Good Food Awards — 2016
In 1976, my wife, Rose Ann Finkel and two friends made plans to open Truffles, a gourmet grocery in our Seattle neighborhood. To prepare for their entrepreneurship, the women flew south to “the city by the bay” for the 1st Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. Like botanist’s hunting rare orchids in the Amazon, they searched for the best of artisan food. Rose Ann described it as “a delicious experience!!” The local food field was just beginning to germinate, mostly as a result of the resurgent wine world. That summer, after tons of follow up tastings and methodical selections, a job that I participated in, the store was welcomed with relish by local foodies. The former neighborhood grocery was packed with beers, wines, cheese, 80 mustards, vinegar, oil, honey, preserves, pickles, coffee, tea, cured meats, not yet called “charcuterie”, high cocoa content chocolate and multiple other confections, and yes fresh tartufo. Most of the goodies were imported; very few were produced locally. Collectively this type of food was known as “specialty” or “gourmet” food. Though those names still persist, the foods those early explorers were looking for are now called “craft food”. I like to remind people that “craft” is not spelled with a capital K. I also rally against “crafty food” made by global giants trying to look like artisan producers. That Rose Ann and her partners succeeded was confirmed in a 1977 Time Magazine article “Love in the Kitchen” that described Truffles as “one of the five best specialty food stores in America!”
Four decades ago, the food landscape in America was as different from todays, as Bologna from baloney! Only two craft beers were brewed in all of America, both, coincidently, in the Bay Area. The only local Seattle ale was Rainier, nick-named “green death” after the color of the label. Truth is, it was a lager, slightly stronger than the same brewery’s regular beer, just called “ale”! The wine industry was a decade ahead of beer and varietal wines like riesling, cabernet, pinot noir, and chardonnay were beginning to replace generic styles like, pardon the pun, “American” Chablis, Burgundy, Chianti, Champagne, Port and Sherry. There was only a small bunch of local Washington wine producers compared to the more than 800 today. Craft ciders were not produced; the bulk of American cheese was uniform — sliceable, tasteless and mostly made by Kraft (with a capital K). A handful of artisan cheeses were springing up around the country but most serious cheese was imported. The first raw milk cheese event in Seattle, influenced by Slow Food’s Cheese in Bra, Italy and orchestrated by Rose Ann and me as the local convivium leaders would not take place for another two decades! Grass fed beef, charcuterie, and heirloom breeds were known only to the cognoscenti. Today’s daily staples like heirlooms vegetables and whole grains, artisan salami, extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and artisan bread were regarded as sophisticated and reserved for special occasions.
Still today, far more globally-owned widely advertised, yellow lagers brewed with corn syrup, hop extract, and other non-traditional ingredients are consumed in America than craft beer. That said, we now have over 4,000 craft brewers and growth in this sector is fermenting over the top of the tun! Mass marketed lagers, by contrast, are falling flat! All food groups: grass fed beef and pork, wild and sustainably raised seafood, artisan cheese, bean to bar chocolate, cider, vinegar, pasta, sauces, mustard, wine, beer, cider, Arabica coffee, home grown and farmers market fruits and vegetables are blooming. We now live in a Garden of Eaten and Drinken.
Rose Ann sold her interest in Truffles a couple of years later. Together, we founded, MdV in 1978 and were the first to offer craft beer from England, Scotland, Germany, and Belgium in the U.S. We founded Pike Brewery a decade later. By that time there were a handful of Washington breweries; fewer than a couple of hundred throughout the country. Eight years after that, we took a sabbatical and dedicated ourselves to learning more about craft food. We toured Italy annually and became active in the Slow Food movement, at that time the biggest consumer food movement, ever. We returned to Pike Brewing in 2006 and have since devoted our energies to the ‘slow’ philosophy in all things other than service. We brew our own liquid bread in our gravity flow, steam brewery, bake spent grain pretzels, make beer mustard, slice only local breads, spread only local cheeses, ferment kim chi, smoke wild salmon, steam Whidbey Island clams and mussels, cut only the best grass-fed beef and charcuterie, and tout local spirits, wines, ciders, and in addition to Pike, other local craft beers. What Pike does to be good and local, would not have been possible in Truffle’s time.
This trip, 41 years and a myriad of visits later, we traveled to the Bay Area to accept a coveted Good Food Award on Jan. 15th. Committees of experts made the award to just 176 craft American producers in 13 categories including: 19 in beer, 17 in charcuterie, 18 in cheese, 11 in chocolate, 11 in cider, 23 in coffee, 16 in confections, 15 in honey, 11 in oil, 19 in pantry, 18 in pickles, 15 in preserves, and 14 in spirits. The guest speaker was Carlo Petrini who started Slow Food after discovering an American fast food restaurant at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Roma. He spoke eloquently, through an interpreter, to the 800 guests including many stars in the American food galaxy. He spoke of egalitarianism, the pleasures of the table for all, that corporate greed was robbing the planet of wholesome food, and the danger that such disparity of incomes both here and abroad is an affront to civility. He called for eating locally and voting with your pocketbook. Other speakers included food legend Alice Waters, and food entrepreneur and activist, Nell Newman.
Representatives in each category were called up together with brewers the last to be summoned. It was a moment of glory and pride in Pike when our group moved up on the stage and Alice Waters hung the bottle-shaped award with red white and blue ribbon around my neck.
At a large tasting afterward, we ate and drank the winners. Pike Kilt Lifter Scotch Ale aged in Westland whiskey barrels, went well with everything from Real Good Fish’s Smoked Carmel Canyon Black Cod; Cow Girl Creamery Red Hawk cheese; Ruby kraut and hot chili okra pickles; to Lonohana Estate Hawaiian chocolate, Kanahiku 70% dark.
Girl Meets Dirt, shiro plum and mint spoon preserves from Orcas Island; Island Trollers, Troll Caught Albacore with Jalapeno and Habanero from Whidbey Island; Fire Barrel Cider from Finnriver Farm and Cidery in Chimicum; Scquim Bee Farm, Wildflower Honey; Wei Kitchen, Organic Shallot Oil from Seattle; Blue Bus Cultured Foods, and Shakedown Beet, Kraut-chi & corrido from Bingen, along with Pike Brewery garnered the metals for Washington State.
In Saturday’s rain, we sampled our way through the farmer’s market at The Ferry Terminal, spent the afternoon at Golden Gate Park and dined at Michael Mina’s Test Kitchen, where we tested positive for the foods of Little Italy.
On Sunday, we attended the 41st Annual winter Fancy Food Show–holy cannoli! Rose Ann described the comparison to the 1st show, as apples to marrons glacé! At Moscone Center, we walked more than 2.6 miles to explore as many of the 1500 exhibitors who were offering, according to the program, 80,000 foods and beverages from around the world, as we could. Especially well represented were Italy, Germany, France, Japan, China, The Philippines and the U.S. We tried a little of everything from asparagus (white) to ziti. Each cheese, salami, and chocolate called to us, like a sirens song, but there just wasn’t enough time to stop and smell all the fleur de sel.
On our culinary journey, we stopped to say hello to several friends, not to speak of sampling their wares: Fran Bigelow of Fran’s Chocolate, Ritrovo’s Ilyse Rathet, both from Seattle, and Herb and Kathy Eckhouse at La Quercia in Newton Iowa, America’s first artisanal prosciutto maker, who also received The Good Food Award this year. From my view, La Quercia Speck Americano, along with their display, were among the best of show. To be fair, I designed their logo 10 years ago and continue to design their packaging to this day.
On the flight back to Seattle, we were offered Alaska Airlines mixed pretzel snacks. “No thanks” I said, keeping the thought of Fran’s salted caramels on my mind as long as possible. “Bon appetite indeed” Rose Ann said, as I fell asleep, dreaming of sugarplums, all the way home.
