Peter: Okay so this is the first episode of a new podcast that I’ve created that’s going to focus on California cuisine with kind of an emphasis on agriculture and food purveyors, ranchers farmers and chefs of course too and so my first guest is Bob Klein and the former owner of Oliveto.
Bob: with Maggie
Peter: with Maggie that’s true Maggie and Bob Maggie started the restaurant.
Bob: I kind of yeah I pushed her into it
Peter: Okay yeah it’s named after her book so obviously she’s very involved.
Peter: So I guess Bob, the first question I wanted to ask is we worked together for a few years, we’ve known each other for a while now, and I’ve never really like sat down and talked to you about something besides like the restaurant and now it’s going to be run that day or in the future or whatever. So I guess I was wondering like how you got started in the restaurant business and like maybe what you did before that and then how it evolved.
Bob: Yeah, so I worked for TV stations. I produced TV shows and then at one point I was an executive producer like that and I got a boss. I hated it the first time and we would have friends over for dinner and people go “Maggie. This is so great. You should open a restaurant”
Peter: Oh, Maggie’s cooking?
Bob: Yeah, so, and she had that cookbook. So I thought, oh, we should start a restaurant. That would be my way to get out. So I wouldn’t have to work for somebody. I hated working for someone who I didn’t like. And then I think she went not completely not completely willingly. And we got a business plan together. She went to work at some chain pizza place for like three months. That was her restaurant experience. But she had cooked, but she knew a lot about food. And we had friends in the restaurant business. And we put a business plan together and then we found a location and then we built out the restaurant and called it Oliveto because it came out of Maggie’s book. The idea of the restaurant was really cuisine that was built around Oliveto, so Italian, Spanish. Then we had a menu. We hired a chef. Rick Hackett was the first chef, we were incredible novices, and we were really busy right away. And Stan Sesser, who was the reviewer for The Chronicle, early on wrote a review that chewed us up. It was like, and it wasn’t just us that started out, those people at Berkeley, they’re so stupid, they will line up outside to eat this horrible food. This is essentially the tone of it. And the picture was the most depressing shot of the restaurant you could imagine. It was like an empty chair and bare wall. And it had this big effect on us. And then sometime later, we were resurrected by Patti Unterman, and then we were sort of kind of okay.
Peter: So do you mind if I just give a little background about who those people are to sort of…
Bob: Yeah, so the first chef, Rick Hackett, Had been a cook at Bay Wolf and he had good food. He hadn’t run a restaurant before. I had an accountant, and I said, you know, when are we gonna know what’s going on? He’s all you’ll know right away. We never knew you know, it’s just like it doesn’t it doesn’t Yes, as far as, like, making money, you know, what’s going on. And so I was in television, continuing working television, and we needed my salary in the beginning, so the restaurant certainly didn’t make money. And then at one point, Paul Bertoli had come back from, he had this little idea that he wanted to be a Catholic scholar and he went to school in some cold city in Canada and he was married by then and then he decided that wasn’t such a good idea so he came back and he consulted for us and then his plan was to open a restaurant and he had a location and we had visited the location to look. It later became you know a restaurant but he got cold feet with the lease and decided that that wasn’t a good thing. So he became a partner in the restaurant. At some point, and by then, you know, Maggie was in trouble. And so I came in, you know, to assist. I had been an executive producer. I didn’t — I wasn’t talent. I was, you know, behind the scenes. And that’s where I was comfortable. And when you have a restaurant, in the beginning Maggie was the star, you know, Maggie was on the front cover of magazines and all that, and she had written for magazines and had a book and had ghost written a couple of books, but once we got Paul, I needed to come in. So then I became kind of in service to the restaurant, which is not something that I was used to, but I was comfortable with it. And it was a matter of managing, at that point it was managing press. You know, the food was fine. Yeah. And what became really clear was you sort of needed press at that point you know the way you know a good Chronicle review or good New York Times review that would propel you and so when Paul came in we were you know we were the spotlight was on us he was nationally prominent and so then it was a matter of Managing what we did and didn’t do and
Peter: Michael Bauer was the reviewer for the Chronicle?
Bob: Yeah, then Michael Bauer. That’s a whole other story. Yeah. He creamed us and then he liked us and then he creamed us again Yeah, he creamed us when his friends opened a restaurant across the street. And it wasn’t just us, it was other local restaurants that were doing well. They were demoted from, like, we were like three stars to one and a half stars. And the Chronicle knew.
Peter: Yeah, wow. See, I always thought that was an East Bay versus San Francisco thing. No, he was…
Bob: He just didn’t like East Bay restaurants as much. It was like it was it was friends wow and he liked restaurants that did nice first nice things for him yeah and so…so we’re getting a lot of press we’re busy food was good we had I think a good manager everything was like fine and then I started to make little movies, and that was when I had done previously, and so I had a little camera, and you know, and I was doing movies about farmers, and Rick Knoll was the first farmer, and It was really about, it was like a whole class of people who were doing something special that they were being, they were coming out of some kind of logic or tradition that they had some level of community support and I thought they were at risk of being undermined by economic Interests, which is what happens all the time.
So I started making these little videotapes and we did Rick and we did Full Belly and we did Dirty Girl and we did… did the strawberry grower. Anyway, so I would go out and they were really, you know, I love them. They were like, and then we had really survived on press. By 2009, press was getting really fragmented. And so you couldn’t, there weren’t a lot of home runs to it. And so I started the Oliveto Community Journal. And that was a regular little, they were really funky, sometimes 40 seconds, sometimes longer. And it would just watch, so I started 2009 with, it was Tomato Watch.
So I went out to River Dog and you looked at Tomato Starts and it was like a whole series of farmers full belly. And that became sort of the norm and then I started going to farmers markets and that is where Bill Fujimoto came in. I think Bill Fujimoto is the father of California cuisine. He’s the one who, you know, some farmer would show up with his Chevy Vega loaded with some produce, you know, like, “What do I do with this?” And he’d take a bite and he’d say, “Well, put it in, put it in that back room.” He would start buying this stuff. And whatever. And chefs would go to the back room and buy you know Judy Rogers was a big buyer I think she did buy. A lot of restaurants would supply themselves out of Monterey market and Bill was extremely knowledgeable so you would go to farmers markets and you’d you know learn you know how to pick the right peach and um.
Peter: So you took him with you to the farmers market?
Bob: Yeah, we would go to the farmer’s markets, and you know and then put it together. And then I started doing meat and chickens and Italian winemakers and you know, I have like a hundred videotapes Little ones
Peter: Do you have any plans for them?
Bob: eventually I should do something with them, and I’ll look at them. They’re great. I was just looking at the one I did, Mr. Espresso, the other day, you know. i think something really magical happened in Northern California back then. I think, I don’t know about you, but I and a lot of my friends came from white, upper-class families that were not interesting, and certainly the food was not interesting, and we went to Europe and we discovered that, and the farmers were discovering how to farm. So very early on, probably 30, maybe 32 years ago, Maggie had worked for UC Agricultural Publications, so she knew all the ag people. And there was a tomato guy who maintained the historic tomato, so it was a tomato that is the first tomato that was found in the mountains in Peru, and he’s kept it alive. And then that tomato went to Europe, and then it developed out of that.
Peter: So it was a sort of a trace of the genetic history?
Bob: It was all there. Also, So we had this tomato museum and we had tomato dinners. I think in the beginning Paul did the first tomato dinners and the tomato dinner was amazing. And so early on maybe even the first year we cleaned out the dining room on like a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and set tables up and all these farmers came in with their tomatoes and we labeled them and so we ended up with a hundred and one tomato varieties and you’d go around and this is before farmers markets or tasting of summer produce. They didn’t know how to farm yet. They didn’t have a language. So if you ate something and said that’s good what’s that one like they say oh no try it yeah there was no you know.
Peter: So is it kind of like farming techniques suited to certain varieties hadn’t been figured out yet?
Bob: Yeah, and a lot of it is watering. And when you actually have to go back and look at, and when you pick, and I have a good videotape from River Dog that talks about how they pick, and where certain tomatoes go to farmers’ markets, certain tomatoes go to the stores, but they got really good. And then we got good. So then we started having these events where we would bring all these tomatoes in that we thought would be part of the dinner, and then the chefs would cast tomato in the menu. That’s going to be for a sauce, that will be tomato water, that will be a slice we’ll put on the sampler plate. So it was an evolution that was really that was real. At the same time Everything was improving, you know, the farmers really started to understand their soil and they started putting out a really good food. It wasn’t just good tomatoes good everything and then I had, when I was in TV, there was a company that would sell movies for you to play in the afternoon and after, you know, when you had to run an event and you had some airtime you had to fill. Oh, okay. And so you’d buy a package of movies. And then the movies had these ratings associated with it would rate stars and plot lines. And then it seemed to me that the movies that did really well-established location really well. You knew where you were, that the establishing shot was strong. And that seems to me to be a very basic human need.
Peter: So it was like a full -length feature film movie?
Bob: Yeah.
Peter: That totally does make sense.
Bob: People like to know where they are.
Peter: Yeah, they do, they do and when you live in this city… Oh, that’s filmed in LA, that’s filmed in San Francisco or whatever.
Bob: Yeah, I mean, I grew up and I knew there was an ocean over there. Yeah. And there was some mountains over there. There was some landmark that you recognized. But farmers really knew where they were. Yeah. They knew where the sun was, they knew the progression this season, they knew what was happening with water, they just knew. And so I thought, okay, well, something that would be good for the Oliveto Community Journal would be to bring the life of the farm into our community so people would know where they were expanding, not just the street that they’re on, or the street that they shop on, or the movie theater they go to, but the life outside, essentially the food life. So that was the model, and so that’s what we did.
Peter: Okay, so I want to ask a question about backing up a little bit to the tomatoes. So you said that at first the growers didn’t necessarily know how to optimize the tomatoes, you know, so they had to adjust their growing techniques, things like that. So at what point or did it even happen that the chefs gave the farmers direct feedback and then the farmers gave chefs direct feedback? Like me as a chef, I might want to ask somebody like, you know, Rick Noel will say, “Hey, you know, this is an awesome piece of produce here but what do you think I should do with it so wait did that sort of dialogue start to happen?
Bob: It did somewhat you know that didn’t that was sort of an innovation with this whole community is that people started to talk to each other Rick would grow something, and it would be rejected by the kitchen and it would drive him crazy he was just like so pissed off yeah and then
Peter: But were they right?
Bob: You tell me I don’t know.
Peter: yeah right. I’d have to be there to see to have an opinion.
Bob: But yeah, one chef we had if you suggested something it would never happen it’d be like the kiss of death.
Bob: You have to make a thing make him think it’s his idea.
Bob: Yeah. So I have to go to Italy every year and I started going to the south to Puglia. And in the south they have these amazing, well they were greens. And they were wild and you had to know how to pick them and what to do with them. They didn’t exist here. And so Rick and Christie ended up going to Italy and they spent time with our friends there, and they brought some of this stuff back and so that got introduced. I don’t know that we ever knew what to do with them. It’s like the Information transfer. I won’t tell you who the chef was but I love fava beans. And so in Italy in the south you can get these, you know, you buy dried fava beans, and they’re already peeled, and they’re delicious, and they’re cheap. So I got like 200 pounds, and Carlo, Mr. Espresso, brought it in for me, just put it in a container with some Espresso machines, but it was the kiss of death, because it was something that I wanted to do. It’s like, no, I’m not going to do that. So yeah, I like fava beans. So that’s sort of what happened. And then in 2009, that’s when things got tight. The economy started getting trashed. And so we had a couple of tough years. Canales changed our food, which I think was not successful. I think it was basically bad food. And then at some point we brought in Jonah. And Jonah was unique.
Peter: Yeah, I heard lots of stories about him.
Bob: Aspergers. Yeah. Really good cook. Like his food was great. But he had to keep his attention on it. Like if the mixer broke, that was gold. He’d be like on the mixer taking it apart. That was like life at the top. And then he had a race car. And so he’s putting all his money into a race car. And then he started motorcycling, so when he left, finally, he joined the Hell’s Angels.
Peter: Yeah, I heard about that.
Bob: That was, you know… Yeah. But he was putting out good food, and then we went into a not very good phase of food, and the pandemic hit, and that was nasty. Yeah. And then you came in, and I think your food was good.
Peter: Well, thank you.
Bob: Yeah, in the end, I think we went out, At least with good food. Yeah, but you know still dragging our asses, you know, we didn’t have the staff. We didn’t have the pandemic was devastating.
Peter: The restaurant business is difficult enough but the pandemic was near impossible. it was impossible to find good staff and trying to serve people nice beautiful upscale Italian food to go boxes. We all did our best.
Bob: We were pivoting every five minutes, you know, so like okay. Well we can do 40 boxes for this organization. Could you put 40 boxes together tomorrow? Then no, we’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna go over this now. We’re sitting outside and now we’re gonna be sitting inside but we’re gonna get the table separate. Now we’re stopping people at the door checking their vaccines and making sure they wore masks.
Peter: Okay so tell me about your truffle adventures because didn’t you do you guys do truffle dinners and like the tomato dinner and the whole hog dinners maybe just tell me about some of the other special dinners you did like the whole hog and truffle and how you acquired the truffles and all that kind and maybe something about the like the purveyors you got the the beef from and the hogs from and all that
Bob: So truffle dinners were… I didn’t know anything about truffles I had no interest in truffles but it was sort of I think maybe Paul thought it’d be cool when I was in Italy so I brought some truffles back and and I ended up becoming really knowledgeable and so I stayed in Tuscany at this you know I guess it was a B &B but it was a really wonderful place and Giorgio was the truffle hunter and so I would go truffle hunting with him and and they’d be really first rate. When I go to Italy, I would fly into Torino and I would sort of check out the truffle market and see what the pricing was, see whether it was a good year or not.
Peter: How would you actually do that?
Bob: Pardon me?
Peter: Did you have people you approached? So when you said truffle market, like I remember you telling me that before. And I think of like a farmer’s market, like all these stalls with all these truffles but that’s not really was that what it was or is something else?
Bob: Well, there was in Torino there was a truffle fair. You could go to the truffle fair and there’d be people with truffles and it was big but that’s not where you would actually buy truffles and the Piedmont was famous for truffles because that’s who marketed it right and but they didn’t have a anyway that’s why I started though and then I started and a lot of the troubles came from Tuscany and Umbria and I knew people and you know I was friends with Roberto Stuckey who was Padigal de Bono so I go down there and I remember when I first started bringing truffles in you had to pay cash and so there’d be lira and so I would go to the bank I’d go to the bank and I’d have this huge wad of lira and I’d be watching the person behind me the first time I did this I got in the car and a car was following me, I thought. And there was a Rolling Stone song on the radio, or I bought a CD or a tape, I guess. And so I cranked that up and, you know, I was in the drug business. And then I would go, and then in other years I would go to Italy and every day I would go to an ATM and I’d take out the maximum of every year so I could build cash. You couldn’t bring the money into the country. I would, you know, I’d have thousands
Peter: You would do the maximum of every day? I’d have thousands of dollars. And, and buy a lot of truffles. And then, at one point, I could wire it to my friend Roberto. So it would go into his account, and then we would go to the bank together and it’s Roberto Stuckey and so the president comes out and says, “Well, can we go up to his office and kind of get you an espresso?” And then somebody walks in with some money. It was like a dream.
Peter: Who is he? Who is Roberto Stuckey?
Bob: Roberto is Padigal de Bono, like a very prominent winemaker. Oh. And we knew him, you know, when Maggie wrote her book. We stayed with them, so as Lorenzo de’ Medici was the Grand Dom and there’s a guy named John Meese and John Meese was a, he was a priest, went to graduate school here in Berkeley so we met him through that and then he lined us up at Badia, and he kind of was the, you know, like the concierge, the promo guy for Badia, charming guy. And he’s the one who named the restaurant Oliveto.
Peter: Oh, really?
Bob: Yeah. And so I might have met Giorgio through John Meese. It was colorful. And then bringing the truffles in, I had to have a broker. They had to be inspected. And the ag, like the first time I bought them, I didn’t bring them in. They were shipped. And they went to the airport and Customs said they couldn’t let him in because there was dirt So we sent a cook there who cleaned them and then we got them really clean, that was the first.
Peter: So he had to clean them like inside some customs office?
Bob: Yeah. Yhat’s something I would never imagine happening but that’s USDA was kind of cool Customs because those Customs people were a nightmare. Customs were just like horrible, but the USA was you know like the inspectors were good you know I’d come in and I’d have a bag full of truffles you know like a cooler and they’d have a drug dog and come on and this dog like crawled over this it was like nirvana for this dog “What’s in there?” “Oh, yeah, they’re declared.” “ Okay. Where are you going?” “I’m going to that line right there”. “Good”. We had all kinds of experiences with truffles. So one year, so I got into a pattern where I would I would have a lot, you know, I might have $20,000 dollars in truffles and so the night before I left we would be cleaning them and we would stay in a hotel and we’d stay in a really good hotel and they knew me at that hotel I was there every year with my truffles. So one year I was there and the king of Lebanon or some king was there, and he was in the royal suite there, this amazing royal suite, and so the hotel was ringed with police, and then every floor had a guy with an uzi at the elevator. Wow. It was like, you know.
Peter: Wow.
Bob: Yeah, it’s secured. So I thought, well, they’re safe. And I’d go to dinner with my friends. I had a friend who lived in Milan. And Maggie was with me this year. And so we were up at two, three in the morning cleaning truffles. The smell was wafting down the hall. And historically you’d have truffles reeking from your room. And one year I went to the elevator to leave and our room was like way down the hall and the elevator opened up and there was this Italian couple and they walked out and they were like “Tartuffe !” So the front desk called and said we’re really sorry but they’re afraid there is a bomb in here and we want to come into the hotel, go No, into your room. I said, well, you know, it’s truffles. They said, yes, of course, we want to check it. Of course you can. So this engineer came in walked in and went talk to the manager that was it. Then that was when we left there was a doorman at the at the hotel named Maurice big mustache wonderful character. And so it became the joke of the hotel. This guy was so stupid he didn’t know the difference between a gas leak and truffles. Oh man. Then one year I was kicked off a plane where I was taking a flight from Florence to, you know, to Frankfurt probably to come home. And it was a two -engine plane. It didn’t have a sealed compartment for — and I had a cooler full of truffles. So the pilot thought that was — it was a German plane. And the pilot thought it was deadly or something so I got a call. I got kicked off the plane was it was
Peter: For him was it smell as well?
Bob: He smelled it. He didn’t know it’s truffles. He just didn’t want it on his plane And it might compromise him or something. So and I was sick as a dog then so I gathered my truffles andI rented a car. I went to the next big city, Bologna and flew out of Bologna. And then I used to get free airfare from Air Italia because we’d get press. And so I’d be flying first class. And one year, we were flying home with truffles. The pilot came down, and the nose of the 47 has a storage apartment and the pilot came down. He cleared out the cabinet and it made a truffle cabinet. And that became a story for, you know, Air Italia. And so, you know, Air Italia got their name in the press. It was worth it for them.
Peter: Yeah. But I was going to say, did he take a truffle as payment or something?
Bob: Did what?
Peter: I was wondering if the pilot took a truffle as payment or something for special storage. But the airline got credit for it.
Bob: Yeah, I mean, they would be– so I would clean them, I put them in paper and then put them in plastic bags. But that was not going to hold back the Fragrance. And so it was colorful getting through reports. So that was truffles. Paul did whole hog. So Paul had this history of spending time in Italy, having the time of year where the winter and the farmer would slaughter a hog and then prepare it for eating through the whole year, and he became, that became his, his MO. And so we started this relationship with Niman Ranch, you know, Bill Niman, and so we would get hogs from Niman Ranch, and they would, they would have these big boxes of meat that they would be parts in and they would ship them but then they put a whole hog on top for us or two whole hogs and so that was the first hogs and I spent time at that farm with Paul Willis there’s a really good video. Paul Willis he’s a great character.
Peter: That’s in Iowa right?
Bob: I’m sorry – In Iowa? – In Iowa, yeah. – And he’s the, you know, he’s the, the heart of Niman Ranch. He was the first farmer.. And Maggie and I went to that. So that was, and then in the movie at some point, Paul comes to dinner with Bill Niman, and has dinner, and there’s an interview with Paul, and Paul talks about making the connection between the food producer and the chef. And Paul Willis said, you know, you’d grow these hogs, and they love these hogs. And then they get put in a box, you never know what goes on with them. And it’s all part of the commodity system and so they were growing good hogs that were then sold in the commodity system. So it was really a matter of making a market for these hogs that were special.
Peter: I see. So he was raising them like in more humane ways and doing things better in the beginning but yet he still ended up having to send them just as a commodity.
Bob: Yeah there was no market for it. There was no market.
Peter: Oh, okay. That’s interesting. ‘Cause I guess I just assumed that the market was created by restaurants like Oliveto and Chez Panisse and other restaurants that were demanding that product. But that’s not always the case, it sounds like.
Bob: Yeah, no, they were, we just, we found him.
Peter: Right. And once you guys found each other, then it was perfect.
Bob: But he was starting, you know, Bill was selling pork. And so his pork was never, they were never in confinement since they were raised outdoors. They grazed, had good lives, they had families. Some customer said to me, and I told Paul this, is like,” if you raise these pigs so beautifully and you are Attached to them, how can you kill them?” And he said, “how can you kill them if you don’t raise them well?” I became an honorary Niman ranch hog farmer. I got a little badge. I went to the dinner, the annual Niman ranch dinner in Ames, Iowa. That was fun. Then balsamic vinegar, this is Paul again. So Paul knew, Paul started an authentic vinegar business where he would buy sets of barrels and then he would sell the sets to families who had money and then he would manage them and someone who built this facility where they were managed
Peter: Here?
Bob: It was in, not Guerneville Sonoma, somewhere It was the Heavey’s property and we had a set of barrels and at one point there was an event where we were tasting balsamic vinegar and a lot of the owners were there for the tasting and Robert Mondavi was one of them and every five minutes Mondavi liked to get up and give a toast and he likes to give a toast and he said you know in the future in the future people will be looking back at this, and what an important moment this is. Balsamic vinegar is really special. And Paul was really good at it.
Peter: Well, I remember one of the best things about working at Oliveto, being the chef at Oliveto, was when you guys were like, “oh, here’s some olive oil”, or sorry, “some balsamic vinegar that Paul made” . And it was so awesome. To me, that was magical. It’s like, wow, I get to use this it’s like it’s been sitting stored someplace and you know it’s probably just getting better or you know it’s like it’s had you know it’s beautiful stuff and I got to use it the way I saw fit which was yeah that was awesome.
Bob: So the dinner we would serve we have like four or five different balsamic vinegars some would be 150 years old you know a little hundred milliliter thing might be $250. We’d serve it in pipettes and three milliliters or whatever and there was that, there was truffles, there was whole hog. We did an annual oceanic dinner. It was really special in June.
Peter: That was with Monterrey fish.
Bob: That was with Monterrey fish. And so we couldn’t have done it with them, I mean without them. And it was, it was a great menu and the fish was amazing and we had, we had a Bella Vista, you know, an ice table with fish, the people that did pick their fish and we cook it for them. And then we did oysters and it was great. Beef, we’d get some Niman ranch beef and so we would get whole animals from Matt McGruder and I did a video tape with him, it was really good I think. And he would do special things. There was somebody who had buffalo, and he thought buffalo would be interesting. So Matt took these buffalo in, and he slaughtered one, it was not so great. He didn’t finish it right, he thought. He wanted to try it again, so he tried it again, and it was great. He didn’t continue because they were just too difficult to manage. They were, you know, they were not placid cows. They were– but we knew, you know, we had a meat locker and we had whole cuts of– whole animals hanging there. And the chefs knew how to age it, you know, on the carcass. And certain parts of it would get cut right away you know the flank steak.
Peter: I remember like kind of learning that as I went and thank God for like Adelino and Tigre and some of the prep cooks there who like guided me and yeah that was special meat. The whole, that whole part of it was incredible those guys especially being the backbone and then Juan doing the pasta. I don’t think people, that’s one thing I sort of don’t want to get lost to history or whatever, I’m sure some way it will, but just like the amount of knowledge in that group of people who were like there every day working with so many different chefs and accumulated the knowledge, like Tigre. I’d be like, oh, let’s do this with the quail and we’ll cut it this way and he would just be like, “Oh, I did that, I did that with Paul the ages ago. Sure, no problem” Like anything I thought that was creative and like maybe a little the difficulty for him was like, “No problem.” Yeah, it was amazing. I was like, “Wow, okay.” –
Bob: Then we had chefs come in from Italy. There was a famous, I can’t remember his name, but early on he was a really famous chef and Carol Field called us and warned us you remember Carol. And she wanted to say you know, he’s really difficult. He can flake. So it turns out he had been an alcoholic. He was no longer alcoholic. He was a dream. Great, great. And then we had a Piedmontese chef, Marco Franeus, that was fabulous.
Peter: So he just came in and did like a guest chef thing?
Bob: Yeah, so Productory do Barbarosco the wine He would do wine dinners with him. He would bring a chef and so he would bring Marco for us and then Marco would come on his own sometimes and he would stay with us and It was special. I Think it was like, you know, great. Really interesting character. I did a video with him. He took me to his cattle ranch. So there was a guy who raised the beef for Marco. And he didn’t have a big herd. He had a few animals. When the weather was bad they lived indoors. He cooked for them These were like, you know little treasures
Peter: That’s even more than Kobe beef.
Bob: Oh, yes well, he didn’t want to have it you know stomach aches, you know, and So we went to his butcher which is in this little town and he hung the meat and he broke it down for us. I did a videotape. It’s so I had a training tape for cooks on how to break down an animal There’s some other beef stuff I’m not sure. I’m sure there were other dinners.
Peter: No, that’s I mean, that’s great. That was It’s very informative.
Peter: So what about like, maybe you could tell me about community grains and how wheat gets grown in California. So before I get into it, I should talk about olive oil. Because olive oil was the beginning. And so a lot of it started with buddy cultivator that are really special oil. And then we went to some other producers of olive oil, there’s a lot of video that we knew a lot about olives. Nan McAvoy, who was one of the owners of the Chronicle, she bought a property in Petaluma, like 500 acres. It was a beat up cattle ranch. And She wanted to do some renovation of this whole farmhouse, and to get a permit, they said, “Well, what’s your agriculture purpose?” So she had been to Badi Kultubonu to the cooking school, so she said, “Olive oil.” So then I was at the Chronicle at that point. I got a call from my boss
Peter: Was this pre Oliveto?
Bob: This is, no, we were in Oliveto by then. So then Maggie became the consultant for Nan. And she brought in hundreds of trees. She had an olive oil consultant who had been Maggie’s advisor in Tuscany. So he was the olive oil expert, and then he came here and managed for Nan, and she did things right. Her stuff was perfect. And we would have these special events where it would be time to harvest, and they would take a whole row of several trees and not pick, then our staff would go out and we’d have a pick day and then we’d have, then they’d press it for us and then we’d bring the oil back and we started doing Olio, Olio Novo, which nobody was doing then, but you know, like it was, you know, which is basically the first press at the beginning of the season. And we had olive oil dinners.
So then wheat became the next thing, we were, we made pasta and I knew nothing about wheat and I knew Mike Tusk brought in a pasta maker, an early Venetian pasta maker. The name of it escapes me. But it was historic. It was like the first pasta maker. It was an extruder, so it was like a brass thing with a plate. And then you. And so historically they’d be making whole grain pasta. So I’d been in Italy. And I’d be with, I was quite friendly with a winemaker at Potatoito
Bob: Roscoe. And so he took me to a local mill and I got some wheat varieties there that weren’t common here. and they got three different varieties, and it was a few hundred pounds and Carlo brought them in for me again it was just you know it was like it was so easy and I gave them to Roeminger to grow out and it was like a couple of like two or three acres with two or three different varieties. There’s a good video of that. And I’d go out there and I was all excited. I’d be saying what I’d like, What do I do? Like if it’s tomatoes, you make tomato sauce or you make– what do you do with grain? Am I going to need a truck? What am I going to do? So we had a customer who was a priest who knew a miller from his church who had a mill, Joe Vanderleet. Joe had been, and Joe was quite old, he was in his, at that point he was in, well into his 70s, maybe 80, and he was a character. And he had been the head of a mill in Oakland that opened in the ’50s, a big mill. And he became anti -white flour. And he started making full grain. And he had a mill. And it was a really wonderful mill. It was called an air -classifier. It was an impact mill, brilliant Japanese invention, but it created, you could get very good, fine milled, consistent wheat flour from it. And at that point Michael Pollan was writing a book called Cooked. And so we became kind of study buddies. And wheat was always sort of a fresh product. So you would, you’d grow it. There’d be the local mill. You wouldn’t mill too much of it. You’d mill two, three months’ worth. And then you’d take it home and make your bread, and then you’d bring more grain in for, because it would go bad, it would oxidize. But there was a technique that was common in Europe where the kernel would be cracked first. And early on I had a science committee, you know, in the backroom at Oliveto, so Michael Ballin was in the science committee. the Miller Craig Ponsford, this great baker, and the scientist, David Kilalay, who had been, who was at UC Davis at one point, Bruce Ames, who’s a very famous biochemist, is the Ames test user who wanted to discover this test for quickly understanding whether something was carcinogenic or or not. He died fairly recently. And it was heavy duty. And then there was a guy named Russell Jones. And Russell Jones was another Cal professor. And he was like an authority on the ion layer of wheat. So the ion layer is this very thin layer inside the brand that is m -zones. And we believe it’s the brain center. It tells the wheat that now we’re going to sprout, now we’re going to release the minerals because we need them to grow, now we’re going to, you know. So in this meeting Joe said, you know, you go to the store to buy whole grain flour, it’s not whole grain. They’re taking the germ out. And Pauline because we should have a test for that. And David Kilday said, “I can do that. There is a protein in the germ that I can measure with antibodies.” Very accurately. And I had a waiter who was in nursing school. She needed a lab time. Pauline had a student who to the lab time. So those two became the lab people for David. And he did these studies and he tested different kernels of wheat. You know, like I would get wheat samples from Nebraska that were big, plump, endosperm rich, And then other kernels, and so we would have some sense of the protein content or the germ content in these different grains. And then he tested pastas and flour, so he tested, you know, King Arthur and
Bob’s Red Mill and our flour, I think, Pillsbury or General Mills and then he tested pastas like what you know five different posters and then it was published in a prominent and So the flowers that were a hundred percent whole grain were probably like 60 65 percent of grain the pastas that were 100 % whole grain were like 10 % and so that okay well that’s important and then I’ve just become sort of this nut on nutrient density and the effect of soil. Soil is a big player in nutrients and flavor and so that’s what I’m into now.
Peter: So who’s actually growing for you now?
Bob: Well, initially there were three farmers So Fritz is our main farmer Fritz is in Caypay and then Paul Muller. Full belly has grown wheat for us. Okay initially a farmer called Front Porch farms, grew wheat and corn for us. They were small, they were great. Fritz’s wheat is great, his soil is great. So what became obvious was I had wheat flour, and wheat flour was a commodity. People didn’t pay much for it.It was really cheap. You would buy wheat For you know, eight cents a pound And then remarketed and sort of really cheap and so but I was paying a lot more for it because it’s coming from good soil And then I was not milling in in a roller mill where you can you know pay to set pound You know, I might have be paying thirty thirty five cents it’s a bound. So what the California farmers had done was create a specialty market for their produce. Tomatoes were a commodity, you know, before our farmers started selling really good tomatoes. It became a specialty crop. And that was the same with a lot of the produce. So there’s like, okay, can I make wheat especially caught so that it becomes something that people know that they’re getting more because of the soil, because of the nutrient density, because of the flavor, because of the milling, like that. So that’s what I do.
Peter: I would assume that’s a little more of a challenge because like a tomato like you didn’t go Look at all these heirloom tomatoes that are beautiful under your colors and whereas the wheat that you have Oh, yeah, a lot of this people’s trust, but that’s an important thing is like people’s look. I’m never having debates with Like other chefs and other people in the food business about like they would say oh you know this was especially back in the day when Bill was running things at Niman Ranch oh you know it’s not any better than anything else blah blah blah and I would say well you know I’ve met Bill I don’t know him very well but I’ve met him I’ve talked to him I know what he sells. I trust him personally because he is a person who’s put all this time and effort into Things. I think that’s a lot of what we’re talking about here is how much of the trust gets built up among people who are serious about food and what they’re doing and care, you know?
Bob: Yeah, and I think the key to trust is transparency. And so when I started with wheat, it was really hard to get information out of the wheat industry. There you are, buttoned up, like it’s like they’re genetically modified to provide with disinformation they can’t give you a straight answer it’s amazing. And early on early on there was this great woman who worked for me and she wrote Pillsbury a note saying oh my uncle Jake’s coming to visit you know and he’s diabetic, but his doc says he can eat whole grain. Is your flour, is your 100 % whole grain? Is this whole grain? This woman writes back, “Yes, it is.” Pollan writes the same note. I’m Michael Pollan. I’m a food journalist. I’m curious. Is your wheat whole grain? No, it’s not. Well the thing about wheat is it is incredibly complicated and incredibly valuable it’s like our most important food and we could really improve the health of America if we did some switch to some level of whole grain you know when you look at the nutrients that are extracted from wheat when it becomes white flour these are nutrients that you need and you say well you know it doesn’t really matter because they’re gonna get them somewhere else.
Peter: well, they’ll enrich it right yeah stuff back in but it’s like why did you take it out in the first place?
Bob: It is just a couple of things you know and so this is stuff you know they can all this stuff and so then when you and I see this chart you know like well these are things that have been taken out and then this is the dietary deficiencies in the American public we need these easy they feel like a glove wow it’s a real yeah it’s a real thing. So that’s wheat.