Michael Voltaggio On Foraging, Mandy Moore, And What’s Wrong With Food Media

Speaking of making your customers happy: the foie gras ban. I know that you’ve been a huge proponent of foie gras, and a lot of your diners miss it desperately. How long do you think it will be before diners in LA start rioting?

I don’t know. You think they would do that?

Possibly. People do crazy things for food.

The “foie gras riot”. I can just imagine the… the last riot in LA. Could you imagine if it was something like that? People trashing the streets over foie gras?

You know, I think a lot of people miss it but, foie gras wasn’t a big deal until the press sort of made it a big deal. Like, I didn’t sell 50 portions of foie gras a night until the idea of a foie gras ban was being circulated. You know? I think – I’m not blaming the media for foie gras going away, but I think it definitely – the benefits of food being exposed through the media right now I think is huge and amazing, but I also think there’s a little bit of a risk because once something gets exposed like that, then it’s like it’s open and it’s out there and people are going to be like “Oh, what is this foie gras? Let’s go and [try it]”—so maybe making the issue that much more accessible perhaps could have pushed it a little bit faster than it needed to be pushed….I don’t know, I think if you started writing about chicken breast, you know…“chicken breast, chicken breast, chicken breast”, people are going to read about chicken breast constantly and they’re going to go out and want chicken breast.

I feel sorry for the businesses that got shut down because of it, and I feel bad that people will simply ban the ingredient, and I think there’s – if foie gras is going to be banned for the reason it’s going to be banned for, then there’s a lot of other things that should be looked at. I feel like it’s an example that was made in vain, for no reason. I feel like there are so many other things that should be shut down before [they shut down] foie gras production or sale, so…I don’t know. For me, it just meant I had to create another dish to put on the menu in its place.

What kind of food trend lately in LA do you think should quietly retire?

I don’t know, I’m a huge fan of food in LA right now. I think… like, I’ve heard people say, you know there was an article I read recently where it was talking about “another restaurant where food meant for sharing and blah blah blah, and we suggest you order 2-3 plates and this and that” you know, people were saying that’s trendy thing right now, but I think that’s what you could call Los Angeles dining Los Angeles cuisine right now. The idea that when you go to a taqueria or you go to a Korean barbeque or you go to some of the ethnic restaurants that I’ve eaten at, we order as much food as possible and we usually bring a group of people so we can pass the food around and share, and I think restaurants in LA take inspiration from that. I mean, the finer dining restaurants took inspiration from that, because that’s what we like to do as diners, so that’s what we’re doing in a restaurant.

I think what’s trendy in LA right now is becoming the staple LA cuisine and I think that’s something that we should be elevating and just celebrating, you know? I mean trends like… I don’t know, I don’t feel like food has to be trendy. Like, when people start writing about food being trendy, then they make it trendy. It’s like “foams are so 1999” or whatever it is, but if there’s something on a plate that’s in foam form and something next to it that’s a liquid form and that foam for whatever reason tastes a lot better, do you decide not to put it on the plate because it’s a foam and you’re afraid someone’s going to come in and say “well, you put the foam on the plate”? I don’t understand where all that comes from. Like, what if it is better? So I feel like trends or the idea of trends makes a lot of food go away for no reason because chefs won’t do it because they’re like “well, I can’t do that! Someone’s going to tell me it’s trendy” or “somebody else did that”. I just think it’s like “What if it just tastes really fucking good?” You should do it.

Maybe vegetables, though. The use of vegetables and fresh herbs right now is really popular in LA. Really popular. I would give Jordan [Kahn] a lot of credit for that over at Red Medicine…and we’re doing it here, but what happened was, you know, the farmer’s market is there every Sunday and so we go there and look for ingredients that we can add to our dishes here or we travel and go on these trips and we see ingredients being used and we ask our farmers here is they can grow them, or we go out in the fields or the mountains around LA and pick leaves that grow wild, or the fennel that we get from underneath the Hollywood sign.

And people are like “Oh, there’s vegetables going on everything right now. Put more protein on the plate” and people are calling that trendy, but that goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s taste. Thomas Jefferson was more of an advocate of like, garnish the plate with meat and put more vegetables on the plate. So, that’s the trend that I really like right now.

 Wait. You said there was fennel growing near the Hollywood sign?

Yeah, we got a lot fennel branches up, just under the Hollywood sign, which I love. Just where the last houses are and walk through that like, we hike up to the gate and we go up there and get wild branches and flowers and tons of fennel up there.

 Finally, one last question – kind of a silly one – you often get confused with your brother. If you were both standing next to each other, how could I quickly tell you apart?

I have a bigger nose and more tattoos.

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