How to Cook a Moose (17 page)

There were a few misses during our months of eating out, of course, but we learned to steer clear of those, aided by one helpful telling ingredient. Inexplicably, in our first year or two in Portland, truffle oil had suddenly become ubiquitous in fancy restaurants around town that were trying too hard to be trendy instead of making honest, nonsense-free food, the kind of food I'd learned to expect as a matter of course. It was splashed on salads, beaten into eggs for omelets, drizzled over a perfectly good hamburger (I just made that up, but it could have been).

For a while, I didn't notice, but after Brendan got violently sick from the truffle-oil popcorn at the bar of one tony restaurant (and could only mutter, “I'll never eat truffle oil again. God damn that fucking truffle oil!”), it occurred to me that yes, he's right: That stuff is disgusting. A few days later, there it was again, hidden in our lobster sushi. The aftertaste, now that I'd been made aware of it, lingered unpleasantly for hours.

A casual investigation, conducted by me on Google after one such disappointing dinner out, revealed that truffle oil is not made of truffles at all; rather, it's a synthetic amalgam of something called 2,4-Dithiapentane, which doesn't sound very appetizing or wholesome to me, plus organic aromas, sometimes from actual truffles, in an olive- or grapeseed-oil base. Why would you want that on your baked fish—or anything, for that matter?
Truffle oil
looks fancy on menus, but it's sheer food snobbery, which always makes me weary.

Truffles themselves, as everyone knows, are outrageously delicious, wickedly expensive, hard-to-find mushrooms buried near trees, sometimes found by trained pigs and, more recently, dogs. Brillat-Savarin called them “the diamond of the kitchen.” The whole point is that they're rare. You don't eat them in everything the same way you don't wear diamonds every day; they're for special dishes and occasions, a
luxury. Shaved, with olive oil, chives, and a little parmesan, black truffles elevate humble linguine to a gourmet feast.

At another restaurant, one of the most gushed-over, highly touted establishments in town, we were handed a “tasting menu” as the only option and a wine list with nothing under $40 anywhere to be seen on it.

For the next two hours, we nibbled our way through a series of small plates with even smaller bits of food on them, all of it overthought, self-congratulatory, fussy, pretentious, and overly complex. I've forgotten every single thing we ate, but I have a visceral recollection of a series of luridly colored emulsions smeared here, precious tiny garnishes draped there; incompatible, incongruous ingredients, like, say, a thin slice of roasted turnip, a leaf of mint battered and fried like tempura, and a quivering lump of burrata, that trendy, ubiquitous former peasant cheese, plunked side by side in a didactic challenge to common sense and taste; or possibly an insultingly tiny coinlike tenderloin of undercooked duck arranged just so on a meager “bed” of corn porridge cooked with lots of fat and salt, like an invalid on a hospital gurney, covered with a gummy plum-colored salty sauce; desserts designed much like the high-heeled, elaborate shoes men wore in the court of Louis XIV.

I tried and failed to figure out why the tasting menu was the only dinner they offered. It cost $130 per person and contained not one dish I would have ordered voluntarily. We left feeling still hungry and pissed-off and went home for a nightcap of our own $8 Rioja and a filling snack of leftover roast chicken.

Another night found us at a farm-to-table Italian restaurant up in the Midcoast region; having heard nothing but raves and paeans about the place, we had decided to pay it a visit. The restaurant was in an old Victorian house on a hill overlooking the ocean. We arrived just as it opened, in hopes of getting a table in the upstairs café without a
reservation. The place was so popular, people reserved tables in the main, downstairs dining room months in advance.

We were in luck; only a few couples were ahead of us, a well-heeled, prosperous-looking bunch, all in their sixties or thereabouts, the women in linen shorts and pashmina shawls and espadrilles, their hair shining pageboys, mostly blonde, the men in khaki shorts or pants and casual-leisure polo shirts and boat shoes.

We were seated upstairs by the bar at a cozy table for two. We looked around: The place had been expensively, meticulously renovated to resemble what struck me as a louche brothel, circa 1935. Everything was perfect, luxurious. It was very dark in here, even though outside it was a sunny, bright, late-June early evening. The atmosphere seemed promising; we rubbed our hands together, excited about the meal to come.

The waitress appeared: young, wholesome-looking, wide-eyed, and rabidly fanatical about the menu. “Downstairs, Chef Melissa is offering some whole fresh-picked
ceci
”— pronounced
cheh-chee
—“for seven dollars, roasted in our pizza oven and coming with sea salt.” She said it as if she were offering us something rare and precious.

“
Ceci
is a pretentious way of saying unshelled chickpeas,” Brendan told me after she'd gone away to let us deliberate. “Any Italian would laugh at that.”

We laughed ourselves, shaking our heads at her earnest smugness. (Then, of course, curious to see if it was as special as our waitress seemed to think it was, we ordered it, and of course we got a handful of Italian edamame. We felt like chumps.)

Our dinner at this place in Midcoast Maine felt the way eating at another widely beloved restaurant had, a decade or more ago when my ex-husband and I were in Berkeley: like a high temple of culinary correctness, without a whiff of hedonism, gluttony, fun, or pleasure. The food was bland and sub-par; our waitress, breathless with awe at the
ceci
, seemed self-serious, zealous, and judgmental of any customer who didn't seem worthy of the food.

They made it known that they were very proud of the “working farm” in back that supplied their kitchens; after our mediocre, puzzling dinner, which cost well over $200 for two people, with wine, we walked through this small farm and saw pigs and chickens, but no shit, and perfect, obsessive-compulsive rows of vegetables, but no weeds. It was gorgeous and clearly highly functional, but I was feeling bilious and in no mood to like it.

“It's Foodsneyland,” I said. “Like a picture-perfect cartoon farm.”

“The parking lot is full of SUVs,” said Brendan. “And the restaurant is full of rich people who have no idea that Tuscan chicken isn't overcooked hen in a bland tomato sauce.”

“
Ceci
,” I said, laughing.

“Why was that meal so expensive? It was food from their garden, yes, and it probably costs more to produce it yourself than sourcing from local farms, but the servings were too small for the price, and it wasn't even that good.”

We went home filled with something that felt like class rage.

But the next day, I thought hard about why I'd reacted this way to what is by all accounts a universally beloved and excellent restaurant, run by a chef renowned for her hard work and philosophy of growing as much as possible of what she serves. I determined that I'd likely been unfair to the entire endeavor; the reason it was so expensive was that it's tremendously labor-intensive to do. The wealthy-seeming clientele was not the chef's fault, in other words. The economic reality dictated that those customers would be the people who'd eat there on a summer Saturday night: summer people, from away, with disposable income. I forced myself to question my ancient suspicion of rich people. They were supporting this worthy, earnest bastion of real food instead of taking their money to a restaurant that
served cynical crap. And every restaurant has an off night. Clearly, we needed to go back and give it another chance.

Also, these disappointments were the exceptions, and they stood out from our usual experiences in Maine restaurants. Up and down the coast, we found places we were thrilled to discover: a simple pub in Damariscotta with fantastically light, fresh, gluten-free fish and chips and local oysters, the best I've ever eaten; a harborside local hangout in Camden with fat, clean steamers and kickass coleslaw; the lobster truck in Fort Williams Park, whose lobster salad was perfect.

On a special occasion, we decided to go out for dinner as a splurge and a celebration, so we chose our restaurant carefully. Vinland might be New England's answer to Noma, the Copenhagen shrine to local and seasonal molecular cooking which was recently voted the best restaurant in the world. Vinland's owner and chef, David Levi, even staged at Noma for a summer. He's from away, but he's forged deep relationships with local farmers and fishermen. The name of the place comes from the mythic New World land where the Vikings found wild grapes growing; Maine is as likely a potential spot as anywhere else.

David Levi's got an idealistic manifesto, a stringently quixotic but admirably consistent take on local, seasonal, and organic. The restaurant serves no olive oil, for example, since there are no olive trees in Maine; the same goes for chocolate. And because lemons and limes don't grow here, instead of citrus in cocktails, they use whey—the astringent dairy by-product of cheese making. Adorning the spare walls are birch logs. The tables are handmade; the dishes are made of natural materials—stone, clay. The menu proclaims that it's gluten-free, Paleo-friendly, and “100 percent local, down to the salt.” It's the New Nordic Cuisine raised to an art form.

“How's your dinner?” David asked us, coming by our table as we dug our forks into astonishingly fresh, delicious salads with emulsified blue cheese and apple vinegar dressing. He was young and thin,
Italian-Jewish, with an earnest, very awake expression. He was wearing a bandanna around his head that said
EAT LOCALLY
. He asked as if he deeply wanted to know.

“Amazing,” we told him honestly.

We'd ordered a feast: lobster with wild black trumpet mushroom emulsion, strip steak with whey-poached parsnips and hen of the woods, radicchio with potato and cheddar, monkfish with shiitake, spinach, and the tenderest sunchoke we'd ever eaten, Brussels sprouts with roast delicata seeds. As dish after dish appeared, we noticed that the portions were about half the size of a normal restaurant, but we got full quickly. At the end, we felt totally satisfied, but not bloated or stuffed.

Over a digestif of house-made dill and fennel aquavit, I asked David to expound on his philosophy.

“It's the culture of a place reflected in the cuisine,” he said. “Because food is the basis of culture. It's the Native American pre–agricultural revolution ways of eating, according to the seasons, the climate, combined with modern craftsmanship, the precision of molecular gastronomy and French cooking. I think of it as meta-indigenous.”

“Meta-indigenous,” I repeated happily, polishing off the last crumbs of the cheese plate with oat crackers. “I love that.”

Maine is—in many ways—the ideal place for a restaurant like Vinland, replete with thriving organic farms, sustainably caught local seafood, and the centuries-old traditions of hunting and foraging. The thin, acidic soil of the region and the short growing season make the state unprofitable for industrial agriculture. In the past this might have been considered a negative, but in fact it's been beneficial. Maine's native agriculture has been preserved by its marginal nature, pushed in a positive direction out of necessity to embrace and preserve old traditions.

“There's more local food in Maine,” said David. “Farmers show up at restaurant doors with fresh organic produce. It's so easy to get.” But
even in a restaurant community known for a heavy reliance on local food, Vinland stands out for its strict adherence to its local-only mission.

What would he say to those who call this mission radical? Even extreme?

“I hate being called extreme,” David stresses, with quiet vehemence. “Extreme and radical are relative terms, relative to a given norm, used as an objective state of being. We live in a very tragic time, a radical, extreme culture relative to the community of life. We are destroying the earth rapidly, horrifically. Relative to that, I'm radical and extreme. Relative to the natural world and traditional societies, I'm very conservative. I deeply believe in immense precautions to preserve the natural world and communities.”

I found myself rooting for David Levi to succeed here in stalwartly down-to-earth Maine, even though he's conceptually rigorous, even though the inspiration behind his food is more cerebral than visceral. No matter how weird it may be to have whey in a Dark & Stormy instead of lime juice, that meal was flat-out delicious, creative, and interesting. Levi's intensely rigorous cuisine of local-only ingredients, down to the salt, turns out to be a lot of fun to eat in the hands of such a brilliant, adept chef.

After dinner, we drove through an early snowstorm to the White Mountains. The next morning, I awoke to a fresh, snowy, sunny landscape. I felt rested and energetic and clear-headed. We took Dingo out for the usual fast four-mile walk, admired the shadows the sun cast through clouds on the mountains, inhaled the crisp northern air. A birch branch had fallen into the creek. Snowflakes sifted down through bright air from hemlock boughs. The lake was as steely-blue and choppy as a fjord.

We came home to hot steel-cut oatmeal with wild blueberries, maple syrup, and cinnamon. My Nordic heart was singing. This region,
so Scandinavian in so many ways, is a place where Noma's culinary ideals as interpreted by an earnest zealot like David Levi can flourish.