Anything That Moves (9 page)

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C
aviar—so dear, so highly controlled, so easily concealed—is the cocaine of food. It comes from the virgin eggs of sturgeon, prehistoric fish of massive proportions. The beluga, or
Huso huso,
is the biggest; it can grow to more than three thousand pounds, and live for a hundred years. The Caspian Sea once teemed with them; in the early nineteenth century, a twenty-four-foot-long female was caught in the Volga estuary.

People have been preserving sturgeon eggs for millennia; for the Phoenicians, they were a food of famine. But by the mid-twentieth century, caviar was a luxury good, an extra-special specialty item. “Even the Russians took part,” noted a report on the second Fancy Food Show, in 1956. “They displayed caviar aimed at exciting the palates of capitalists.” It takes around fifteen years for a sturgeon to mature. Theocracies and dictators were good beluga stewards, but with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, overfishing and poaching threatened
Huso huso,
along with other sturgeon species prized for their roe, with extinction. “Everyone with a rowboat is out on the Caspian tossing sturgeon into the backs of their boats,” a U.S. Customs agent told the
Los Angeles
Times
in the late nineties.

In 1998, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) started setting quotas on the harvesting of wild Caspian caviar. Some years, the amount deemed safe to take was none. In 2005, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banned the importation of beluga, which had recently been added to the endangered species list. Beluga prices spiked, encouraging smugglers and imposters. The less beluga there was, the more “beluga” there was: some of it real, some of it fake, all of it illegal. A Warsaw police officer in charge of an anti-organized-crime unit was arrested at JFK with six accomplices and sixteen suitcases full of undeclared beluga, and special agents from U.S. Fish and Wildlife started to perform DNA tests on incoming caviar shipments, looking for fraud.

The restrictions on caviar have spawned a mini-industry of neologisms based on deep faith in the power of association. Label-imagery, Morris Kushner might have called it. “Beluga,” which conjures visions of oligarchs, is the magic word. The largest caviar importer in America, Marky's, which is based in Miami, offers on its website “Prime B Dark Osetra Private Stock Caviar known as Beluga Type Caviar,” which is about as meaningful as describing an African elephant as “Dark Gray Special Reserve Animal known as Lion Type Animal.” The COO assured me that the company was going to revise its website soon. “This was written to indicate what others have called it,” he said. “There is so much confusion.”

One thing, at least, was clear. Before the ban, Marky's aquaculture branch brought fifty-five live
Huso huso
into the United States; when the fish mature in several years the company will have a federally enforced monopoly on beluga in the U.S. market. Another importer has registered the name River Beluga to refer to
Huso dauricus,
a sturgeon native to the Amur River, on the border of Russia and China.
Huso dauricus,
commonly known as kaluga, is a relative of beluga, but not a close one. One distributor I talked to, who deals in
Huso dauricus
raised on a farm in China, said that
his
importer invoices it to him as “beluga hybrid,” which is how he represents it to the restaurants he supplies. “The beluga name is what consumers know, but there's no wild beluga on the market,” he said. “You have people reaching out, saying, ‘What's the next best thing?' You're paying for the scarcity of the species.”

In 2000, when the embargo against Iran was loosened, Behroush Sharifi, an Iranian-born, English-educated, American Deadhead with a gigantic beard, decided to start importing from the Middle East. First it was carpets. Then he moved into botanicals: saffron, barberries, and manna from Iran; red hibiscus from Lebanon; mastic, a kind of ancient chewing gum, from Greece. Anointing himself the Saffron King, he trafficked in the ancient, storied, strange, and scarce. His customers were famous New York restaurants like Babbo, Daniel, Jean Georges, WD-50. Around the time he started his business, a friend at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) asked him for help. The group was petitioning Fish and Wildlife to add beluga to the endangered species list; the agency had missed a deadline to respond and now the NRDC could bring a lawsuit but needed a plaintiff. Sharifi had grown up spending summers on the Caspian, and had flirted with importing Iranian caviar. Helped by his testimony about the devastation of the fishery, beluga was added to the list, clearing the way for the 2005 ban. “Many foodies would be angry that I'd removed something so precious,” he said.

In the absence of wild-caught Caspian caviar, a market for domestic roe, farmed and fished, has opened up. California has been producing caviar since the seventies, when the overthrow of the shah of Iran inspired fears—hopes?—of a shortage; now Petrossian carries it. Paddlefish eggs are coming out of the Ozarks; bowfin roe from the Atchafalaya Swamp gets exported to Moscow. (The FDA allows these products to be called caviar, but purists say that designation belongs only to sturgeon eggs.) On farms, delivery does not always mean death: some aquacultivators induce ovulation with synthetic oxytocin—Pitocin, which stimulates uterine contractions, is one—and then “milk” the fish, while others have experimented with cesarean sections. “It's not lost on me that a lovely unintended consequence of making caviar illegal is that it allows for this emergence, this wonderful domestic product,” Sharifi told me. It is a product he has come to have a special feeling for, now that a new trade embargo has made importing saffron and other Iranian products illegal again. “Principles are one thing but you have to have bread in the bowl,” he told me, explaining that he is now a seller of American caviar.

Ottolenghi's caviar, from a Mediterranean sturgeon called
Acipenser naccarii,
is raised sustainably on a farm in Grenada, and prepared according to a traditional Iranian recipe. I met Philippe Barbier, the recipe master, in Spain: a French Basque with deep-set green eyes, a reddish beard, a yellow front tooth, and unlaced shoes. Driving through the countryside, he said that the culinary potential for farmed caviar was much greater than for the revered beluga, which no one dared serve other than with toast points and riced egg. The lower price of his stuff made it more like any other raw ingredient. “Chefs seem receptive—they're just looking for reassurance that it's a product no one will think they're silly for using,” he said. Michel Troisgros, the Michelin three-star chef at Maison Troisgros, in Paris, was using his caviar, he said, to make
payusnaya
, a paste that he formed into a thin sheet and wrapped around a soft-boiled quail egg. “When you cut it, all the yolk is coming out, like a little volcano!” he said. Troisgros had also filled the channels of cooked endive with the caviar and shaped them into black-and-white roses.

After Ottolenghi visited the farm with Barbier, he returned to Las Vegas determined to break into the room-service and private-jet menus of all the big casinos. Hopeful, he went to a major casino and presented the caviar to a team of chefs. They loved it; they especially loved the price. But then one of them asked if Ottolenghi could call it “beluga,” as their current supplier was doing. “I told the exec chef what they were doing is illegal in front of 8 chefs and walked out,” he wrote me in a text message. The next day, he wrote to me again, saying that he now had all the information he needed to show the casino that its caviar was illegally labeled. “So we should be able to get the business.” If all else failed, he had put in a call to the authorities to get his competitor slapped.

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O
ttolenghi lives in a single-story stucco house he shares with his college roommate, Howie, who actually is a VIP host at Tao, the nightclub made famous by Tiger Woods and, with 1,400 covers on a peak night, one of the top-grossing restaurants in America. When I visited him in 2010, Ottolenghi was getting ready to open a small retail store, near the airport, where he hoped that chefs would shop on their days off. The living room was crowded
with cans of Spanish olive oil, French green lentils, hand-kneaded fettuccine, specialty vinegar made by an ornery vintner in Napa, a huge bag of Szechuan peppercorns, and sixteen kinds of salt.
In the kitchen cabinets, there were old balsamics and samples of water from all over the world, which Ottolenghi, researching for a special project, had tasted only after a twenty-four-hour fast. His fridge was full of awkward little pancakes of
payusnaya,
which, drawing on the Troisgros example, he was trying to interest his chefs in. Four long chest freezers full of bone-in hams and foie gras lobes lined the garage. A cream-colored 1951 Chevy panel truck, in which Sidney, the Artisanal Foods driver, makes deliveries, was parked out front.

Beside the front door was a small pond, which was home to three sturgeon—pets, Ottolenghi said, that also served as props. Several weeks before, he had bought a fish tank from a pet store, then called his domestic caviar supplier, in California, and asked if they could send him some sturgeon. He started going to chef meetings to pitch the Spanish caviar with one in tow. “He comes in with this fish tank sloshing water to show us what a sturgeon is,” Alessandro Stratta told me. “I said, ‘I know what a sturgeon is.' Next time, he'll come in here with a pig!” (Stratta placed an order.)

One morning, Ottolenghi went to the airport to pick up Helena Gonzalez, a beautiful twenty-seven-year-old Salvadoran woman whose parents started making foie gras in Sonoma, California, in the mid-eighties, and a better prop by a long shot than a sturgeon in a tank. Her foie gras was one of Ottolenghi's special products: it had the glow that comes from being obscenely delicious, extremely expensive (around $80 a pound), and soon to be unavailable. Foie gras, or “fatty liver,” is made by
gavage,
force-feeding corn to ducks or geese until their livers swell to ten times their natural size. Animal-rights activists consider the feeding regimen to be torture, and in 2005 Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was at the time the governor of California, signed legislation to ban the sale and production of foie gras. Sonoma Artisan Foie Gras, the Gonzalezes' company, was the state's one producer. In deference to them, the bill was given a long sunset: they had until July 1, 2012, to invent a method of production that did not involve
gavage
, or close down. It was a rather hopeless proposition. Foie gras has been made the same way since the time of the Pharoahs.

Ottolenghi's first appointment with Gonzalez was at City Center, with Drew Terp, who was then the executive chef at barMASA and Shaboo, a pair of restaurants run by Masayoshi Takayama, whose flagship, Masa, is one of the most expensive restaurants in New York. Wearing a brown suit, a Bic behind his ear, and a pair of glasses tucked into the neckline of his shirt, and carrying a foam cooler loaded with duck breasts and foie gras, Ottolenghi led Gonzalez across the hectic, dimly lit casino floor and around a corner to a fifteen-foot-tall locked door. Beside the locked door was another door, which he tested and found open. He let himself in and sat down to wait for the chef. “It took me forever to find Masa,” he said later. “I kept hearing about it. I was, like, ‘There's a new really expensive restaurant? How am I not working with them?'”

Eventually, Terp appeared and took Ottolenghi and Gonzalez into the kitchen. “We use Hudson. That's what Chef Masa likes best,” Terp, who is tall and fair, with full, rosy cheeks and a curl at his forehead, said. Hudson Valley Foie Gras, which is based in upstate New York, is the largest domestic producer of foie gras, and was Sonoma's primary competitor. “Chef Masa, when he finds something he likes, it's very difficult to get him to use other things.” Ottolenghi extracted a big putty-colored lump from the cooler and handed it to Terp, who drew it close to his face and turned it over several times. Ottolenghi ventured that the feed used by Sonoma was, in his opinion, superior—cooked corn, with no added soy protein. Terp shaved off a tiny sliver of the lobe and pressed it into a pan with his index finger. It started to sizzle. “We go through five to six lobes a week,” he said. “We do a five-hundred-dollar
omakase
menu, and I'll use half a lobe for a five-top.”

Terp removed the piece of seared foie gras with a pair of chopsticks and set it on a cutting board. He tasted it; he liked it; price, he said, was no object. “I have to run it by Chef Masa,” he said. “He's very demanding. I'll have to go through the whole lobe to make sure of the consistency.” Ottolenghi asked if he could visit the following week, when the chef was in. “Sure,” Terp said. “But it's just him tasting it and saying yes or no. No sales pitch, no talking about sustainability.”

Sampling, Ottolenghi not only drops off tidbits but also collects them. The next day, at Andre's, at the Monte Carlo, an old-school fine-dining establishment with a grandfathered-in cigar lounge, custom Limoges china, and wine dating back to the French Revolution, Ottolenghi set to work on the chef, Gary FX LaMorte. Chef was an indoorsy-looking guy, with shiny dark hair. There was a lot Ottolenghi wanted to know: where he had worked before (another French restaurant), where his former colleague had gone (the Caribbean), where he got his rabbit. “I ask because rabbit really interests me,” he said. “Rabbit doesn't require USDA approval to slaughter. Anyone can kill one and butcher it in their kitchen and sell it. One day I want to get into that.” Picturing Ottolenghi's kitchen, with its view of an algae-covered swimming pool, I shivered. When they got around to the matter at hand, LaMorte mentioned that he needed duck fat for terrines. “We decant the clarified foie fat, chill the terrine, and brush the fat back on for a protective coating, just like you would do at your house in the 1880s or some shit,” he said. “You can mix it with cocoa butter. It makes a great salad dressing.”