The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World's Fiercest Food Fight - Softcover

Charlie Trotter is notoriously prickly, but even for him, threatening to eat a rival chef's liver was a bit much. True, Rick Tramonto had called him "a little hypocritical," yet there are some things that four-star chefs just don't do. They don't trash one another's cooking publicly. They don't gloat upon winning Iron Chef. And they don't suggest snacking upon one another's possibly fatty internal organs.

What happens when you cross this line? In Trotter's case you trigger an often-surreal chain reaction that leads to actress Loretta "Hot Lips" Swit taking to the Chicago City Council floor to compare the treatment of force-fed birds to that of Iraqi war prisoners at Abu Ghraib. You see yourself excoriated by internationally renowned chefs who are your peers -- and celebrated by animal-rights activists whom you consider to be "idiots." You look on as you're credited with placing a 5,000-year-old delicacy in the city's crosshairs, even as the fatty livers of force-fed ducks suddenly are showing up on pizzas, hot dogs and soul food. Now that you've shot your mouth off, people who'd never heard of foie gras are making special trips to chow down on the stuff. Meanwhile, Roger "007" Moore is solemnly narrating over grisly footage of a rat burrowing up an enfeebled duck's bloody butt.

What the hell.

Well, Charlie Trotter didn't become Chicago's most celebrated chef with an international reputation and a national TV show (PBS's The Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter) by following convention -- or being nice. When his elegant, self-named restaurant opened in 1987 in a converted townhouse in upscale Lincoln Park, it almost instantly was hailed as a flag bearer in a national haute cuisine revolution. Charlie Trotter's discarded heavy sauces and "classic" preparations in favor of more spontaneous, surprising combinations of bold, clean flavors and textures that emphasized the purity and freshness of an exotic array of ingredients. The young chef's approach was exacting, his results stunning. Each bite would offer a different taste experience depending on where the fork traveled on the plate. Each day the menu would change -- he claimed never to repeat the same dish twice. Trotter didn't try to polish a dish into fixed perfection the way the French Laundry's Thomas Keller would. He saw himself more like a jazz musician, a John Coltrane of the food world, and you had to be there to catch the magic of his improvisations.

That he was hell on his staff just came with the package. He was a brilliant artist, after all, and brilliant artists are difficult. When he speaks, most of his rectangular face doesn't move; it's as if all of his energy is concentrated into his piercing, deep-set eyes and tart tongue. When Trotter is in a room, there's no question of who's giving the orders. He preaches excellence, excellence, excellence until his underlings want to plug their ears with their spatulas. He's been known to give cooks reading assignments (Ayn Rand, for instance) and spontaneously to screen movies that end an hour before service, thus sending the kitchen into a mad scramble. In his early days especially, he has yelled, smashed plates and fostered an atmosphere of constant anxiety. He has eviscerated aspiring chefs for the tiniest of infractions and jettisoned them to the sidewalk if they resisted buying into his program of constant, complete commitment. For a while Trotter instructed his wait staff to wear double-sided tape on their shoe soles so they could de-lint the new carpet as they delivered the food. If a guest complimented a server's tie, former employees recalled, Trotter required the server to place it into a box and offer it as a gift -- even though Trotter might reimburse the server only a fraction of the tie's actual cost. When Chicago magazine listed the city's 10 meanest people in 1996, Trotter placed second, after Michael Jordan, and he characteristically complained publicly about not being number 1. Trotter frequently cites his sense of humor without cracking a smile. In the 1997 Julia Roberts romantic comedy My Best Friend's Wedding, he barks at a cook: "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right! I need this perfect!" Trotter alumni often say they appreciated what he taught them -- and they'd never, ever choose to relive the experience.

If animals knew such things, they might have feared Trotter as well. He serves up just about anything that once drew breath. Although he also was ahead of the curve in offering a vegetarian tasting menu, his restaurant became known for exquisite preparations of specialty meats such as antelope, bison, rabbit loin, pork belly, pig shoulder, wild boar, duck gizzards, chicken "oysters," grouse, squab, partridge, pheasant, oxtail, venison, beef cheeks and veal heart, brains, sweetbreads and tongue. "Raising a goat or a calf or a chicken or anything, to raise it and kill it and eat it -- I'm all into that," he told me. "That's life."

Of his great array of specialty animal products, Trotter showed the most enthusiasm and verve for foie gras (pronounced "fwah grah"), the fatty liver of a force-fed goose or -- in almost all cases in the United States -- duck. This delicate delectable has long been a staple of French cuisine, but Trotter applied it to his distinctly American brand of cooking. One night he would sear a slice and layer it with soy-dressed tuna, preserved ginger slices and fried carrot threads atop a bed of puréed parsnip. On another he would extract the foie gras essence to accompany sweet halibut and a red-wine-and-wildmushroom sauce. If he really wanted to impress someone, he would roast a foie gras lobe whole and slice it tableside. The chef's affinity for this pricey product led Chicago Tribune food writer William Rice to refer to Charlie Trotter's as a "foie gras and truffle emporium" in a 1998 story that also reported that Wine Spectator readers had named Trotter's "the best restaurant in the world for wine and food" for the second straight year. Charlie Trotter's was going through more foie gras than any restaurant in the area -- 50 to 60 lobes a week from Hudson Valley Foie Gras and sometimes additional ones from Sonoma Foie Gras. Hudson Valley co-founder Michael Ginor said Trotter's was among his top 10 customers.

Nowhere was Trotter's foie gras passion more apparent than his 2001 cookbook, Charlie Trotter's Meat & Game. In one photo that spans two glossy, oversized pages, Trotter is seen crouching on the barn floor of a Canadian foie gras farm amid a cluster of fuzzy yellow ducklings that will grow up to donate their unnaturally enlarged livers to the cause of sublime dining. Another full-page photo depicts the compact Trotter in a white lab jacket standing stoically under the hanging shackles that, when in use, carry the ducks by their feet around the slaughter room. The book also offers 14 foie gras recipes, including Seared Foie Gras; Cured Foie Gras; Foie Gras Terrine; Foie Gras Custard; Foie Gras Ice Cream; Foie Gras Beignet; Bleeding Heart Radish Terrine with Star Anise and Thyme-Flavored Foie Gras and Seckel Pear; Sweet-and-Sour Braised Lettuce Soup with Foie Gras and Radishes; and Roasted Chestnut Soup with Foie Gras, Cipolline Onions and Ginger.

The influence of Charlie Trotter's was felt far and wide. Just as Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in Berkeley spawned countless restaurants that emphasized greens and meats with local/organic origins, Trotter's provided the template for a wave of high-end eateries, many helmed by graduates of his kitchen, that combined an affinity for natural, small-farm products with robust flavor combinations meant to tantalize your palate without weighing down your stomach. With Trotter and some like-minded colleagues spreading the foie gras gospel -- all while Hudson Valley's Ginor aggressively marketed his product to chefs nationwide -- the dish's popularity soared. By the early 2000s, it wasn't unusual to find seared foie gras, often with a fruit garnish, on the menu of your everyday upscale restaurant.

Yet sometime after he'd posed with those cute little duckies, Trotter underwent a dramatic conversion. In 2002, with his Meat & Game book relatively fresh on the shelves, Trotter quit serving foie gras. He didn't make an announcement. He issued no press release. The product just ceased showing up on the restaurant's ever-rotating tasting menus. Few patrons noticed or complained. A year passed, then another. Finally, in early 2005, Trotter mentioned his personal foie gras ban to Chicago Tribune restaurant critic Phil Vettel, who happened to be working on what would prove to be a particularly loaded article: a head-to-head comparison between Trotter's and Tru, Rick Tramontoand Gale Gand's younger competitor for Chicago's top dining dollar.

This was where I came in.

Knowing of my interest in the food scene (despite my primary job as Tribune entertainment reporter), Vettel mentioned Trotter's revelation to me and suggested I write a story. Why not? I liked foie gras. I didn't like cruelty to animals. This could be interesting.

I phoned Trotter, who told me he'd simply seen enough of how foie gras was produced. "I've had the chance to visit three different farms, and the circumstances are less than pleasant," he said in his raspy rat-a-tat. "I just felt that we don't really need to do this. We don't need to serve this product." The problem wasn't just what he saw at these particular farms, which he refused to name. The problem was inherent in foie gras production anywhere. "It's the same thing all over the world. This is the process. This is how it's done. We have these romantic visions of 50, 70 years ago when a single large and fatted goose would be in a box and a person would kind of hold the neck up and caress the animal and hold the food up and let them eat as much as they wanted, and subsequently they'd have an enlarged, ...