In The Chefs’ Secret Service

There is about to be a run on fava beans.

“Give me all you’ve got left,” says Campanile chef-owner Mark Peel, to the dismay of another customer who’s carefully sifting through the heap, building his collection bean by bean. Peel is about to shoot off in another direction when some internal mechanism causes him to wheel around and add: “But after this guy gets finished.” And with that, he plunges into the crowd in search of nettles.

It’s 11 a.m. on a sunny Wednesday, the day of the week Peel drives his white Dodge Ram pickup truck to Santa Monica, where he goes zigzagging like a skittle top through the farmers market in search of fresh produce. In addition to fava beans and nettles, he scoops up boxes of tomatoes, bunches of cauliflower, baby radishes, leeks--whatever his menu for the next 72 hours or so requires.

Following close behind are friends Paul Schrade and Jack Stumpf, retirees and food lovers who serve as Peel’s lieutenants on this weekly ritual. Stumpf is the money man. He trails Peel, writing up purchase orders and doling out cash after the chef has made his selections. He’s also constantly nibbling, his tastebuds ever on alert for standout greens, fruits and vegetables along the way. Schrade--tall and lanky with a shock of gray hair that makes him easy to spot in a crowd--follows close behind, collecting the goods and depositing them onto a wagon that grows ever higher with the day’s purchases. Later, the two of them will fan through the market passing out loaves of bread from La Brea Bakery (owned and operated by Peel and his wife, pastry goddess Nancy Silverton). The cell phone chirps; it’s Silverton. She needs strawberries. Twelve flats.

“Twelve flats?” Stumpf asks skeptically.

“When it comes to pastry, I do what I’m told,” says Peel.

Like any top chef, Peel doesn’t compromise when ingredients are concerned. He says he needs direct contact with the raw materials to get his creative juices going. “I have to have my interest piqued by seeing, feeling or tasting an ingredient or a combination of ingredients. Then possibilities start unfolding.”

Whether they’re looking for exquisitely marbled prime rib, iridescently fresh seafood or garden-crisp exotic greens, Los Angeles’ ber chefs search high and low for a degree of perfection that seems at odds with today’s mass-produced agricultural products. In fact, as chefs gear down from the garish excesses of the ‘80s and early ‘90s--the days when a menu often read like the catalog for an action-painting opening--the purity and quality of ingredients are valued in American cuisine as never before. And so are the people who supply them.

Some are farmers, others are artisans, and not a few are middlemen (and women), distinguished and driven by a love of good food and an obsession with excellence. “They’re people who have the same passion for what they do as the best chefs,” says Spago Beverly Hills chef Lee Hefter, who--preferring to buy from purveyors who specialize in only one item--relies on an ever-changing network of 120 suppliers.

“They’re not really business people. I might have an order of quail and the quail guy says, ‘I didn’t kill them this week; it’s too hot and they’re panting.’ But this is a passionate guy. And ultimately he produces the greatest quail.”

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if anyone has defied economic gravity, it’s bill coleman, a small-scale, quality-obsessed farmer who has not merely made a living tilling a six-acre patch in Santa Barbara County but has also put several kids through college--a fact that he says once caused an undersecretary of the agriculture to demand, “What else do you do for a living?” When Coleman told him that was all, the man’s jaw dropped. But then Coleman, 59, has a way of rendering people gob-smacked. He does it by speaking Zapotec to Oaxacan customers while pointing out such native herbs as hoja santa, pipicha and hierba de coneja and then casually shifting to fluent Tagalog when a Filipino shopper poses a question. (Coleman’s grandfather was Filipino.) He calls his farm “Tanikala Ng Pag-ibig”--Tagalog for “Chain of Love.”

Although he refuses to tailor his greens to chefs--”they change their menus too often”--they flock to his stands at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market and at four other green markets in the Santa Barbara area. They pluck sorrel, amaranth, alfalfa, lamb’s-quarters, epazote, purslane and other exotics. “Chefs have finally realized they have to come to the market, see what’s in season, and use it,” he says.

A self-taught botanist, Coleman cultivates obscure vegetables for which there’s no known market. “I have a bad habit of trying new things,” he says. He’s a tireless proselytizer (“You build up a customer base by yapping all the time”) and a hard worker. He rises at 4, loads the truck for the market of the day, returns to the farm and spends the rest of the day in the field, sometimes having lunch there. Coleman was visiting Oaxaca 40 years ago when he discovered many of the herbs he now purveys. Today, he travels the world in pursuit of his passion. He left recently for Cambodia for the express purpose of eating durian, a prickly tropical fruit the size of a football. Feasting on it in Borneo two years ago, he gained 30 pounds.

The very unpredictability of produce keeps chefs on their toes: They just can’t be sure what’s going to be good or available one week or the next. Perhaps surprisingly, they like this. “To a certain extent, you work with what’s available,” says Angelo Auriana, chef of Valentino. “You don’t want to rely on a single supplier; you have to hunt around. Otherwise, it becomes boring, too machine-like. Being forced to improvise makes you more creative.”

Virtually any given ingredient is germinating or gestating somewhere in the world at any given time, and the jet age renders each perhaps 48 hours from farm to fork. But is it such a good thing to have everything year round? Many chefs think not. Palette fatigue is the occupational hazard of today’s gourmet. “Growing up in Italy, spring meant baby asparagus and pasta with fresh tomatoes,” recalls Auriana. “They would be so good because you waited a whole year for them.” In other words, absence makes the tongue grow fonder.

And while Southern California may be a glittering trove of vegetable matter, when it comes to protein, compared to our state’s northern half, we’re relatively lacking in the kind of narrowly focused, single-item purveyors that Hefter and other chefs favor, such as Sonoma County duck breast, Wolf Farm quail and Campbell Ranch lamb.

The reason is subject to speculation, but real estate costs, local politics and land-use practices are part of the equation. Gary Carpenter, who owns the Carpenter Squab Ranch in Ventura County, observes, “It’s nearly impossible to get a license for a processing house,” thanks to the unwelcoming stance that prospective neighbors take toward such pungent enterprises. (Carpenter relocated from Newhall to Ventura in 1965, when rules were more lenient.) A third-generation squab wrangler, Carpenter remembers helping his grandfather deliver tender young pigeons to such bygone hot spots as Ciro’s and Romanoff’s, where he once glimpsed Humphrey Bogart in revelry at noon, complete with cigarette and martini. Musso & Frank has served Carpenter squab since the 1920s, and they’ve been on the menu at Spago and at Michael’s in Santa Monica. What makes his product special? Breeding. Although the ranch sells most of its product through a distributor today, Carpenter, 56, hasn’t lost his grandfather’s personal touch. He still hand-delivers the birds to faithfuls such as Downey’s restaurant in Santa Barbara, which won an award from GQ magazine in 1995 for its squab with braised mustard greens.

Similarly, Emily Thomson, proprietor of Fromage de Chevres, is no stranger to house calls. She personally delivers orders of her French-style, hand-molded goat cheese to such restaurants as the Little Door and Les Deux Cafes. Thomson first jumped into organic farming because she wanted a career that would allow her to spend time with her children. Selling her wares at farmers markets throughout the area, she thought many of her European customers would like fresh goat cheese. So she started experimenting, selling her works-in-progress under the table until she perfected her recipe. Eventually her customers all but demanded that she take up cheese-making full time. “I love making cheese; the process is sublime,” says Thomson, also a painter who attended the Parsons School of Design in New York City. “It’s the perfect mix of science, chemistry and artisanry.” The business--not to mention the goats themselves--soon outgrew her home kitchen, forcing her to plunk her inheritance into building a factory in 1993. Demand continues to rise but Thomson is wary of expanding too rapidly. “I could sell to so many more restaurants than I do but it’s hard to expand without losing quality,” she says. “I want to keep things as handmade as possible. The French say you have to treat the milk and the curd like a bride.” Thomson, 43, used to do the milking herself but now entrusts the care of her 27 goats to a Portuguese herdsman whose ranch is north of Santa Barbara. Does she miss milking the goats? “Not at all,” she says with a laugh. “It’s really dirty work.”

Local may be the ideal, but often it is not the reality--especially for protein. Chefs rely on middlemen (and women) who have a bloodhound’s nose for quality along with vast networks of sources to ferret out rare or hard-to-acquire foodstuffs. ber chefs, for instance, don’t much care for California beef because it tends to be grass-fed and too lean. So they turn to people such as Harvey Gussman to rustle up corn-fed top prime rib with marbling worthy of a Medici palace, which Gussman then dry-ages for 21 to 28 days. Gussman is a truculent, white-bearded 66-year-old with a booming voice who still hoists 75-pound boxes of the best cow anywhere as if they were filled with Styrofoam. He’s been supplying meat to L.A.’s top restaurants since 1955, when he started working at the Guss Meat company with his father, who started the business in 1939. Today known as Harvey’s Guss Meat Co., it is L.A.’s longest-running meat supply company and the last remaining business of its kind on the west side of town.

While other small-sized meat suppliers have bitten the sawdust, Gussman has survived because of his ability to suss out the best of the best from meat distributors across the country, selling an estimated half-million pounds of meat per year. “I’m probably the only meat supplier in Los Angeles who doesn’t have a salesman on the road,” he says. “I work by word of mouth.”

It’s an early morning business. Gussman arrives at 4 a.m. at the plant at South Ogden Drive and Olympic Boulevard, where it has been since 1948. He first fills orders, then he phones suppliers across the country, generally ordering two weeks in advance. His selections are based on his profound knowledge of the bovine. “You don’t want beef that’s raised on grass its whole life and then just fed grain from the feed lot two weeks before it’s slaughtered. That’s superficial fat,” he says. “The best is corn-fed beef from the Midwest.” The first delivery truck goes out at 5:30 a.m., half an hour before federal inspection begins and the plant is permitted to begin slicing meat into individual steaks. The days when a team of butchers would carve up entire loins or hindquarters are no more; the advent of boxed beef a number of years ago took care of that, leaving Gussman and crew to do the final trim.

Similarly, local fishmongers no longer go to the port at sunset to meet fleets of incoming fishermen for a round of haggling over the choicest catch. Distribution is a global enterprise and most former denizens of the deep arrive by air. Fish are considerably less predictable than cattle: You can’t herd them onto the boats, and that makes the seafood game a slippery undertaking. Just ask Julee Harman, who was on her way to med school when she started going to fish markets and stumbled into the blackened redfish craze. Fourteen years later, her Ocean Jewels Seafood in downtown Los Angeles is a boutique operation, supplying hard-to-find fish to such high-end restaurants as Melisse and La Cachette. “It’s a chaotic business because so many variables come into play prior to my getting the fish and the fish getting to the restaurant,” says Harman. The catch may be light and she may have only 100 pounds of fish to fill 200 pounds of orders. The fish may get bumped off the flight in favor of Mother’s Day flowers. So it may not be up to her standards, in which case Harman alerts the chefs; she’s built her business on trust.

Quality depends on several factors. Harman prefers fish caught on hook lines because they arrive in better shape than those caught in nets. She also cuts the fish to order. Optimally, she says, the fish on your plate has been out of the water no more than 48 hours; she gains a day on most other distributors by turning her fish over to restaurants the same day she gets them, adding an extra margin of pressure. “I’ve tried to stay small because it’s more interesting,” Harman says. “I don’t really feel like I’m selling stuff. It’s more like I’m helping out.”

Dutch-born Dan Ketelaars of Danko Foods in Laguna Niguel is a virtual gastronomic gumshoe, specializing in all things wild--Scottish quail, partridge and pheasant, rabbit, duck and fish--and traveling great distances to find them. “Some things you simply cannot farm,” he says. “You can’t farm partridges. Rabbit you can farm, but a wild rabbit has much more structure and firmness. Same with fish. If they have to fight for their diet, they have more character.” Ketelaars, 42, has witnessed firsthand the broadening of the American palette. He speaks to about 100 chefs a week and says that because of his reputation, he can get them to try things out of the ordinary, like the preternaturally ugly wolffish. “They ask me, ‘Do you think they’ll eat it?’ And I tell them to try poaching it.” Monday is phone day, when he calls at ridiculous hours in pursuit of wild turbot, monkfish, dorade, chasing the catch from the French coast up to Ireland, Scotland, the Dutch coast. The business is sensitive to international events; the Balkan wars have complicated his supply lines. Wednesday is an adrenalin bomb: dozens of orders arriving on as many as six different airlines at LAX. He’s there with several trucks to consolidate, separate and ship orders to destinations around the country. There are Federal Express deadlines. There are customs officials to bicker with. But Ketelaars thrives on this. “It’s a high,” he says.

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MARK PEEL IS DRIVING DOWN Wilshire Boulevard on the way to his restaurant. He likes shopping, he says, but it makes him anxious.

“It’s hard to commit to something before you’ve seen everything out there, but if you don’t, by the time you come back for it, it’s gone.” At Rimpau Boulevard, he passes a vacant lot shaggy with what the uneducated eye would dismiss as a rather lovely weed. “That’s wild fennel,” he says as a grin spreads over his lean face. “In fact, that is exactly the wild fennel that will be made into soup at Campanile tonight.”