Eco-Location

In '08 and '09, every big U.S. magazine ran at least one article about 1) the return of absinthe and 2) the rise of the great farm-to-table chef, Dan Barber.  Except GQ.  They had assigned each piece to me.  A draft of the absinthe article is on this blog somewhere, and here is a draft of my Dan Barber piece, which was the greatest pleasure to report, as he was kind and generous and his kitchen is all it's cracked up to be.  He has since won the James Beard Award as the nation's top chef.  This piece was never fact checked or copy edited.  Probably one of those departments would have urged me to correct, among other things, the line about the 19th-Century agrarian novel, since the heyday of the agrarian novel was actually in the early 20th Century.  Probably I would have just changed "agrarian" to "Russian."  Also, the magazine would have come up with a memorable headline, as they always do, but I could only come up with, for now:

A Culinary Yankee in Queen Alice's Court
Dan Barber Schools the Purists with Face Bacon, Super-Chickens, Sous-vide Lamb and Tough Love

which is awful, but please keep reading; the piece gains momentum as it progresses. 

Norman architecture: Blue Hill at Stone Barns

In his crisp, white togs, framed by tall corn stalks, he is the image of the modern chef. Dan Barber is...bucolic. On this small farm in the lush Hudson Valley, it’s a perfect, buzzing summer afternoon. Distant spruce and maples sway in a soft breeze. A waterlogged storm cloud peeks from the south. A black and white farm dog follows us from patches of beans to stands of corn to rows of summer squash that look like the trunks of baby elephants.

I’m hungry and happy about it. I’m planning to nurse my hunger well into the evening, and then take my seat in the bright, vaulted dining room a hog’s snort from where we’re standing, to settle in for a long summer feast replete with ingredients I actually can see workers yanking from the ground at this very moment. Every crop in the soil we stand on is organic; everything here with a heartbeat ranges free before slaughter. I pet the dog, take in the scent of sweet decay in the air, as the chef with the curious mind, the receding hairline, the dirty mouth and the cooking-flame tan interrogates the farmer, scribbles in a notebook, releases periodic ejaculations: amazing, wow.

Barber is the ultimate farm-to-table chef, the farm for his tables stretching across nearly thirty acres surrounding his restaurant on an old Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, New York, twenty-five miles outside Manhattan, called Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Last January, as part of a fundraiser organized by Alice Waters, he was one of an elite group of top chefs dispatched to Washington to prepare meals for the nation’s new power elite on the eve of the Obama inauguration. Barber worked out of journalist Bob Woodward’s kitchen, served pig snout, lamb, a winter salad, chatted up members of the president’s cabinet and his economic council.

Man Bites Dogma
If he is the emerging voice of a sustainable food movement in its ascendancy, then this colorful, seemingly thriving farm/restaurant is like the movement’s Vatican. This morning I’ve joined Barber to do farm chores: driving stakes, rotating fences that contain the free-range chickens, grabbing wily, stupid-eyed birds hiding under wagon seats and tossing them onto the new grass. It’s wet, dirty work, but the chef seems willing enough. He says the movement’s rank and file likes to think of him as a farmer, even though he isn’t one. He seems so reasonable, so companionable, but in the shade of the greenhouse, when I ask the him about the purists in his movement, those people you meet, too sincere for argument, who demonize any and all industrial agricultural methods, and he lets lose with a slicing dismissal so thorough and unexpected, it's actually kind of thrilling:

“I just throw that out the window,” he tells me. “That’s ridiculous. I think it’s reactionary. That says to me, ‘OK, let’s harken back to a Shaker Village.’ That would last about as long as this conversation. It’s too much Alice Waters, who also influenced me more than anyone. But I don’t want to look back. I don’t want to have this farm perceived as a Shaker Village or an Amish thing of the turn of the century. It means nothing.”

Chefs in the fields at Stone Barns

The Discovery of the Season
Dan Barber is only thirty-nine (he's probably forty-eight now), but he’s been talking about the environmental and gastronomic genius of fresh, local ingredients, about this new, old way to grow and distribute food, since long before he was out standing in his field of corn. He comes from a Manhattan family not of cooks but of eaters, the son of a world-traveling businessman, a widower who would take Dan and his brother, David, on the road, and into fancy restaurants for business meetings. Paris, Hong Kong. Cincinnati. Early on the boys learned to appreciate the exotic and the mundane. Summers were spent on their grandmother’s small dairy farm. She adored the land, the open spaces. Her grandsons have that genetic marker and they obviously know it. Their two restaurants are named for her farm. Blue Hill. They own that farm now. It provides their kitchens with butter, yogurt, milk, and the occasional pig or lamb. It was during summers on the farm that Barber says he began to feel like a small farmer himself, to comprehend their skills and their plight.

In New York, in the late Nineties, the brothers started a catering business. Barber was back from two stints cooking in California (including a brief stop at Waters’ Chez Panisse), from a two-and-a-half year stage in France that began in the kitchen of Michel Rostang. With Dan cooking and David managing, the catering business flourished, so the Barbers opened a restaurant to push it; instead of auditioning in unfamiliar kitchens, they could invite potential clients to Blue Hill. But then the elegant little basement restaurant a half-block off Washington Square, the one largely relying for its ingredients, in all four seasons, on the bounty of Hudson Valley farmers, caught on. A review on Bloomberg radio started a stir. A rave in Gourmet in late 2000 was seminal.

There are chanterelles when chanterelles freckle local hillsides, wrote Jonathan Gold, and local corn shoots in the salad when they pop out of the ground in June, then ramps and fiddleheads and local zucchini.

There in the middle of the lower part of the big, great city, a small restaurant was doing its best with what the local climate and soil gave it. Back then they still imported fish from Hawaii, still got a few other mainstays from far away. But the local farmers were catching on to the fact that Barber didn’t just serve their produce, their lamb, their pork, he featured it, mentioned the names of farms on the menu, talked them up when the media came calling. At Blue Hill, the chef might cook the food, but the farmers determined the menu.

Rich in Soil and Pocket Both
Around the time that Gourmet review appeared unfathomably rich nonagenarian David Rockefeller was setting out to turn a chunk of his family estate near Tarrytown into a nonprofit agricultural education center. He wanted to honor his late wife, Peggy, who had long been dedicated to the well-being of the small farmer. There would be wild spaces for hiking, pastures, and a working farm. The beautiful old outbuildings and the stone dairy barns long in disuse, and modeled after ancient French-Norman towers, would be converted into offices and, what the heck, there’d be a restaurant. Mr. Rockefeller likes good food.

He’d given his young right hand man, James Ford, this dream assignment: find the proper chef for a restaurant at Stone Barns. But fifty restaurants and fifteen extra pounds later, Ford was getting frustrated. The famous chefs wanted too much money. The un-famous ones didn’t fit the spirit of the surroundings. On the day he stumbled upon the original Blue Hill, Ford says he was only vaguely aware of Barber’s effort to use local ingredients. That night, he was pretty much just looking for a meal. But he found that he loved the food and the peaceful feel of the place in the Village. He was intrigued by Blue Hill’s commitment to sourcing in the Hudson Valley. He asked to meet the Barbers. Eventually he brought Rockefeller to Blue Hill, to discuss the project at Stone Barns, to eat. The old man was a sitting duck.

By 2004, Rockefeller had spent $30 million, to convert the fields, six acres for vegetables, twenty-two acres for livestock to graze, to build the 23,000 square foot greenhouse, and construct Barber’s big, gleaming kitchen. Now Rockefeller is known to hitch up his horse and buggy, literally, and ride on over to the Barns for a meal, his largesse is finite. Although it is large.

The farm is a nonprofit. Barber does not own it, or farm it, per se. He buys from the farm his produce, chickens, lamb, pork, geese and rabbit, at wholesale prices. Today his two kitchens get about seventy percent of their ingredients from the farm and greenhouse at Stone Barns, and from other Hudson Valley farmers, many of whom truck their produce into Manhattan and set up shop at the Union Square Green Market.

Face Bacon
One raw, drizzly Saturday morning around eight I meet Barber there. I’m a nuisance, but he doesn’t make me feel that way, although twice he leaves me perched under a lamp post to stand still and wait, like a child you like okay, but really wish had stayed home this time. Now just stand here and don’t get into any trouble. Daddy will be right back. Daddy loves you! Meanwhile he goes rummaging behind stalls and into the private stashes of vendors, who all know him well. He has a cap on backwards; it has a beret effect. He’s wearing small-framed glasses, looks pale, sleepless, very Lower-East-Side intellectual artist. It’s very early spring, so we pick up asparagus, onions, turnips and ramps. Just as we’re about to leave, a guy calls Barber over, then pulls from a blue cooler a plastic bag with two big, greasy pigs feet he’s been saving for the chef, who is thrilled. Now he can make foot bacon. Sounds gross. Won’t be. The night before Barber had served me face bacon, a delicious, thinly sliced, beautifully marbled, crunchy, pungent sliver of porcine physiognomy. Although it is important to ignore the eye hole.

Fields at Stone Barns

One Day in the Life of a Pig Jowl
Sometimes when I’m winding my way down the long drive at Stone Barns I feel as if I’m entering some great Nineteenth Century agrarian novel. Workers toil in the fields that slope away from the looming, round barns of timeless gray. Lambs graze, hogs root, chickens scamper in a frenzy. Then, as I sit in the bright, wide-open dining room and look out over the fields, I half expect that Aunt Maryushka will appear, holding a cast iron spoon with her tea-stained fingers, waiting to serve me turnip soup.

Instead, a well-manicured, well-informed captain will come to my table and engage me in a conversation. There is no menu at Blue Hill, but a list of ingredients proper for the season. So, frankly or furtively, he or she will check on my allergies and my limitations, such as, am I anti-meat? Am I not too fond of tomatoes? Am I curious about wine, or am I just looking to make an impression by blowing my expense account on the Opus One? Is it clear that I am a foodie so excited to be here that I already know what crops are in season, what dishes they’ve been serving lately, what Barber himself ate for breakfast today, how tall he is (5’ 11”) and that he has a book contract, not for a cook book, that will come, of course, but for a narrative? From here, my “foodie level” will be encoded on the ticket, possibly my age-range, as well. I could be judged “excited,” “adventurous,” “interested,” “younger,” “conservative,” even, alas, “middle-aged.” My wine choice might be discussed in the kitchen, and then the big, affable chef de cuisine will begin calling out my dishes. Four quail egg! Four chicken! Four lamb! Four sweet potato marshmallow! On a given night, there are ten to fifteen plates for the kitchen to choose among, another five Barber describes as “orbiting.”

Barber says they want diners to get what will please them most. Codes allow everyone to avoid, say, innards-inspired unpleasantness. They wouldn’t want to serve a conventional, unadventurous diner sheep’s brains or venison heart. If they have only fifteen lamb chops that night, they want those chops to go to those who are enthused. Sure, like at any restaurant, they might harbor some mild frustration with a vegetarian or a disdainer of tomatoes during a summertime service. Certainly with a vegan, but who wouldn’t?

“We lose a lot of people,” Barber tells me. “Diners say ‘Fuck. I’ve waited two months to be here and you’re telling me I can’t fucking order a steak?’”

The first time I ate at Blue Hill it was winter, which meant root vegetables, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, beets.

“Before Dan, this kind of approach to food,” says Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Polan, “was not something you heard about on the East Coast, it was much more of a West Coast thing.”

Often, Blue Hill waiters describe ingredients as “this morning’s,” as in “this morning’s egg.” Just laid. In summer there are a dozen varieties of tomatoes. In winter time there is the meat of the pig, the whole pig. For the really adventurous among us, a server will bring out a tray of half-cooked pig anatomy, an ear, a snout, a jowl. This is it, no pretense, no hiding, and here is what we will do with it. If not pig parts, the server might present a tray of just-harvested beets, soil still clinging like blood to a newborn. They are supine, uncooked, uninteresting even, until you are told that tonight’s beets have survived upwards of seven frosts, that the gift of the frost is their sweetness.

Stone Barns beets

At Blue Hill, dinners unfold, frosts hold strange ironies, freezes become friends, cold weather is a thing not to necessitate imports, but to inspire discovery. Here’s how Barber puts it one night when I call to ask him what’s on the menu:

“We switch to serving cold weather crops after a few hard frosts. After a deep frost the brix (a measurement of sugar content) is a hundred fold sweeter. Cabbages, Swiss chard, Brussels sprouts, we tested them in August and the brix was 6.8, and we tested them after the fourth frost and they were 12.6 parts per billion of sugar. A plant physiologist who is also a poet explained it to me this way: the conversion from starches to sugars is the plants or the roots trying to avoid ice crystallization within their bodies by converting to sugar, because sugar raises the body temperature. What you're tasting, what the plant or the root is telling you is, ‘I don't want to die.’ Right now it’s a fucking total blow out celebration of that.”

A Culinary Mark Twain
Dan Barber has no TV show, no book or blog, he is neither barefoot nor naked, but he is in demand. He gives talks, draws crowds. He sits on many panels, the kind with fawning audiences blogging and twittering and moderators who take off their shoes and cross their legs, hold lots of index cards in their hands and go for laughs and try not to seem nervous. But Barber is always the funniest one onstage, the one whose profound fascination, whose awe of the earth and the edible stuff it offers up borders on the Druidical.

Audiences eat it up.

Once after a performance in San Francisco, Barber and I try to walk approximately one-hundred yards from the stage door to the theater exit and it takes us almost half an hour, as fans, some with shyness, some desire, approach him to thank him for what he does, and then, to my surprise, to say they look forward to someday eating at his restaurant. They love him, but they have never eaten a dish at Blue Hill.

“There are few people you meet that are as good at one thing as Dan Barber is at cooking,” says Polan, “and who have these other skills: journalist, writer, promoter, storyteller. All these different kinds of things.”

In person, when Barber gets really into a story, really excited about the topic, he taps your shoulder, over and over again. It’s endearing, if at times walking the farm or riding next to him in his gray minivan that sometimes smells like onions, sometimes goat cheese, I worry about bruising. But onstage, he is a performer, a yarn-spinner, a culinary Mark Twain by way of Woody Allen, whose narratives tend to have a moral. Also a good deal of angst and self-deprecation. To the crowds he sometimes tells his tales while pacing, gulping, flipping through slides, anything to subdue his nervous energy. He can seem so agitated at first, that you find yourself getting a bit tense, you start rooting for him just so that you can relax. Soon all is well, he’s rolling, telling the story about his secretly failed carrot experiment, in which while attempting to duplicate the delicious effects of a farmer he’d met in Burgundy, he tried sprinkling pounds of almond dust on the soil where the Napoli carrots grow. So confident was he that on the day the carrots were to be harvested, he’d already put an item on the menu: Almond-Carrot Salad.

“I had a dream the night before,” he tells the audience, “of me on the cover of Gourmet with a farmer’s hat, holding a bunch of carrots, with the title, Dan Barber: Chef Revolutionizes Farming.”

Problem was, the carrots tasted strictly carrot-y, not a trace of almond anywhere. So quickly he splashed some almond oil on them and the salads were a huge hit, ninety-five orders among 140 covers for the night. Customers wrote out comment cards with four stars. Someone on the staff triumphantly exclaimed: Ferran Adria has foams, but Dan Barber has carrots!

Then there is the classic story of Boris, a boar at Stone Barns. Barber and the livestock farmer are watching Boris trying to “make love,” as Barber puts it, dryly, to various sows in heat. “Don’t know if any of you have ever seen a sow in heat,” he says, “but suffice to say, they are not picky.” But Boris is too fat. The sows reject him. He has out-lived his usefulness and the farmer matter-of-factly announces his intention to shoot the old hog.

Barber the Manhattanite is mortified, and goes on a quest for optional fates for Boris. One, “castrate and slaughter,” is accompanied by a large slide of the white, filthy, drooping, masculine, torpedo-like balls of Boris, still hanging proudly.

The stories demonstrate curiosity and daring on Barber’s behalf. But I think they also betray a control on the farm beyond influence, beyond what he tends to claim he has, and far beyond the farmer-dictated gastro-future he himself promotes: If a hundred years ago the diner determined what was on the menu -- Oysters Rockefeller and mutton seem to have been popular items -- and over the last thirty years creative chefs took menu-control, showing us new, pleasurable ways to eat (and becoming the celebrities we can’t avoid today), then in the 21st Century it’s the farmers’ time to take the reins. Not to worry, though. The great chefs will still decide what to do with the farmer’s crops.

“The gourmet will be the leader of the world,” he says, meaning the food world, I assume, although his enthusiasm and proto-Marxist formulations make me wonder.

Barbs
Vision and timing have transformed this chef into a leader of, if not the world -- yet -- then a movement. A similar thing happened to Polan after Omnivore’s Dilemma. Polan had told me how strange it was to go from journalist to spokesperson for a cause, from interviewer to subject. His hope was to go back to journalism as new voices emerged. But the time had been right, as it is now for Barber.

“You get historical opportunities and you have to take advantage of them,” says Polan, “and the culture is willing to listen to this now, to these issues that have been knocking around for thirty years.”

For more than thirty years, of course, Alice Waters has been saying and doing many of the same things Barber says and does now. If her effect on the food industry at large has been limited, her restaurant is legendary, her acolytes are many. Her cookbooks read like little miracle-guides to ethical pleasure. Even as Barber’s reach grows, in the throbbing, emerging community of green foodies, Waters is rightly ubiquitous. Barber cites her as a primary inspiration, and surely if he can keep Blue Hill afloat and Stone Barns fertile, and show the way for others, her vindication will be nearly complete.

But there is a mutual distancing.

Barber is a realist. He is anti-quaint. If the small, organic farmers can’t make money, then what is this but some theoretical Eden? For now, the farm at Stone Barns may be a nonprofit, but the restaurant has to pay rent; it has to share its profits with the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. And so they engage in selective environmentalist no-nos. They raise sheep genetically cross-bred to lamb in twos and threes instead of nature’s one-at-a-time. The birds here eat naught but grass and bugs, but they are of a breed of super-chickens developed by evil agri-giant Tyson foods to grow to eating size in seven weeks instead of the fourteen nature intended. Barber serves it all with pleasure.

“This bugs the Slow Food people,” says Barber, referring to the worldwide collection of chefs and food-producers dedicated to the demise of big agriculture and the return of non-industrial methods of growing and food preparation. “But it’s better for the bottom line.”

When I talk to Waters and Barber about each other, they try to bury their conflicts under, in Barber’s case, cutting jocularity, in Waters’ case, a soft, pillowy sweetness backed with a slap. She says Barber is “articulate” and has “great taste,” but she wishes he would cook “peasant food.” He says he’d cook peasant food, maybe, if he was in South Dakota, but he’s in New York, it’s an expensive operation, he charges a lot of money. People have expectations. They have expense accounts. As Polan puts it to me, a chef in New York has to “dazzle.” So Barber does not serve peasant food. It would be hard to define, say, a refreshing celery/apple juice I had one spring at Blue Hill, a light-green liquid that finds a paradise between sweet and earthy I never knew existed, as peasant food. I don’t think the peasants spent a lot of time juicing. Waters can romanticize them, but for a modern like Barber to pretend to embrace their ways would be disingenuous.

Carrot from the farm at Stone Barns, soon to be eaten

I do think sometimes he regrets this; his ingredients taste so damn good right out of the ground. He wants you to experience that natural flavor. He’d love to be the simple conduit between you and the soil. And early in each meal at Blue Hill does come the raw stuff, eight carrots, lightly kissed with salt, impaled on skewers protruding from a block of polished cherry wood -- eat the carrot, eat the leaf, break through the salt to savor the sweetness -- then potato chips with a suggestion of sage, or little, sweet, bite-sized beet burgers somehow made to look like hamburgers. But these are just the seductive opening notes to his nocturne.

Like Waters, Barber is a champion of the small farmer and the old pre-chemical ways of farming, but he is far more likely to subject his ingredients to the kitchen techniques of the 21st Century, to bring the products of those old ways into the now and assimilate them with extreme prejudice.

So, he says, when diners sent back his grass-fed lamb because they thought it was too tough, he adopted, with pleasure, the sous-vide cooking technique. As with the super-chickens and fecund sheep at Stone Barns, he says some purists in the movement disdain use of the high-energy, plastic-vacuum-packed sous-vide process. Very modern.

Anyway, Waters tells me, sous-vide is not for her; she is more for the grill. She needs to have the smoke and the fragrance. For her, that problem with grass-fed toughness was more a question of “learning how to cook it.”

As I listen, I feel a painful pull in two directions, one foot in the honorable past, one sliding unfettered into the inevitable future. I love them both. And without Waters there would be no Barber. But in a world were big agriculture and a non-feudal economy predominate, without a Barber-like focus on the bottom line, it might take another thirty years to change things.

“I don’t think there’s a contradiction between Alice’s ideals of heritage and looking to innovation and technology to interpret them,” says Barber, “because otherwise they don’t move forward.”

My Dream Date with the Chef
Nearly every interview I do with Barber seem to take place in transit, moving forward, as it were. We’re walking. We’re driving. Until one night when I actually succeed in wrenching him away from his two kitchens. It’s like I’ve won a Dream Date with the Chef. His minivan is strewn with foodstuffs. Tiny spotted dry beans jostle in the console. He takes me to three restaurants, each dedicated to serving local, organic ingredients. He spends the evening ordering my food, my wine, telling me stories hard won from the crazy, periodic, one-night-and-a-day pilgrimages he makes from Manhattan to London, or Spain, or to exotic Western New York, to witness the work of obscure, innovative farmers, or to visit the kitchens of famous, innovative chefs.

At lively, candle-lit Marlow & Sons in Brooklyn, he tells me about the Spanish foie gras maker, said to be the world’s best, who doesn’t gorge his birds, but just let’s them come to the food as they will to get their over-fill.

At a bright pizza joint called Frannie’s, while we’re savoring a pork terrine, he says, “You’ve got fat in your mouth, but not greasy fat. I love that.” He talks about a farmer outside London who is resurrecting a hundred neglected varieties of wheat, and about a grower of kosher grains in Penn Yan, New York, who has found that the presence of wild onions in the field, the ones the rabbi is now helping him avoid, had been holding back the flavor and size of his harvest. Eliminating them with the help of the rabbi has been a godsend. It’s the Torah as farmer’s almanac.

We end the night in Chelsea, at the counter at Dell’Anima, eating hand-made pastas and talking about his stint as a judge on Top Chef, how during a break in filming he’d wandered over here to 8th Avenue for an exceedingly rare, quiet meal, alone, at dinner time. He has the wistful tone of a botanist who’s found a species of plant long thought extinct, but then lost the specimen.

I’d sensed a similar longing in him at Marlow and Sons, over a simple salad of fresh radishes, tomatoes, greens, and peaches so juicy they were mouth-cleansing. While we marveled at the flavors of this peasant food, he’d told me that sometimes he thinks he’d like to cook this way.

“But if I did this,” he says, his voice seasoned with urgency, “we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.”

Still, the very next night, at his restaurant on the farm, a waiter brings me a salad of radishes, greens and peaches. In Barber’s version there is a touch of flare, a tomato foam, a gastronomic signature you won’t find in Brooklyn. It dazzles. The waiter also brings me a message: “Chef said to tell you this was inspired by your dinner last night.”

Dining room at Blue Hill at Stone Barns

I end up sitting at the dimly-lit, eleven-stool bar eating -- eggplant and pancetta, face bacon with a cantaloupe porter chaser, celtuce with yogurt and pine-nuts -- for so long I develop bruises on my thighs from the stool’s edge. I think of them as a hedonist’s bed sores. I know that the celebrated restaurant on the organic farm that supplies its ingredients is supposed to marry the fundamentals of clean earth and human hand, bodily nutrition and that blessed thing that makes us human: an appetite for mouth-watering synthesis. (What other animals make salads or sauces?) We’re human. We don’t want food to simply keep us alive, we want food that makes us feel alive. And now we want it grown and prepared in ways that will keep the earth alive as well. Some might think any deviation from the purest of green practices here could mar the coming new order. But maybe purity itself is non-sustainable.

In fact, no one has stepped with greater confidence into the farmer-controlled future than Dan Barber. No one has committed with more fury to serving local ingredients in their proper season, no matter the season. No asparagus in the fall. No corn or tomatoes in late winter. But then comes renewal, the spring, new lambs, artichokes, johnny jump-ups, a dozen sweet greens, appetites made fonder by a season of absence, after the poetry of a frost that brings sweetness, there’s the fucking total blowout celebration of it all.

 Images courtesy of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture

You Came Here to be Saved

This is an old story pitch that never got picked up, but it has some interesting scenes from storefront churches in Richmond, California, and some interesting research about the churches and the city. I'm posting it in relation to my write up of the funeral of Raymen Justice, which was held in Richmond on October 1, 2010.


Storefront Salvation

“I was a pimp, a hustler, a drug addict; I would’ve been a murderer except the man lived.” - Pastor Samuel Vann of The Church of Deliverance, Richmond, California

Late for services at Perfect Peace and Praise Ministry (PPPM) one Sunday morning in spring I’m greeted half a block away by the throbbing beat of an electric base, a full drum kit, an organ’s soulful growl, an ecstatic tambourine, and the powerful singing of Missionary Regina Crawford, the newest member of the congregation.

Inside the little storefront church the service is only just underway and Pastor Al Williams, a compact, strongly built man in his early fifties, begins his preaching with a quick, flowing, impromptu prayer of thanks that God has given each of us the money to pay our bills this month, that the angel of death didn’t visit us this morning, that we’d woken up at all.

Soon his preaching gains a kind of emphatic force, a runaway truck momentum that I think he can’t possibly keep it up. But he doesn’t slow down until the organ strikes up again and he begins to sing his phrases and then the whole of this small congregation joins in as the sound of the organ swells and four songs in a row follow, including the minor Gospel masterpiece, “Wade in the Water”

Like so many of the storefronts in Richmond, PPPM is a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) assembly. It seems that the COGIC recognized early what many traditional denominations have only lately come around to: in America, storefront worship by small congregations is where salvation is at. According to “Faith Communities Today (released March, 2001),” the largest study ever done of American congregations, “...half the congregations in the United States have fewer than 100 regularly participating adults... Indeed, a full quarter of congregations has fewer than 50.”

While on earth 2000 years ago, the god this morning’s congregants worship preached in favor of private prayer, showed an occasional distaste for public displays of holiness.  But there is not a trace of disingenuousness here. I don’t think Jesus would be displeased. Not even the fact that Pastor Williams, a gentle, soft spoken, sensible public transit authority janitor, is lunging down the aisle speaking in what sounds to me like meaningless gibberish, but is more likely what is called tongues, raises in me any doubt that this a kind of spiritual light has descended on this dank little church in the worst neighborhood in Richmond, California.

In just a three block radius in the rotting downtown section of this Bay Area city of 99,000 souls, I’ve counted no less than 10 churches of the storefront variety. All but one – Muhammad Mosque #72 – are Protestant. Five exist under the umbrella of the Memphis-based Church of God in Christ. Adherents.com reports that C.O.G.I.C. has nearly 6,000,000 members, many of whom worship in small churches in formerly commercial spaces in the moribund downtowns of cities that peaked decades ago.

Most are once thriving, now dying cities not unlike Richmond, home of the original Rosie the Riveter and the Kaiser Shipyards where WW II-era Liberty Ships were constructed and launched at the patriotic pace of six per week. Here the Great Migration found its terminus, as the number of African Americans multiplied twenty times in three years and tens of thousands of Americans of all races came west for reasons of patriotism and economics. In the years from 1940 to 1943 Richmond was transformed from a town of 23,000 into a thriving city of over 93,000.

Nearly all traces of the shipyards are gone now and several disparate yet interconnected worlds make up Richmond: tightly guarded hillside acres known as tank farms, where Chevron, the city’s primary employer, stores and refines oil (and where the occasional leakage of sulfur dioxide or sulfur trioxide set off emergency sirens and put nearby residents in a “shelter-in-place” alert); lovely coastal hills covered in sprawling ranch style homes with expansive bay views (here the Chevron executives live); waterfront gentility in cookie cutter condos (these have replaced the shipyards); busy, homely, strip-mall-strewn avenues (here are some of the storefront churches, including the one with the best name, God’s Supermarket of Faith); intensely Latino barrios that go on for blocks; quiet, middle class African American neighborhoods; a dying downtown of nail salons, wig and consignment shops, donut shops and distressed furniture stores (there’s a wig shop just up the street from Perfect Peace and Praise Ministry called Sullen Beauty Supply); everywhere a thriving gangland.

Richmond is a quintessential small American city, sub to no urb, prone to bursts of boosterism, of optimism and civic pride countered inevitably by killing sprees in which as many as six children are shot dead in a matter of months. Driving home on Holy Friday afternoon from a local Denny’s where I’d interviewed a fasting storefront pastor over many cups of coffee, I am forced into a detour by the Richmond police. They’ve cordoned off three blocks of Cutting Boulevard. One of the cops tells me a man has been shot in the head. Three days later the victim dies of his wounds. His murderer remains at large.

Experience of misery is a common thread among all the pastors and all the worshipers I encounter at the storefront churches of Richmond. Everybody’s got a serious past. Seems that just about everybody has been either a pimp or prostitute, a drug dealer or drug user, a thief, a fence, an inmate. Everybody’s hustled somebody. And everybody’s glad not to be hustling anymore. They have left or are leaving behind that life. And yet they come most Sundays into the belly of the beast, to one of several churches right across the street from a tattered and nameless SRO, just down the block from a bustling, free-market municipal park.

They come dressed in their Sunday finest to these churches with names that reflect the very things they crave: peace, power, deliverance. They come to this block where the denizens of its demimonde do not welcome them. Where overheard conversations at bus stops discuss the technicalities of parole or the inequities of social services. Where hoopdie after hoopdie chugs into the parking lot of Joe’s Market. Where one minute out and one block away from Sunday services you can be solicited by a prostitute.

Says Pastor Williams: “We’ve tried to reach out to the folks on the block. We’re here for a reason. But there’s a long history of distrust in the black community. It stretches all the way back to when slave owners used to promise freedom to slaves if they kept an eye on each other, told the owners about escapes and such. Also there’s been too much abuse by pastors: money, sex, everything.”

I lived in Richmond for three years, and only recently moved ten miles away to Oakland. This piece proposes a critical but open-minded examination -- through my experiences of the storefronts of Richmond, to which I have gained unfettered access -- of the American history and current state of worship in small, storefront churches, from their inception in the wake of the Great Migration, to their potential dominance as outlets of salvation today and their struggle with the big denominations for recognition. It will explore their conservative theology and social philosophies (which so many whites, liberal whites, treat with a condescension bordering on bigotry, which I will also explore), their intrepid faith in the face of a constant struggle to survive, and their 24/7 efforts to save souls, including mine. As the charismatic pastor of the Church of Deliverance, Sam Vann, said to me at the end of our first interview, “Jim O’Brien, you didn’t come here to write a story, you came here to be saved.”

With Jeffers at Point Sur

The old Coast Road north of Big Sur

If you want to find a deeper meaning in the inextinguishable beauty of California’s Central Coast, or just a great hike, grab some Jeffers and head for Big Sur. Robinson Jeffers was the great American poet and conservationist who lived in Carmel from 1914 until his death in 1962, and who seems to have combed every inch of the coast and the coastal range seeking refuge from the world’s conflagrations and from the encroachment of science and civilization onto the rugged, untamed region many refer to as Jeffers Country.

For Jeffers, the dramatic California landscape was a mirror to human passions and a symbol for eternity. He found meaning and metaphor in the brutality of the surf, in the merciless nature of the region’s wild predators, in the lasting beauty of stone, and in the earnestness of the diverse peoples who inhabited this coast before the influx of tourism and golf.

Despite the influx, almost in defiance of it, many of the canyons, creeks, rivers, mountains, backroads and beaches appear not much changed from when they inspired Jeffers’ intense, passionate lyric and narrative poetry. His national landmark home, Tor House, is an ideal place to start any exploration of what might be the most beautiful hundred-mile stretch in the west.

Any traveler, child or scholar, poet or plumber, will have his or her experience of the central coast enriched with a little Jeffers in a pocket. Much of his work remains available, including a handy, pocket-sized edition from Vintage Books called Selected Poems.

What follows are a few specific suggestions -- one historic house tour, one unique hike, one spectacular drive, one fine walk -- of places to go in and around Carmel and Big Sur and what to read when you get there. For more information, you should purchase “Jeffers Country Revisited,” an exhaustive guide (with a great map) to the specific locations of dozens of Jeffers’ poems, at his historic home on the coast, Tor House.

The House
Tor House and Hawk Tower
26304 Ocean View Avenue, Carmel, CA
Four blocks south of downtown Carmel

Hawk Tower at Tor House

Tor House and Hawk Tower are the incomparable architectural gems a mile or so off the main drag in Carmel. Here Jeffers lived a bohemian existence with his wife Una and their twin sons, Donan and Garth. Both buildings were constructed with stones from the coast they overlook. The poet helped the stonemasons build the house in 1924, then built the tower himself.

For many years there was just the Pacific Ocean, Tor House, and to the east a stand of cypress trees planted by the poet himself. The first time I went looking for Tor House I drove right past it. I was expecting to find a still solitary homestead on a deserted coast. Instead what I found – what you’ll find – is a house surrounded by a busy neighborhood full of houses. Fortunately, nothing but a small roadway (Scenic Road) yet lies between Tor House and the ocean. Inside, the house is warm, and signs of a lively, literate family life remain.

Many of Jeffers’ books remain on the shelves about the rustic, low-ceilinged house. The last time I was there was just after I’d run across a blurb by Jeffers in an ad inside an old literary journal praising Horace Gregory’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. While the docent told our group stories of Robin’s reclusiveness (despite this, he was visited by most of the literary lights of his time), his work life and whimsical parenting style, I scanned the shelves until, in a downstairs bedroom wherein lies the bed in which he died, I found the Gregory volume. I excitedly told the docent of my serendipitous find. He was a little less enthusiastic than me.

Tor House inspired some of Jeffers’ most anthologized and representative works. The poem called “Tor House” serves as an excellent introduction to the way he viewed the Central Coast, and to the occasional beauty of his language:

Tor House
If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May yet stand, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.
But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years:
It is the granite knoll on the granite
And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel
River-valley, these four will remain
In the change of names. You will know it by the wild sea-fragrance of wind
Though the ocean may have climbed or retired a little;
You will know it by the valley inland that our sun and our moon were born from
Before the poles changed; and Orion in December
Evenings was strung in the throat of the valley like a lamp-lighted bridge.
Come in the morning you will see white gulls
Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon
Their dance-companion, a ghost walking
By daylight, but wider and whiter than any bird in the world.
My ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably
Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite, not dancing on wind
With the mad wings of the day moon.

With Jeffers one is constantly reminded of the contrast between the impermanence of human things and the lasting nature of stone, of the ocean, of the natural world. Stand at the height of Hawk Tower. Look only west. Someday we’ll all be gone, but the roiling ocean, the “wild sea-fragrance of wind,” will endure.

The Hike
Soberanes Canyon and Soberanes Point Trails
Garrapata State Park
Highway 1, seven miles south of Carmel
Look for cars parked in the shade of a cypress grove on the inland side of the highway

Footbridge near Big Sur

This is a glorious two-to-four mile (it’s up to you) hike from the coast seven miles south of Carmel, heading east into the Santa Lucia hills. It’s one of those uniquely Californian hikes where in a relatively short distance you can go from rocky ocean beach to dusty coastal scrub and mission cactus, from warm morning sun to, finally, unexpectedly, dense forest chill beneath a towering canopy of redwoods.

If it is winter or spring, Soberanes Creek will be flowing westward beside the trail, making its hasty way to the Pacific. In summer and early fall, you’ll find lingering pools of cool water and, where the forest breaks, muddy patches covered in deep green grass and lined with goldenrod.

Toward Highway 1, near the bottom of the hill, at the beginning and the end of your hike, you’ll find a small corral in long disuse, haunted remnant of an older California. In a cypress grove near the corral gate, nailed to the trail’s bulletin board, protected in a plastic envelope, someone has posted this 1932 poem by Jeffers:

The Place for No Story
The coast hills at Sovranes Creek:
No trees, but dark scant pasture drawn thin
Over rock shaped like flame;
The old ocean at land’s foot, the vast
Gray extension beyond the long white violence;
A heard of cows and the bull
Far distant, hardly apparent up the dark slope;
And the gray air haunted with hawks:
This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.
No imaginable
Human presence here could do anything
But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.

In this short poem, Jeffers, who’d written so many passionate stories in verse about the Central Coast and the hardscrabble ranchers and gamblers, Mexicans and Indians who’d settled there, admits to right here where you stand having encountered a place too naturally dramatic to populate with human characters.

To stand on the hills and gaze all around you with “The Place for No Story” still chiming in your mind is a kind of revelation: east the rock “shaped like flame”; west the notorious “white violence” of the breakers; hovering, the menacing presence of a red tail hawk hunting.

There’s no better way to recall the earnest human history of this place than to stand at that abandoned corral and imagine cowboys at their dusty work astride their horses. Even if this time Jeffers could find no story for them.

The Drive
The Old Coast Road
Thirteen miles south of Carmel
Left off Highway 1 immediately north of Bixby Bridge

Bixby Bridge

Just a few miles south of the Soberanes Canyon Trail, immediately north of the elegant Bixby Bridge, there’s a dirt road leading up into the hills. The old Coast Road is 10.5 sometimes bumpy miles that must be taken slowly and with frequent stops along the way. The winding road leadeth you through green pastures, untrammeled meadows, dark redwood forests, along creeks, over the Little Sur River, and into the unspoiled country where Jeffers set many of his long, passionate narratives.

It was in these lush, mysterious canyons that the doomed Clare Walker wandered in search of nourishment for her flock in “The Loving Shepherdess,” one of Jeffers’ most accessible and compelling long poems. Along her way Clare encounters cowboys, subsistence farmers, ranchers and visionaries.

An old homestead along the Coast Road

These are mixed-race American people, Asian, Latino, Native American, white, the western American people of a century ago, for whom the great hills and rocky coast were a living, a hideout, a refuge. Among them Clare finds kindness and rejection, gives joy and causes pain. Each encounter brings suspense, ambiguity, enlightenment. “The Loving Shepherdess” demonstrates the union of Jeffers’ fascination with the lives of the people and the natural grandeur of the place. It also demonstrates his poetic obsession with retelling the story of Christ. Clare is the good shepherd whose sacrifice is inevitable. Here’s a small excerpt from the poem:

...The Creek makes music below. Come, Clare.
It is deep with peace. When I have to go about and work on men’s farms for wages
I long for that place
Like someone thinking of water in deserts. Sometimes we hear the sea’s thunder
far down the deep gorge.
The darkness under the trees in spring is starry with flowers, with redwood sorrel,
colt’s foot, wakerobbin,
The slender-stemmed pale yellow violets,
And Solomon’s seal that makes intense islands of fragrance....

The old Coast Road affords some of the best, most expansive views of the coast and the much-photographed Bixby Bridge. I recently drove it twice in two days, in a 12-year old 2WD car with low clearance. Along my way I encountered hardly any people.

What I did encounter, along with the views, was an exceedingly rare California Condor perched in the upper reaches of a dying Alder tree.

California Condor and Sea

 So, if you want to escape the long lines of cars snaking along Highway One, and if you want a place where frequent stops and starts to enjoy the view can be safely made, try the old Coast Road, just like Clare Walker. And like Jeffers and wife, Una, who are said to have come into Carmel for the first time over this dramatic track.

The Walk
Molera Point Trail to the mouth of the Big Sur River
Andrew Molera State Park
Highway 1, 22 miles south of Carmel

The old Coast Road will drop you back on Highway 1 near the entrance to Andrew Molera State Park. There you can take a one-mile stroll along the Big Sur River to its terminus at the Pacific Ocean.

When with the river you meet the sea, stop and look over your left shoulder to see the marble precipice of Pico Blanco towering in the eastern sky. Here you can take the advice Jeffers gives in “Return.” We have gotten too far from the land, he says, “too abstract,” “too wise.” Modern life has muted our passions, has blinded us to the beauty and nobility of nature. Here in this little cove lies an antidote:

Return
A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go down to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.
Things are the hawk’s food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.

On a recent visit to Molera Point I had the cove all to myself. I read “Return,” there alongside the clear rushing water, the ocean waves, a driftwood strewn island in the stream. Inland the green carpeted Coast Range was bathed in late afternoon sunlight, every contour and every crevice in every hill in evidence. Beyond the green hills soared “noble Pico Blanco.” Maybe it was right here, at the end of the Big Sur River, that Jeffers dipped his arms “up to the shoulders,” here, where he found his “accounting where the alder leaf quivers/ In the ocean wind over the river boulders.”

Photographs by Caitlin O'Brien

Spirit of the Century

I wrote this for GQ in 2009 but it never ran. Also never got fact-checked. It could have used another round of editing, too. I notice some bad and/or mixed metaphors in there. Still interesting though, and there are reviews of five further brands of American absinthe at the end. I got bottles of them all to try. It was a great assignment, even though its failure to ever run was, as always, devastating.

In the dimly lit mad-scientist laboratory where distiller Lance Winters works, the scattered debris creates a sort-of topographical map of his winding alcohol-spirit journeys. Boxes of ripe blood oranges clutter a long table. There are odd-sized beakers filled with old samples from years of failed batches of bootleg absinthe (although it didn’t make the final cut, chamomile worked well; noble fir needles, not so much) and plastic baggies bulging with unfamiliar herbs. A shelf is holds herbal reference books and volumes on flavor science.

 There is also a tattered copy of Gray’s Anatomy. It looks well-thumbed.

The lab is tucked into a corner of the airy, million-square-foot former Naval hangar across a shipping channel from Oakland, in which St. George Spirits, where Winters is master distiller, makes and bottles its powerful boozes, Hangar One Vodkas, Malt Whiskey, St. George Eau de Vies, and its ground-breaking Absinthe Verte. Everything is distilled in two gleaming, copper, hand-made Bavarian contraptions that look like the combination of a one-man submarine and a giant clarinet.

During a recent visit, as he finished up his third batch of commercial absinthe, the air in the enormous hangar was infused with a sometimes sweet, sometimes earthy, herbal perfume. Up on the big still’s platform sat an innocent-looking carton overflowing with the dry-earth-colored stalks of the herb, wormwood -- a boxful of the peculiar soul of the world’s most notorious drink, trying to look casual.

When I ask what first interested him in absinthe, Lance Winters answers quickly, “The lore.” At first I think he has said, “The Lord,” and for a few nervous minutes sitting in his lab I operate under that assumption. Such is his almost religious devotion to the purity of his spirits. And such is the profound nature of the quest to save absinthe from its past.

Born under a bad sign, absinthe began life as a semi-quackish, offensive tasting curative for the varied bodily ills in 17th Century Switzerland, where its key and most controversial ingredient, the bitter herb wormwood, grows in abundance. Soon distillers began to refine absinthe into something still bitter but drinkable.

But it was the French, during a series of late 1800s wine shortages, who embraced it wholeheartedly as their drink of choice. They’re French, they needed something. And so they rhapsodized it, immortalized it, imbibed it daily.

Naturally there came an influx of cheap absinthes to exploit this moment of popularity. These were criminally awful liquids that ranged from the horribly bitter to the literally poisonous, with dangerous green dyes (absinthe is traditionally green-hued) and toxic alcohol bases. Suddenly absinthe was cheap, cheaper than wine, cheaper than bread. It became the drug of choice for alcoholics, for destitute artists.

Even as bad absinthe made people sick, as overindulgence made them act badly, even violently, the drink became ubiquitous at fin-de-siecle cafes. It became popular in paintings then judged worthless, today priceless. Lautrec painted it. Van Gough. Degas. And finally, Picasso.

“It was safe to attack absinthe because the people that drank it, they were the scourge of society,” says Winters. “They were these people that called themselves artists, but they painted in bizarre colors and shapes. They were poets and who needed poets?”

***

Egged on by the evidence of the affects of bad absinthe, and especially by a worried and jealous national wine industry, the French government turned on it, destroying its reputation with all manner of hysterical calumny -- absinthe made men hallucinate, it made women harlots, it turned infants into degenerates.

The French banned it. So did the Swiss. The United States, believing the key ingredient wormwood to be the source of some hallucinatory power, banned the herb’s import, and essentially, the drink, in 1912.

Ban it, of course, and the lore begins. The lore always takes care of itself. A legend began, a myth was born, of absinthe as artistic muse, as opium in a glass.

***

It took Winters eleven years and nine-and-a-half carefully-executed batches of bootleg absinthe to arrive at something that truly thrilled his palate. Getting there had felt like the first time he’d gone to Disneyland as a kid; today his description of the moment borders on the orgasmic.

“I had this feeling right in my solar plexus that was just starting to radiate,” he says. “It’s the same feeling. It’s like, oh my God, it’s here. This is beautiful.”

Nothing could match the buzz he got walking into a familiar bar or a room full of friends, hoisting a bottle of his latest absinthe, and seeing the knowing smiles spread: tonight we drink something mysterious, delicious, illegal, and potent.

Last year, when America’s alcohol bureaucracy agreed to allow it to be made and sold here again, after ninety years underground, naturally someone asked Winters if he planned to bottle his bootleg absinthe and take it commercial.

His answer: Never.

It was too precious, too personal. Sharing it was meant to be private, intimate, a little illicit, and Winters wanted to keep it underground, down where the drinkers roll.

“I loved that feeling,” he says, “of being able to have something that they appreciated. And I didn’t want to cheapen that aspect of it.”

Once Winters let go, and released his St. George Spirits Absinthe Verte, the first ever commercial, American-made absinthe, he became a member of a very small club.

Barely a year into absinthe’s sensational rebirth, a tiny handful of Americans are making some of the best stuff available, but perhaps only Winters is making absinthe his own. It’s fair to say that American purists have fallen into something like love with absinthe, and are determined to save it, like a French whore with a heart of gold, from itself and its reputation, and especially from any charlatan eager to corrupt its precious original formula. Primarily they cling to a quest for authenticity of taste; the purist’s goal in the bottle is reproduction. It might be more accurate to say the obsession is replication.

But of what?

While there is general agreement that absinthe’s essential ingredients are anise, fennel, and wormwood, all steeped in a clean spirit base of grain alcohol, beat alcohol, or brandy, there is no official, regulatory, base-definition of absinthe. Outside of Switzerland, no government has given absinthe a classification, like for whiskey or vodka, within which clear rules of distillation and ingredients would apply.

For now, purists insist that truly authentic absinthe can only be made with an intimate knowledge of hard-to-obtain vintage bottles.

When Winters made his very first batch of illicit absinthe eleven years ago, he’d never tasted even a dram of the green fairy. Now his bold take on absinthe’s conventional herbal profile has begun to modernize the powerful liquor. For now, while the purists tend to speak admiringly of Absinthe Verte, they are also quick to point out that it represents a digression from what those lucky Belle Époque Frenchmen enjoyed.

Winters and I are sipping absinthe, legally, after dinner at Flora, a busy restaurant in Oakland’s burgeoning Uptown neighborhood. Good absinthe should be as much an olfactory pleasure as it is a pleasure on the tongue and throat and mind. And it is this sense of inspiration, in the most literal sense of the word, that immediately transfers to the imbiber as a glass of Absinthe Verte nears the nose and mouth. There it is: the earthiness of the wormwood, the sweetness of the star anise, the fennel’s grassiness. Next comes the momentarily intimidating power of the wafting brandy base. Then you sip it and it’s a mural on the tongue. And you find yourself delighted, and quite certain, that after nearly a hundred years underground, the powerful booze with the reputation for havoc is truly back.

And back it is. Winters estimates that in all maybe 300 people tasted the fruits of his underground batches. Last, St. George Spirits estimates it sold 100,000 bottles. I’ve been to Flora before when the bar was lined with glasses of the cloudy greenish drink prepared the traditional way: ice water dripped over sugar cubes and through slotted absinthe spoons. Tonight is the same, as bottles of Absinthe Verte, with the crazy monkey on the label, swing from shelf to bar and back.

That particular preparation, known as the French drip, always seems too sweet to me, and so I order mine the way I like it: straight, with a couple of ice cubes. In no way does good absinthe require added sweetness. What bitterness it holds only serves to make it more interesting, to give it presence.

There is no question of the suggestion of black licorice, and some think that’s a taste for which Americans have no palate. But you shouldn’t let a distaste for licorice or anise prevent you from trying absinthe. In the good stuff, and certainly in Absinthe Verte, the balance of the herbs, and the intensity of their interplay with their clear alcohol base, dazzle the tongue away from lingering on any one element.

It’s a notoriously difficult balance to achieve. One distiller famously put beakers of vintage, pre-ban absinthe through a spectrometer to find the precise ingredients classic distillers used. Winters approach is more art, less science.

“Mozart didn’t have to break apart the auditory spectrum to say ‘this is what sounds beautiful, this is what is truly pleasing to the soul,’” he says. “With this, all the chemicals are there; they do their shit. Whether you make them do it or not, they do it. What we’re making them do is sing all their harmonies in the right way.”

At Flora with Winters, sipping absinthe after years of reading and hearing about it, yearning for the experience, after years of never expecting to drink it, I take in the herbs and the burn. The restaurant is a fairly new place, lively, still gleaming, its art and high ceilings and long curving bar done in an Art Deco style to mark the era of the great old building it’s in.

Looking around, it’s easy to imagine this 1930s-style dining room packed with chain-smoking men in suits hitting on secretaries in stockings; easy to picture lithe, flirtatious, secret Lesbians with bobbed hair and clunky shoes, leaning into each other furtively at the bar. It’s an image and a moment I love; but I understand I can’t ever live it. I understand that this place is not a perfect replica, not a chimerical attempt to go back, but an affectionate, modern architectural nod. Like Absinthe Verte, it’s a perfect, beautiful echo.

Five to Try
Outside of New Orleans, absinthe made little impact in the United States in its heyday a century ago. But this time around, Lance Winters and a small group of Americans are making some of the best stuff out there. Invariably, their creations achieve that remarkable progression from the sweet to the bitter that makes every mouthful of absinthe such a trip.

Jade Nouvelle-Orleans
Ted Breaux
Combier, France
If Lance Winters is absinthe’s modern face, Ted Breaux, a native of New Orleans, is its sternest Puritan. A fierce champion of tradition and authenticity, Breaux makes his spirits at a 130-year old distillery in France, using herbs from the original cultivars of absinthe’s glory days. He famously put pre-ban absinthe through a spectrometer to determine its precise chemical make-up, so that he could re-create the very stuff that inspired the likes of Van Gogh and Oscar Wilde. It was worth it. With its brandy base and European wormwood, Nouvelle Orleans, which Breaux distributes under his Jade label, simply mesmerizes the senses. The palate tingles. The anise alerts you to the coming pleasure like the first chord of “A Hard Days Night,” its sweetness in perfect harmony with the eventual bite of the wormwood. The flavor lingers on the tongue, and longer in the mind. It’s an epiphany. But I couldn’t tell you if Breaux’s products are “authentic,” because like all but a few people on earth, I’ve never tasted pre-ban absinthe. Given the sublime pleasure of Nouvelle Orleans, it seems unimportant.

Lucid Absinthe Superieure
Ted Breaux
Combier, France
Apparently a great finish is a Ted Breaux trademark. Lucid is the widely-distributed absinthe Breaux makes, also in France, for Viridian Spirits. Don’t be fooled by its cheesy, velvet-painting-black bottle adorned with two glowing cat’s eyes at the neck and the word “Lucid” written in fun-house-mirror lettering at the base. Inside is some sophisticated liquor. If this is not the monumental achievement that Nouvelle Orleans represents, if it lacks that spirit’s complexity, it is also about half the price. The primary difference is in the base: beet alcohol in Lucid, as opposed to brandy in Nouvelle Orleans. Thus Lucid takes its effect in a more leisurely way, as if the gentler base gives the anise and fennel more time to establish their benevolent power, just before Lucid finally enflames the mouth and animates the senses. Its presence is felt long after the glass is empty.

North Shore Distillery Sirene Absinthe Verte
Derek Kassebaum
Lake Bluff, Illinois
Ice water (absinthe’s traditional mixer) causes the essential oils from the herbs to reconstitute, which turns the traditionally green liquor a milky white. Aficionados call this transformation “louching,” French for “clouding up.” Kassebaum’s Sirene has a golden glow at its core, which probably should have alerted me to its fiery nature. Instead, watching it slowly louche like the drifting in of a soft coastal fog, I thought I had found a surprisingly gentle absinthe. Wrong. Sirene may be serene on the outside, but its essence is heat. Its sweet herbs hit you one-by-one, like low cards from a black-jack dealer. But in the end they succumb to a royal spiciness. Sirene exits burning.

Leopold Bros Absinthe Verte
Todd Leopold
Denver
In the United States, there are no official rules for an absinthe recipe. Makers generally agree that it must have anise, fennel and wormwood, all steeped in a base of clean, clear alcohol. After that, it’s up to you, and Todd Leopold might be making the boldest move of all: for his base, he uses twice-distilled Pisco, a grape-based alcohol from Chile. His potent Absinthe Verte overtakes the palate like the Marines at Normandy. It is boisterous from start to finish, as its bold floral scents and strikingly sweet introduction promptly give way to a peppery finish. It’s like a really wild night at a great bar that ends in a fist fight, and even the fist fight was fun.

Marteau Absinthe de la Belle Epoque
Gwydion Stone
Portland
Seattle-based Gwydion Stone makes his absinthe with the innovative distillers at House Spirits in Portland. Like Breaux, he’s an avid traditionalist, as you can see from the name of his absinthe. (Stone is the creator of the fascinating web site, wormwoodsociety.org). His base is grape and his herbs European. As with each of these American absinthes, there is no need to add sugar to a glass of Marteau; it starts with a jab of sweetness, promptly followed with a manly punch of alcoholic power that could knock you into the next week, if not the 19th Century. Still, if this is what Belle Époque Frenchman were drinking in all those famous paintings of them, one wonders why they don’t look happier.

But first, a poem to get things started

The Lonely Goatherd
The charlatan,
A suicide,
He never really could decide:
Mountain goats?
Or whores with sores in their throats?