The Tastemakers (9 page)

“Glenn Roberts's reputation began spreading like wildfire years ago when he first reintroduced us to the proper grit and to Carolina Gold rice,” the New Orleans chef John Besh recounted. “Word spread through the upper-echelon kitchen ranks by word of mouth.” Besh, whose grandfather had ground his own grits, hadn't seen a proper grit in decades. “Then came Anson Mills, who in turn inspired others to begin milling again. I credit Glenn with this renaissance of not only the mill but of southern food and culture as well.” Charleston soon became a food destination at the center of this movement, on par with San Francisco as a magnet for culinary tourism, as hush puppies, shrimp and grits, and fried chicken dishes began populating menus all over the country, from fine-dining spots such as Charlie Trotter's in Chicago to small neighborhood bistros and even national chains such as the Cheesecake Factory.

During our lunch at the Glass Onion I tasted the shrimp and grits Roberts had ordered, piled in a wide bowl with pan-fried fat prawns and thick slices of spicy Andouille sausage. These were Anson Mills hominy grits made from John Haulk corn grown nearby, cooked in the Charleston style by quickly boiling them in milk. Their color was a deep, custardy yellow, but there were flecks of brown and caramel in there as well. I didn't really expect much; having tried grits many times before, I'd always felt their taste was somewhere between baby's cereal and unsweetened oatmeal, but these were something entirely transcendent. Buttery, sweet, and chewy, they had the consistency and heft of perfectly scrambled eggs, and I found myself actually pushing aside the shrimp and sausage to get every last bite of grits that I could.

Today Roberts runs Anson Mills with his wife, Kay Rentschler, a cookbook writer and journalist who met Roberts when she came to write about him and his grits for the
New York Times
in 2004, and she fell in love after he sent her home with his only bag of yellow nixtamal grits, which, she said, “blew me away.” She works out of New York and Martha's Vineyard, testing recipes to accompany the two hundred–plus grains the company now sells—a daunting task, considering the need for historical accuracy as well as precision in cooking what are very temperamental foods. Though Anson Mills grains are freely available for purchase online, according to Roberts, direct-to-consumer sales only make up 4 percent of the company's $3 million annual revenue, with roughly four thousand restaurant clients, ranging as far afield as Italy and Japan, being the main driver of the business. Each year it's been in business the company has grown between 20 to 25 percent, almost all of it driven by more chefs and restaurants coming to Anson Mills for their grains. Aside from his work in the field, Roberts works closely with chefs who buy his products, sometimes talking on the phone with them, often as they're in their kitchens, to explain not only the cooking process but also the cultural legacy behind what they are serving that night. That hand-holding and his attention to personal relationships has really paid off. “We know what chefs want, we know how to deliver it the way they want it, because we've all been in the restaurant business.
We've all worked with some of the best in America. I'm a rotten cook and a terrible chef, but if I work with chefs, I become better,” said Roberts, ordering a second beer. “The idea behind what we do is only dealing with concepts we can make relevant to the American public. We stumble across things that can become relevant. We were never restricted by trends. We set our own trends.”

Each year Roberts picks one new food he will push out to his clients, and this year, if everything works out in the fields, he is hoping it will be China Black. The combination of its flavor, the stark black sheen of its color, and the story of its history make it a grain he believes could eventually generate revenues of $1 million annually. Though other rice producers, such as Lotus Foods, sell varieties of imported black tribute rice (grown largely in China), these mostly lack the deep aromatic flavor of the organic, American-grown China Black that Anson Mills is bringing to market. Even before it was available, the company's website listed several products it hoped to sell, from straightforward China Black rice to black rice grits, black rice flour, black rice polenta, crème de riz, and a toasted black rice powder. With its high antioxidant levels, Roberts imagined being able to sell some of the by-product for health supplements and saw the potential market of pastry chefs as a particular springboard into a food trend. “This must be begging for some sort of out-of-the-way crazy congee rice dish,” he said enthusiastically.

Roberts was also driven by a desire to redeem China Black's fortunes after the crop's failure in 2009. “When the seed went away, the beatings I took from the chefs were brutal. I'd promised it, and when chefs want stuff, they want it now. They don't want to wait.” For the sake of Roberts's reputation and that of Anson Mills, China Black had to succeed and become a trend. “I promised the chefs I'd do it. I failed, and now I'm coming back and tripling down on it.” When I asked Roberts how he planned to create a demand for China Black, he told me the marketing plan was already done. His strategy was simple: choose grains that will be relevant to chefs, put those grains in their hands, and use the chef's own star power and network to kick-start the trend. In short, let the clients do the work for you. “I just gave two thousand dollars of rice to Sean,” he said,
with an all-knowing grin. “I guarantee you within two weeks from now Anthony Bourdain and David Chang will be sitting somewhere together, eating this very rice I gave Sean today.”

W
e sat down for dinner at McCrady's a few hours later as the restaurant slowly filled with well-dressed Charleston families, led by men who wore seersucker suits and bowties and opened car doors for their wives and daughters with a gentlemanly grace. Roberts was still in his dusty jeans and boots, but the restaurant's staff greeted him with a hero's welcome. After all, his name graced the menu under the section devoted to the local farmers whose products Brock used, crediting Roberts and Anson Mills for
Grains, Knowledge, Inspiration
.

“Well, one of the three, anyway,” Roberts said with a chuckle.

The meal unfolded over many boozy hours, with Brock pulling out all the stops to showcase his cooking, his heirloom products (ham from African guinea hogs he'd raised, ember-roasted carrots he'd grown), and what he could do with Anson Mills grains. There were bright, briny roe from sunburst trout sprinkled on a smoked trout pate atop crisp, earthy crackers baked from Anson Mills red fife wheat; Anson Mills airy popcorn served with a startlingly buttery popcorn miso and pea stew; a buttered slice of chewy, dense, flavorful bread made from Anson Mills grits, oats, and benne; chocolate chess pie with toasted benne seeds and benne butter; and finished with Robert E. Lee cake baked with Sea Island red pea flour. Each dish was presented with a minimal rustic elegance. In one, Brock plated what looked like two small, thin rice crackers on an earthenware plate and topped them with some sort of cream. The waiter would explain with great ceremony that these were actually crispy fried beef tendons, topped with a truffle cream. I bit in, and the deep flavor of beef stock quickly emerged from that lithe airy crisp, with the rich, woodsy funk of the truffles tying it back to the earth. It was one of the most amazing, epic, and yet somehow humble meals I'd eaten in years.

As the cocktails and wine flowed (and flow they did—we'd already had three different drinks before the first course even arrived), Roberts got to talking about what drove him to keep pushing out new tastes and trying to forge new trends, like China Black. Seed research these days was becoming digitized. Agronomists could sit at a computer, sequence a grain's DNA, and concoct new varieties without ever having to step foot in a field. A connection to the land was being lost and, with it, the sense of place and culture that came along with agriculture and with eating something grown on a farm. Yes, Anson Mills was a company that existed to sell grains to high-end customers (their products are much more expensive than their competitors'), but at its core Roberts saw his mission as part of a “Robin Hood syndrome.” In 2003, when the company began taking off, he founded the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, a nonprofit that funds research into heirloom grains from the Carolina Rice Kitchen and distributes those grains for free to interested farmers around the United States as well as cofunding research projects with the USDA, such as the China Black trials. “My mission is to recover something from extinction and make sure the avenues to scale it up are open.” Already, he had distributed up to seventy tons of seed entirely free, including donations of Einkorn wheat to the radiation-ravaged farms around Japan's damaged Fukushima reactor, and aided the southwest's Hopi Native Americans in recovering their nearly extinct blue corn crop. To Roberts, Anson Mills was just the means to fund and publicize the work he was doing at his foundation.

“The public doesn't respond to the system [behind the growing] at all. They just think the product is wonderful,” he said, summing up the divide between the two sides of his business. “The public responds to taste if they have a good palate, which is why this goes back to the elite—getting the one percent interested.” It was a trickle-down approach to social change via food trends. Anson Mills grains composes a tiny percentage of the grain produced in South Carolina, let alone America. But because he had targeted the most respected, visible chefs in the world and had his company's name on all their menus, Roberts had harnessed their visibility and influence as tastemakers, turning those grains into a trend
and using the trends' success (and profits) to further his mission of restoring the Carolina Rice Kitchen as well as the greater cause of saving American grains. The culinary trend he'd created was itself a kind of Trojan horse—for the social, environmental, and historical trends he truly cared about implementing.

“I started this when I'm old,” Roberts said, “and that's a good thing, because if I was young, I would have to prove a point. I just want to get enough seed out there that there's a tipping point—that anyone can get China Black rice if they want to grow it and want to sell it. I think about my age, and I probably need to make money at some point. I'm on a decade-and-a-half startup.”

Just then Brock came out of the kitchen, carrying two dark, handmade ceramic bowls and pewter spoons. A sweet, nutty aroma steamed out of them, and as he set them in front of us, we saw that each contained a mound of China Black rice, about half a cup's worth, glistening and perfect. “We just cooked them simply in water, in a low oven, and added a little butter at the end,” Brock said, clearly pleased with the product. “Everyone in the kitchen was freaking out. It doesn't need anything else. You understand the work that goes into it. It's the best food in the world.”

I had never eaten rice like this: straight and pure, in which I noticed the firm, al dente texture of each grain, its subtle fragrance of toasted earth, and the slick, buttery coating from the starch coaxed out of it. I could see how Chinese emperors would have demanded this rice in tribute, hoarding it for themselves, like gold and rubies. It was rice that tasted like candy. It was a grain as art.

“It's nuts,” our waiter said, looking over us as we savored it. “Chef Brock gave us each a little spoonful, just a few grains, and it reminds me of ice cream. The density has that pop to it. Oh man, it's incredible.”

“Sean, I haven't eaten this in three years,” Roberts said, his nose hovering over the bowl with an ear-to-ear grin. Suddenly, the years of work, the high hopes and crushing disappointments, were evaporating for him like the steam coming off the rice.

When our dinner ended at eleven that night, five hours and far too many drinks after it had begun, Roberts ordered a cup of strong
black coffee, which he downed in several gulps. I could barely stay awake at the table, but he was going to drive two hours to his mill in the town of Columbia, sleep there for two hours, and start milling seeds at three in the morning to prepare orders for shipment the next morning, when he would meet me at another rice plantation, then drive another four hours to Charlotte, where he would catch a flight back home to New York that night. Here was a man who was hitting the stride of a twenty-year-old at an age when most men were thinking about retirement, and in his mind, Roberts's trendsetting had only just begun. He was a farmer and advocate and dreamer who had tapped into the fantastic trendsetting power of chefs and leveraged that to change the way the culinary world ate its grains. As he drove off into the night with the Camry's seatbelt warning bell clanging away (he never wears them), I thought of something Dr. Anna McClung said about Roberts when I asked whether he was a trendsetter or just plain nuts.

“Well,” she replied without a pause, “I guess most trends start with eccentric lunatics.”