chanterelles.”

On a family trip to San Francisco, when Brett was twelve, he ordered a pasta dish with truffle oil on it. This led to a conversation about the high price of truffles in the United States. At the time, there was only one major importer, Urbani, an old Italian company that still dominates the market. Brett decided to see if he could compete. He was already something of an entrepreneur. In second grade, he sold Pixy Stix and gourmet lollipops at school, in violation of campus rules, and was sent to the principal's office. In seventh, he started importing laser pens from China for eleven dollars and selling them for twenty, and wound up in the principal's office again.

Brett and Arturo started the Truffle Market, an online venture selling truffles that they imported from Italy, in 1998. When
Newsweek
mentioned that their company was selling white truffles for $60 an ounce, compared with Dean & DeLuca's price of $106 for the same amount, business increased tenfold. “I was making thirty percent on it and I thought it was great,” Brett says now. “I didn't even know that was a small profit.” With perishable products, you have to make a killing; at some point you will inevitably lose a shipment to spoilage or to overeager Customs officials. Brett remembers that Fareed Zakaria placed an order, as did the actor Heath Ledger. Robert Mondavi, the winemaker, began to use the Ottolenghi mushrooms for his truffle parties. But the Ottolenghis' best customer was a young woman in Palm Beach, referred by the manager of the Palm Beach Country Club, who ordered a pound of white truffles a week for the entire season, September through December. She hated truffles, but a business associate of her father's, an oil executive from Houston, liked to fly to Palm Beach for the weekends, and he expected to have a plate of them waiting on his bedside table. He ate them like apples.

In the food business, Brett found youth to be an inconvenience. Rather than present the Truffle Market as a father-son venture, as Arturo had hoped, Brett insisted that his father pose alone for the picture in their first catalog. “To buy a truffle from a guy named Arturo Ottolenghi, that makes sense,” Brett says. “Not from Brett, who's thirteen.” For a while, he styled himself “J. Brett Ottolenghi” on his business cards. When he expanded the Truffle Market and renamed it Artisanal Foods, in 2008, he used an unsmiling picture of himself, sporting a suit jacket, a three-day beard, and a pair of fake eyeglasses, which he likes to wear for work, particularly when he's meeting a chef for the first time. “I probably have twenty pairs,” he says.