The United States of Arugula by David Kamp

Author:David Kamp [Kamp, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-57534-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

IN A SENSE, GREENS was the culmination of a move away from joyless vegetarianism that had begun in the early seventies with such places as the Moosewood Restaurant, a utopian hangout in Ithaca, New York, that opened in 1973. The Moosewood, distant as it was from California, was yet another countercuisine shrine with Bay Area roots. Its original head cook—“chef” seems too high-flown a word—was Mollie Katzen, an East Coast girl who had soaked up the patchouli funk of the West Coast while studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and taking folk-dancing classes in Berkeley.

A native of Rochester, New York, Katzen was something of a reluctant counterculturist. She had originally enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, but her matriculation there coincided with the most tumultuous period in the school’s history. The student body shut down the campus twice for long stretches—in 1969, in the cause of the Vietnam Moratorium, a massive antiwar protest, and in 1970, in protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the subsequent murder by National Guardsmen of four student protesters at Kent State University. “I just kind of wanted to go to school,” she says. “Everyone was like, ‘Nixon invaded Cambodia, so we shouldn’t go to school!’ I was thinking, ‘I don’t completely see the connection.’ I’d been studying to be a painter at Cornell, so I left and went to the San Francisco Art Institute to finish my degree.”

The move to the Bay Area proved crucial, for Katzen, who’d always enjoyed puttering around in the kitchen, took a job working at a now forgotten San Francisco vegetarian restaurant called the Shandygaff to help pay her tuition. Having served brief stints as a kitchen worker in soul-crushingly pious macrobiotic restaurants in Ithaca that were, in her estimation, “monochromatic, everything a certain shade of beige, from the chairs to the tables to the dishes to the food, which I called ‘remorse cuisine,’” Katzen was stunned by the chirpy California sunniness of her new place of employment. “It was colorful!” she says. “Healthy, movie stars and tennis players, California lifestyle. Avocados. A lot of ferns hanging. And the food was excellent, really the first time I’d seen a bridge between macrobiotic and gourmet.”

The Shandygaff took advantage of its proximity to excellent produce by making simple yet flavorful concoctions that Katzen had until then never heard of, such as pesto sauce and fruit smoothies. More important, the restaurant’s cooks, while true to the hippie propensity for dabbling in ethnic cuisines, managed not to botch their preparations through overseasoning or stoner sloppiness. At the Shandygaff, Katzen learned how to make baba ghanoush, the Middle Eastern eggplant puree, and spanakopita, the Greek spinach pie, for the first time, as well as a lot of Indian-inspired dishes, such as a vegetable curry “with bright yellow sauce and turmeric, with bright red peppers poking out,” that she would more or less re-create ingredient for ingredient at Moosewood.

The Moosewood opportunity came about while Katzen, twenty-two years old and just out of the

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