Omega Mart

Kate Russell

Las Vegas is arguably the last destination most people think about when thinking of eco-friendly vacations. I watched Teslas zoom by while I passed the solar fields just outside the Strip on an uncomfortably hot spring day and it made me think: Sure, I offset my road trip’s carbon by donating to an organization that plants trees along my planned route, but that seemed like a Band-Aid. I had hoped for this trip to use regenerative travel practices, a growing traveling philosophy that dictates one shouldn’t only leave a place as they found it, but also seek to make it better. With that in mind, I set out on a quest to do more good than harm in Sin, eh… Sinless City.

See

I start my venture with using the zero-emissions monorail on the Strip, which removes 2.1 million vehicles a year from the clogged roadway. Inside the just-off-the-Strip Area 51 is the family-friendly art experience Meow Wolf–the only certified B-Corporation (a certification program for environmental/social performance) in the themed entertainment industry.

The collective’s brand-new permanent installation, “Omega Mart,” is a tripped-out convenience store offering some food for thought on how we live now. Part of the entrance fee goes to support local community organizations. In addition, Meow Wolf partners with local artists to create public installations, like Luis Varela Rico’s e-waste sculpture at Goodwill of Southern Nevada.

Arcadia Earth

Leong Sim

Another artsy experience is Arcadia Earth, the first immersive environmental art exhibit to explore our natural world’s challenges. Using large-scale installations built from upcycled materials, plus augmented and virtual reality, Arcadia Earth presents climate education in a fun way. To offset their emissions, they partnered with Sea Trees, an ocean reforestation nonprofit, to help regenerate kelp forests in California.

Relax

Locating a truly green hotel can be a challenge in Las Vegas, but some properties are trying harder than others to reduce their environmental footprints. For example, a large portion of the electricity needed to power slots at MGM Resorts Aria and Vdara and pool pumping at the Wynn Las Vegas, are powered by solar fields like the one I’d seen driving in. Still, few Vegas resorts were making headway in their dependence on fossil fuels. A good tip is to look into a resort’s water reuse practices and use that as a guideline.

Wynn Las Vegas

Barbara Kraft

Eat

While hunting for locally sourced cuisine, one friend laughed and said to me, “There are no farms in Vegas.” He was wrong. Enter the Summerlin neighborhood’s Honey Salt, Vegas’ only authentic farm-to-table restaurant (so far).

From the designing minds of Elizabeth Blau and Chef Kim Canteenwalla, the former of which is often credited for making Vegas a culinary destination in the first place, the sleek and stylish Honey Salt sources much of its veggie sides for its new summer seafood boil from Desert Blooms Farm in nearby Tecopa. Rumor has it that a carbon-neutral brewery, Brewdog, is also in the works for future visitors.

Do

Friends told me to get off the Strip to find inspiration and maybe make an impact. Spring Preserve’s Origen Museum educates community members and eco-travelers about the intense process of building sustainably in the interactive (and air-conditioned) LEED-certified museum. The property’s four trails, first traversed by the Paiute Indians, wind around the complex and ribbon into a cottonwood grove and past natural springs threaded with reeds. There, native tortoises baked in the sun, offering an unexpected lesson on how slowness helps a body adapt to oppressive heat.

I took a day kayak trip from the base of the Hoover Dam, up the Colorado River, to a natural hot spring and the Emerald Cave with Evolution Expeditions. Throughout the journey, I learned about conservation efforts and the west’s water crisis (40 million people rely on water from Lake Mead). Visitors can paddle along the rushing river, past waterfalls, bighorn sheep, and bald eagles, stopping to traverse slot canyons.

While meandering along a river so strong it carved canyons, it becomes clear to me that Vegas is evolving, perhaps not as quickly as other cities, but it’s trying. And spending our tourism dollars wisely can help support that.

The post Vida Las Vegas: Sustainability in Sin City appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

“Oh no! Food with eyes!”

“I can’t eat dinner that’s looking at me!”

“Gross!”

I get it. I empathized. Years ago, I had the same damn reaction. But as someone whose job it is to take a deep look at how, what and why we eat what we do, this response also disturbed me.

In college, I met my first hunter. I was a suburban kid, a lover of animals, the kind of tender ronie who stopped strangers to pet their dogs. I thought my hunter friend was a monster. My logic was comically flawed: Why would a human choose to kill an animal? Had he never seen a Disney movie or cuddled with a Labrador? And yet, I’d grown up enjoying bacon, burgers, steak, chicken. I’d eaten the passenger load of Noah’s ark a few times over. But here’s the thing: Having never even set foot on a farm, I thought of those foods as products at the grocery store, not animals.

Sure, I knew it came from animals. But never having to see the actual animal, or connect with it, that was just an intellectual fact. Not an emotional one.

The friend in question shot deer, mostly. He explained to me that deer were overpopulated, and hunting is how he had grown up. He and his family didn’t do it for trophy. I’m sure part of them did it for sport. But they ate all of the meat, all the parts. They stewed the bones. Nothing went to waste.

Still. Bambi killer.

And now I realize. He was the most authentic, honest omnivore on the planet. Compared to him, I was the sadly common meat eater who buried his head in the sand.

Hunters should be the most respected people on the planet. Not trophy hunters, obviously. Anyone who hunts animals for the prize or wall display is a gross, gaudy, gold-plated link on the evolutionary chain.

But 90-plus percent of us in America eat meat. Why don’t we want to eat meat with eyes? Why does it shock us, and turn our stomach?

Because we’ve become too detached from the process. Most of us don’t fish, hunt, or ranch anymore. The food industry protects us from emotionally difficult action of killing an animal so that we can eat. We only see it as a glistening, beautiful product under a sheath of cellophane. It’s a product, no different than buying an iPad. There’s no photo of a pig or a steer that says, “And here’s Babe, the animal that died so that you can eat!He liked tummy rubs and mud!”

What’s the big deal about that? Why should we bother to look our dinner in the eye?

Because as omnivores, if we care about ethics, I’d like to think we have a moral responsibility to be attached to the animal. We need to reconnect to the meat-making process. When we’re removed from the process, we don’t have to think of protein as a former living thing. The industry removes the moral, ethical and emotional part of meat eating, and just leaves the pleasurable part (eating).

And that leads to a couple of negative outcomes for us. First, a disinterest, or outright ignorance, of how our food animals are treated and whether or not they had a decent quality of life. Do some light research on CAFOs (Contained Animal Feeding Operations) and you’ll quickly see why that matters.

Second, it leads to over-eating and waste; to ordering a triple cheeseburger and only eating half because we have no respect for or tangible knowledge of the animal that gave its life. In 2014, America wasted enough food to fill the Empire State Building 91 times. Ninety-one.

And, finally, to get a little mystical—it takes out the spiritual side of eating. For millions of years, we had to hunt our food and connect with it—see its alive eyes, its animated spirit—before bringing that to an end. That imbued our mealtime with a connectivity to life, death and our natural environment.

Without that connection to our food animals, meals are just pleasure and sustenance. I’d argue that without the toil, the hunt or the gather, eating is only a fraction as meaningful and fulfilling as it could be.

This is a theme I’ve hit on in these pages before. But it’s one that “ceviche with eyes” reminded me of. And it’s worth repeating. As eaters, we should want to connect to our food. Even if it’s just eating food with the eyes still on the plate.

Eat food with eyes. It’s not gross. It’s real.

Eat Food With Eyes

The post Eat Food With Eyes appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Local food is a good thing. First, it means our city is tending to its own land and has an idea of its health. Second, it carries on an almost lost tradition (growing your own food) and teaches the basic life skill of getting dinner to the table—especially now that Home Ec has been replaced by Java Scripting in the American curriculum. Third, anytime you spend money in your own community, your community improves. Fourth, food not shipped thousands of miles tastes better. Fifth, it’s easier to ensure the people making your food share your ethics—whether organic, grass-fed, biodynamic, sustainable, fair trade, etc. Sixth, well there are lots of reasons.

The ideal? Create a large, interwoven network of local people who are growing, ranching and creating great-tasting food that treats the environment, animals and people in an ethical manner where they’ll thrive for generations.

Pie, meet sky, right?

Talk is cheap. The hard part is bringing together the people who can really make that happen, or get us closer.

That’s the goal of the Berry Good Food Foundation (BGFF), a nonprofit started this year by Michelle Lerach. A longtime proponent of sustainable food ways in San Diego, Lerach has hosted her “Berry Good Night” dinner series since 2009. Every year, the dinner pulls farmers, ranchers, chefs, eaters, politicians, moneymakers, policy advocates, purveyors and advocates together in her backyard (a massive estate, overlooking Black’s Beach). The idea is to foster relationships that will lead to real, tangible progress. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to the BGFF board).

Maybe that’s teaching eaters and chefs to use the whole animal (thus reducing waste). Or bringing farmers together to brainstorm ways to improve the lives of farm workers. Or spearheading a local USDA-approved slaughterhouse so that San Diegans are able to buy meat raised in their own backyard.

The latter is a concern of Jack Ford, owner/rancher of Taj Farms and Ranch Coordinator for the BGFF. Over the last 10 years, Ford has raised sheep, goats, poultry, and pigs on his acreage in Valley Center, using food from the farm or his neighbors, and treating his animals with respect. “Every living thing deserves a quality of life and death,” he says.

Ford’s meat is top quality. And San Diegans can’t buy it at any retail outlet. In fact, San Diegans can’t really buy much locally raised meat at all. Why? In order to sell meat retail, ranchers must have their animals slaughtered at a USDA-approved facility. San Diego doesn’t have one. The closest is in Riverside.

San Diego’s last slaughterhouse—Talones in Escondido—shut down last year. Sure, some local ranchers send their animals up north to USDA plants. But most don’t bother.

Ford fills us in on the problem, and a potential solution:

WHERE DO YOU SELL MOST OF YOUR MEAT NOW?

I don’t send any of my animals to USDA plants. Everything is harvested on the farm. Without it going to a government audit, I have to sell the animal live. Technically, the slaughter, cut and wrap of the animal needs to be done by the new owner. My biggest market are individuals who are buying for their community. I sell them the animal whole. These are people who don’t want to ingest any meat from an animal who’s had a bad life. They don’t want to buy anything from China. They’re stewards of the environment. Everything is relationship bound.

WHERE’S THE CLOSEST SLAUGHTERHOUSE?

For ruminants (goat beef and cattle), there’s one in Riverside. There’s Pico Rivera in L.A. But you have to have a minimum number of cattle to be able to use them. There are state places, but you can’t retail anything that goes through state. It has to be USDA to sell retail.

WHY DON’T YOU SEND YOUR ANIMALS THERE?

I used to send them to the USDA plant in Riverside. But then I thought, ‘Why am I working so hard at breeding and raising these animals, giving them a quality of life, and then scaring them to death when I drive them to this place, shoving them into something that smells like a public swimming pool?’ Is what comes out the other side really something I can be proud of? All living things should have a quality of life and a quality of death. During the drive to the slaughterhouse, pigs will lose 15 percent or more of their body mass because of the stress. That’s why you don’t see pig farms south of Porterville.

DOES SAN DIEGO NEED A USDA-APPROVED SLAUGHTERHOUSE?

The food scene needs one. Farm to table then can have a local retail outlet for good, local meat. Ranchers in San Diego can send it there and sell to restaurants and markets. It would open up a whole new market. It would then allow crop farmers to add more biodynamics to their farms.

WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?

I think the Talones location in Escondido will probably work at some point. That’s been inactive for a little over a year, but hasn’t been USDA approved for over 15 years. There are individuals and foundations with the resources to accomplish this problem. I’m currently working on putting these minds together. It would have to be run by a co-op, a foundation and not for profit. The location of Talone’s is perfect. It’s surrounded on one side by railroad tracks and on one side by the freeway. It would be hard for PETA to get in there. It would be easy to defend the castle.

WHY HASN’T ANYONE DONE IT YET?

The community is disjointed. It hasn’t ever been a priority for anybody here because they’re all small producers and worked around it and not taken it seriously. It hasn’t been a priority for consumers yet because people have situational ethics with food. People go into Trader Joe’s to buy tomato sauce that’s certified organic, but it’s grown in a sub equatorial country where women don’t have reproductive rights. We’ve dumbed down home economics and dumbed down food and it’s removed the ritual for our lives. Anytime you spend money in your community, your community gets better.

WHY DOESN’T THE USDA SANCTION MORE LOCAL OPERATIONS?

The government would like to only have three USDA plants for our whole country. They are constantly trying to consolidate the number of USDA-approved plants. They’d rather have these major factory farms where you have the processing plants right there. Who are all of the people who run the USDA? It’s the people who run Monsanto and the drug companies. We’ve gotten into this cycle we take pharmaceuticals to counteract the pharmaceuticals in our food.

Jack Ford of Taj Farms.

The post Slaughterhouse Rules appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Patrick Glennon

Patrick Glennon

“Do you know who he is?”

People often whisper this when talking about Patrick Glennon. As vice president of sales for Santa Monica Seafood, Glennon is one of the foremost sustainable seafood experts in the country. That’s accomplishment enough. But a few months ago, he posted photos of his trip to cook at the James Beard House. Then he competed on Alton Brown’s Food Network show, Cutthroat Kitchen. He easily dispatched a few contestants, then barely (and debatably) lost in the finals.

How many fish salesmen cook at that level? Who exactly was Glennon? I started asking around. One local restaurant lifer explained: “Two decades ago, he was the Grant Achatz or William Bradley.”

Knowing both fishing and kitchen life, it’s not terribly surprising that two of the biggest names in San Diego seafood have this common thread: Booze, in life-withering amounts. Both Glennon and Tommy Gomes (Catalina Offshore) nearly drank themselves to death, got sober, then poured that once-misdirected energy into good, honest work until they became the faces of an industry. Glennon doesn’t live in San Diego, but as fishmonger to top chefs and hyperactive culinary activist, he’s in local kitchens every week. His name is synonymous with top-notch seafood.

“Paddy was telling me…” a chef might say of some new study on sustainable seafood. Or “I got Paddy barking in my ear about how there’s no way my diver scallops are actually diver scallops…” another will smile, knowing Glennon’s right.

Chefs trust Glennon because he was once one of the top up-and-coming chefs in the country. He trained in France under greats Alain Ducasse, Jacques Maximin and Bruno Cirino. An early pilot for the American version of Iron Chef was filmed at The Mirage in Vegas, featuring William Shatner as the host and Glennon as “the American chef” (the pilot was slated for TMC, but never aired). After a long, almost-famous run in SoCal that involved bribing cops, brandishing automatic weapons atop Mick Fleetwood’s restaurant, and some groundbreaking cooking—Glennon found himself hundreds of thousands in debt, working in a fish freezer for minimum wage, and reeking of booze.

This is how one of America’s most promising chefs lost everything, and fought his way back.

You trained under some French greats for eight years. You came back to America in the 80s as a hugely talented young chef and went to… Newport Beach?

Yeah. I was forbidden by the French guys to work for some of the top American chefs of that era, like Wolfgang Puck. They wanted me to use my training for myself and not to make those guys any bigger. The French guys considered the American chefs culinary thieves. Jean-Louis Palladin was in charge of placing me coming back from France. I stayed at the Watergate for a week and then—the biggest mistake I made—I told him I wanted to go back to Newport. I should’ve gone to Chicago or New York City. The pool of opportunity got small quick.

Where’d you cook in Southern California?

I was the chef de cuisine for Ritz-Carlton Four Seasons during the ’80s and early ’90s. I was also the chef for the Le Meridian hotel in Coronado. The Meridians were known to have the best restaurants in the country at the time. [Mister A’s longtime chef] Stéphane Voitzwinkler was there; he was part of the entourage of young cooks we brought over from France. Tim Connelly of [San Diego farm] Connelly Gardens grew everything for me. We had a tasting menu—people hadn’t seen that before. We had to explain it to them. We’d put anchovies on the plate and people would get mad because it’s bait food. We were way ahead of our time for San Diego and Top 5 Zagat in the country. [Top French chef] Michel Richard came down from L.A. with a group of 12 French chefs just to have a meal with us. In the kitchen it was all the Frenchies and me. We’d have our trucks already packed and ready to go—after dinner service we’d go across the border and surf in Mexico for the weekend. It was a different time.

Then you went Hollywood?

I got big money thrown at me to open this place in L.A. for one of the head models of Guess Jeans, called Bilboque. Stefan came with me. Iman, Madonna, Stallone, Rod Stewart—they were regulars. But even with all these celebrities and notoriety, it was very short-lived. They said my salary was $175K. But we weren’t seeing any money. After three months of not getting paid, we jacked all the equipment and sold it to pay my crew. I was fine with them not paying me, but not paying my crew? Irish carjack.

That’s where you hooked up with Jean-Francois Meteigner?

Jean Francois and I took over all the hotels owned by Severyn Ashkenazy—the Bel Age, Mondrian, Hermitage.

I heard there are celebrities in Los Angeles.

It was wild. We did Pamela and Tommy’s wedding at the Bel Age. I cooked in John Travolta’s home. Same with Guns N Roses. We cooked for New Kids on the Block, Sting, Vanilla Ice, the Stones. But then the recession hit. No one wanted to hire us because we were high-paid chefs during a recession. So I partnered with [longtime New York pastry shop owners] The Ferraras. They wanted to open restaurants in L.A. We had a small farm in Topanga where we lived and smoked pot and drank all day. We farmed at least 40 percent of the food we cooked. This is when alcohol started to catch up to me.

When that didn’t pan out, you teamed up with Mick Fleetwood?

Yeah. I partnered with Mick to open Fleetwood’s. I was chef-owner. We had a show on VH1 that was Mick jamming with everyone, like Marky Mark. Little Feat was our house band. But we ran into liquor license problems from the get-go. The grand jury thought we were mafia. They pulled our liquor license on a technicality that went back 40 years before we bought the building. We did Michael Jackson’s release party. We’d pay the fire and police department not to show up.

Sounds pretty above-board.

Pretty much all the business we were doing was illegal, since we didn’t have the license to gather or sell liquor. This was during the riots. When the riots happened, we were on the roof with semi-automatics.

From rock venue with semi-automatics you joined… Disney?

Mick and I were in “keep the lights on” mode. That’s when I left high-end cuisine and started chasing Cheesecake Factory style money. These guys came in one day and asked me to rebuild the spider Encounter restaurant at LAX with some Disney designers. That was fu**ing horrific. We rebuilt that with John Rivera Sedlar. I was still cooking on the line and in charge of everything else—working 100 hours a week and keeping myself numb with alcohol the entire time. I think that’s when I lost my culinary soul—and my soul, period. I don’t even remember those years. It was a decade of blur.

So you got out?

Yeah. I went to Vermont. My wife at the time was not mentally stable. I thought I’d find a nice place for her. I went to New England Culinary Institute, where I was chef-instructor for fine dining restaurants. I used to train and handpick the kids for Daniel and Le Cirque. I built my own seafood distribution business there called Paddy the Fishmonger—market, distributor, restaurant. Alcoholism took that down.

What lured you back?

I was on the golf course one day and the phone rang. It was Jean-François. He wanted me to take over L’Orangerie in Beverly Hills. They brought me in as a consultant with Ludo Lefebvre was in the kitchen.

What was the final straw for you as a professional chef?

I opened up Hollywood & Vine Diner with a group that was supposed to build-out concepts. The builder overshot the build-out by millions. We opened the doors with no money. I couldn’t be in another restaurant with no money. That was the end of my road with alcohol. I was blacking out. I couldn’t be on the line without alcohol.

How’d you get out?

My fish vendor said, “You’re better than this—let’s get you out of this industry.” I started working nights icing fish for minimum wage on the docks. I didn’t get sober right away, believe me. I finally got sober in 2005. I figure I was about a month from death. I thought I was done. Eventually, I worked my way up and became the fish monger to the star chefs.

You’ve become known as a “culinary activist”—an absolute bulldog about sustainable, eco-friendly seafood. Three things a consumer can do? 

First, buy US-caught fish, which is all under sustainable management. It doesn’t mean that Georges Bank is going to be recovered, but it does mean that anything from that area is in a rehabilitating, science-based recovery program.   Second,   Look up your fish on Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s site, www.seafoodwatch.org. They even have an app now. Third, look for the MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) certification. You’ll see it in most stores, from Whole Foods to Costco and Wal-Mart. It’s a really well-managed, science-based organization.

What’s the worst (most unsustainable) fish that people buy way too often?

Improperly farmed salmon. It’ll say “Atlantic salmon.” But unless the menu or the store is specific about the actual farm it came from, it’s most likely not from a sustainable farm. Chefs pay a premium for sustainably farmed fish—so they’re gonna put the name on the label or menu. They wouldn’t try to sell you a Cadillac by calling it “a car.” So “Atlantic salmon” basically means the same thing as “car.” It means nothing. If it says the farm, good chance it’s a sustainable operation.

What’s the biggest form of seafood fraud you see?

Mixing species. Sometimes a restaurant might call it grouper or sole on the menu, but it’s really swai—a Vietnamese catfish from Mekong River waters I wouldn’t drink. It’s often the seafood company who’s lying to the chefs, so it’s my job to try to educate them without “schooling” them. For instance, I’ll be bidding to sell a chef No. 1 ahi tuna and they’ll say ‘No thanks, I’m getting an insanely good price.’ I’ll have them take me to the walk-in cooler and show me the fish. It’s almost never No. 1 ahi. Or the chef thinks they’re getting Loch Duart salmon, but what they’re getting is actually Canadian salmon. If the fish was sold to them whole, they’d be able to tell by looking at it. But in filet form, it’s hard to tell them apart unless you taste it. So sellers can mislabel it and sell it for a higher price. A program such as MSC is a good way to insure what they are getting.  Another big one is “diver scallops.” The amount of diver scallops that are actually caught by a diver is less than nothing and most of that stays in the fishing community. Plus, it’s seasonal. Divers aren’t going to go out in the Atlantic Ocean from late October to the beginning of April. Even “day boat scallops”—there are a very limited number of day boats.

Intentional fraud, or ignorance?

I’d say it’s 50/50 the guys who claim to be sustainable really are doing it right, and the others are just saying they are to make you feel good. A lot of big corporate restaurants will put one or two sustainable, farm-specific items on the menu to make you feel good. But the other 99 percent of the menu is unsustainable.

Your sausage company, Europa Specialty Sausage, is served in Whole Foods and Caesar’s Palace, St. Regis Monarch. Why aren’t you retired driving a sausage-shaped speedboat in the Caymans right now?

It’s not so profitable when you have six kids. My final run in the restaurant business, took me into the couple hundred thousand in tax debt.

Were you hesitant to start cooking again?

In the end, a voice spoke to me and said, ‘If you cook for charity and environmental awareness, there’s a lot to be done.’ Everything I do is for straight charity—helping farmers, ranchers and fishermen survive. At the Beard House, I personally shook the hand of every farmer, fisherman or diver whose food we served. With each plate presentation, we included a bio for every one of them. We served Skuna Bay Salmon, which is Canada’s answer to top-end Scottish salmon. The farmers live on the water with the fish 24/7. They take the top farms, and then take the top of the top fish from those farms. The fish box is taped at the farm and not opened until the chef opens it at the restaurant. If you buy Scottish salmon, you have no idea if it’s salmon.

You don’t have a restaurant, you’re not trying to “make it” as a chef. Why cook on TV?

My number one driving force is protecting what’s left of our food source. I realized I needed a bigger soap box than just that of a sausage producer and salesperson. My initial thing was auditioning for Top Chef. I tried out three times. Each time I got near the final test and they’d ask what restaurant I cooked for. And I just cook for charity. They couldn’t quite get their heads around it.

How was the Cutthroat Kitchen experience?

It was great. I left with a bitter taste for about a week. I didn’t feel I lost in the finals. I think it was very hard for the editors of that show to make it look like I deserved to lose. Are you doing ridiculous shit? Absolutely. But you have to be able to cook. It was like WWE meets Iron Chef.

And the Beard House?

Man, that was it for me. It really came full circle. After alcohol got the best of me and 10 years later to be in that house cooking next to those awesome chefs—I proved to myself I’ve still got some tools left.

You’re working on a documentary film, too?

It’s called Hail, Caesar. It’s the journey of a Caesar salad and all the ingredients that are in it—GMOs, imported produce, to-go containers, the chemicals used to clean the plates. There are a lot of sustainability issues in just one single salad. There are tons of improperly purchased items in a restaurant. And the thing is—they don’t just sell it once. They sell that salad 3,000 times a year. The amount of waste, the chemicals they produce, the jobs they pull from the local economy and give to internationals… it’s massive.

Where does sleep fall in your value system?

My nickname used to be RPM. I don’t work 40-hour weeks. I talk to chefs at 11PM, and I talk to them at 5AM.

After all the years of hard living, how are you physically?

For as busted up as my body is, I work out five or six days a week, I fight in the masters division of amateur boxing. www.olddogboxing.com. We get 1,000 people at the fights. For me, to get my body to the level it’s at is a miracle—no matter how ‘off’ my metabolism will always be. I fight now with a martial arts world champion. He kicks the shit out of me, but I can handle it.

The post FROM THE DEPTHS appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Patrick Glennon

Patrick Glennon

“Do you know who he is?”

People often whisper this when talking about Patrick Glennon. As vice president of sales for Santa Monica Seafood, Glennon is one of the foremost sustainable seafood experts in the country. That’s accomplishment enough. But a few months ago, he posted photos of his trip to cook at the James Beard House. Then he competed on Alton Brown’s Food Network show, Cutthroat Kitchen. He easily dispatched a few contestants, then barely (and debatably) lost in the finals.

How many fish salesmen cook at that level? Who exactly was Glennon? I started asking around. One local restaurant lifer explained: “Two decades ago, he was the Grant Achatz or William Bradley.”

Knowing both fishing and kitchen life, it’s not terribly surprising that two of the biggest names in San Diego seafood have this common thread: Booze, in life-withering amounts. Both Glennon and Tommy Gomes (Catalina Offshore) nearly drank themselves to death, got sober, then poured that once-misdirected energy into good, honest work until they became the faces of an industry. Glennon doesn’t live in San Diego, but as fishmonger to top chefs and hyperactive culinary activist, he’s in local kitchens every week. His name is synonymous with top-notch seafood.

“Paddy was telling me…” a chef might say of some new study on sustainable seafood. Or “I got Paddy barking in my ear about how there’s no way my diver scallops are actually diver scallops…” another will smile, knowing Glennon’s right.

Chefs trust Glennon because he was once one of the top up-and-coming chefs in the country. He trained in France under greats Alain Ducasse, Jacques Maximin and Bruno Cirino. An early pilot for the American version of Iron Chef was filmed at The Mirage in Vegas, featuring William Shatner as the host and Glennon as “the American chef” (the pilot was slated for TMC, but never aired). After a long, almost-famous run in SoCal that involved bribing cops, brandishing automatic weapons atop Mick Fleetwood’s restaurant, and some groundbreaking cooking—Glennon found himself hundreds of thousands in debt, working in a fish freezer for minimum wage, and reeking of booze.

This is how one of America’s most promising chefs lost everything, and fought his way back.

You trained under some French greats for eight years. You came back to America in the 80s as a hugely talented young chef and went to… Newport Beach?

Yeah. I was forbidden by the French guys to work for some of the top American chefs of that era, like Wolfgang Puck. They wanted me to use my training for myself and not to make those guys any bigger. The French guys considered the American chefs culinary thieves. Jean-Louis Palladin was in charge of placing me coming back from France. I stayed at the Watergate for a week and then—the biggest mistake I made—I told him I wanted to go back to Newport. I should’ve gone to Chicago or New York City. The pool of opportunity got small quick.

Where’d you cook in Southern California?

I was the chef de cuisine for Ritz-Carlton Four Seasons during the ’80s and early ’90s. I was also the chef for the Le Meridian hotel in Coronado. The Meridians were known to have the best restaurants in the country at the time. [Mister A’s longtime chef] Stéphane Voitzwinkler was there; he was part of the entourage of young cooks we brought over from France. Tim Connelly of [San Diego farm] Connelly Gardens grew everything for me. We had a tasting menu—people hadn’t seen that before. We had to explain it to them. We’d put anchovies on the plate and people would get mad because it’s bait food. We were way ahead of our time for San Diego and Top 5 Zagat in the country. [Top French chef] Michel Richard came down from L.A. with a group of 12 French chefs just to have a meal with us. In the kitchen it was all the Frenchies and me. We’d have our trucks already packed and ready to go—after dinner service we’d go across the border and surf in Mexico for the weekend. It was a different time.

Then you went Hollywood?

I got big money thrown at me to open this place in L.A. for one of the head models of Guess Jeans, called Bilboque. Stefan came with me. Iman, Madonna, Stallone, Rod Stewart—they were regulars. But even with all these celebrities and notoriety, it was very short-lived. They said my salary was $175K. But we weren’t seeing any money. After three months of not getting paid, we jacked all the equipment and sold it to pay my crew. I was fine with them not paying me, but not paying my crew? Irish carjack.

That’s where you hooked up with Jean-Francois Meteigner?

Jean Francois and I took over all the hotels owned by Severyn Ashkenazy—the Bel Age, Mondrian, Hermitage.

I heard there are celebrities in Los Angeles.

It was wild. We did Pamela and Tommy’s wedding at the Bel Age. I cooked in John Travolta’s home. Same with Guns N Roses. We cooked for New Kids on the Block, Sting, Vanilla Ice, the Stones. But then the recession hit. No one wanted to hire us because we were high-paid chefs during a recession. So I partnered with [longtime New York pastry shop owners] The Ferraras. They wanted to open restaurants in L.A. We had a small farm in Topanga where we lived and smoked pot and drank all day. We farmed at least 40 percent of the food we cooked. This is when alcohol started to catch up to me.

When that didn’t pan out, you teamed up with Mick Fleetwood?

Yeah. I partnered with Mick to open Fleetwood’s. I was chef-owner. We had a show on VH1 that was Mick jamming with everyone, like Marky Mark. Little Feat was our house band. But we ran into liquor license problems from the get-go. The grand jury thought we were mafia. They pulled our liquor license on a technicality that went back 40 years before we bought the building. We did Michael Jackson’s release party. We’d pay the fire and police department not to show up.

Sounds pretty above-board.

Pretty much all the business we were doing was illegal, since we didn’t have the license to gather or sell liquor. This was during the riots. When the riots happened, we were on the roof with semi-automatics.

From rock venue with semi-automatics you joined… Disney?

Mick and I were in “keep the lights on” mode. That’s when I left high-end cuisine and started chasing Cheesecake Factory style money. These guys came in one day and asked me to rebuild the spider Encounter restaurant at LAX with some Disney designers. That was fu**ing horrific. We rebuilt that with John Rivera Sedlar. I was still cooking on the line and in charge of everything else—working 100 hours a week and keeping myself numb with alcohol the entire time. I think that’s when I lost my culinary soul—and my soul, period. I don’t even remember those years. It was a decade of blur.

So you got out?

Yeah. I went to Vermont. My wife at the time was not mentally stable. I thought I’d find a nice place for her. I went to New England Culinary Institute, where I was chef-instructor for fine dining restaurants. I used to train and handpick the kids for Daniel and Le Cirque. I built my own seafood distribution business there called Paddy the Fishmonger—market, distributor, restaurant. Alcoholism took that down.

What lured you back?

I was on the golf course one day and the phone rang. It was Jean-François. He wanted me to take over L’Orangerie in Beverly Hills. They brought me in as a consultant with Ludo Lefebvre was in the kitchen.

What was the final straw for you as a professional chef?

I opened up Hollywood & Vine Diner with a group that was supposed to build-out concepts. The builder overshot the build-out by millions. We opened the doors with no money. I couldn’t be in another restaurant with no money. That was the end of my road with alcohol. I was blacking out. I couldn’t be on the line without alcohol.

How’d you get out?

My fish vendor said, “You’re better than this—let’s get you out of this industry.” I started working nights icing fish for minimum wage on the docks. I didn’t get sober right away, believe me. I finally got sober in 2005. I figure I was about a month from death. I thought I was done. Eventually, I worked my way up and became the fish monger to the star chefs.

You’ve become known as a “culinary activist”—an absolute bulldog about sustainable, eco-friendly seafood. Three things a consumer can do? 

First, buy US-caught fish, which is all under sustainable management. It doesn’t mean that Georges Bank is going to be recovered, but it does mean that anything from that area is in a rehabilitating, science-based recovery program.   Second,   Look up your fish on Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s site, www.seafoodwatch.org. They even have an app now. Third, look for the MSC (Marine Stewardship Council) certification. You’ll see it in most stores, from Whole Foods to Costco and Wal-Mart. It’s a really well-managed, science-based organization.

What’s the worst (most unsustainable) fish that people buy way too often?

Improperly farmed salmon. It’ll say “Atlantic salmon.” But unless the menu or the store is specific about the actual farm it came from, it’s most likely not from a sustainable farm. Chefs pay a premium for sustainably farmed fish—so they’re gonna put the name on the label or menu. They wouldn’t try to sell you a Cadillac by calling it “a car.” So “Atlantic salmon” basically means the same thing as “car.” It means nothing. If it says the farm, good chance it’s a sustainable operation.

What’s the biggest form of seafood fraud you see?

Mixing species. Sometimes a restaurant might call it grouper or sole on the menu, but it’s really swai—a Vietnamese catfish from Mekong River waters I wouldn’t drink. It’s often the seafood company who’s lying to the chefs, so it’s my job to try to educate them without “schooling” them. For instance, I’ll be bidding to sell a chef No. 1 ahi tuna and they’ll say ‘No thanks, I’m getting an insanely good price.’ I’ll have them take me to the walk-in cooler and show me the fish. It’s almost never No. 1 ahi. Or the chef thinks they’re getting Loch Duart salmon, but what they’re getting is actually Canadian salmon. If the fish was sold to them whole, they’d be able to tell by looking at it. But in filet form, it’s hard to tell them apart unless you taste it. So sellers can mislabel it and sell it for a higher price. A program such as MSC is a good way to insure what they are getting.  Another big one is “diver scallops.” The amount of diver scallops that are actually caught by a diver is less than nothing and most of that stays in the fishing community. Plus, it’s seasonal. Divers aren’t going to go out in the Atlantic Ocean from late October to the beginning of April. Even “day boat scallops”—there are a very limited number of day boats.

Intentional fraud, or ignorance?

I’d say it’s 50/50 the guys who claim to be sustainable really are doing it right, and the others are just saying they are to make you feel good. A lot of big corporate restaurants will put one or two sustainable, farm-specific items on the menu to make you feel good. But the other 99 percent of the menu is unsustainable.

Your sausage company, Europa Specialty Sausage, is served in Whole Foods and Caesar’s Palace, St. Regis Monarch. Why aren’t you retired driving a sausage-shaped speedboat in the Caymans right now?

It’s not so profitable when you have six kids. My final run in the restaurant business, took me into the couple hundred thousand in tax debt.

Were you hesitant to start cooking again?

In the end, a voice spoke to me and said, ‘If you cook for charity and environmental awareness, there’s a lot to be done.’ Everything I do is for straight charity—helping farmers, ranchers and fishermen survive. At the Beard House, I personally shook the hand of every farmer, fisherman or diver whose food we served. With each plate presentation, we included a bio for every one of them. We served Skuna Bay Salmon, which is Canada’s answer to top-end Scottish salmon. The farmers live on the water with the fish 24/7. They take the top farms, and then take the top of the top fish from those farms. The fish box is taped at the farm and not opened until the chef opens it at the restaurant. If you buy Scottish salmon, you have no idea if it’s salmon.

You don’t have a restaurant, you’re not trying to “make it” as a chef. Why cook on TV?

My number one driving force is protecting what’s left of our food source. I realized I needed a bigger soap box than just that of a sausage producer and salesperson. My initial thing was auditioning for Top Chef. I tried out three times. Each time I got near the final test and they’d ask what restaurant I cooked for. And I just cook for charity. They couldn’t quite get their heads around it.

How was the Cutthroat Kitchen experience?

It was great. I left with a bitter taste for about a week. I didn’t feel I lost in the finals. I think it was very hard for the editors of that show to make it look like I deserved to lose. Are you doing ridiculous shit? Absolutely. But you have to be able to cook. It was like WWE meets Iron Chef.

And the Beard House?

Man, that was it for me. It really came full circle. After alcohol got the best of me and 10 years later to be in that house cooking next to those awesome chefs—I proved to myself I’ve still got some tools left.

You’re working on a documentary film, too?

It’s called Hail, Caesar. It’s the journey of a Caesar salad and all the ingredients that are in it—GMOs, imported produce, to-go containers, the chemicals used to clean the plates. There are a lot of sustainability issues in just one single salad. There are tons of improperly purchased items in a restaurant. And the thing is—they don’t just sell it once. They sell that salad 3,000 times a year. The amount of waste, the chemicals they produce, the jobs they pull from the local economy and give to internationals… it’s massive.

Where does sleep fall in your value system?

My nickname used to be RPM. I don’t work 40-hour weeks. I talk to chefs at 11PM, and I talk to them at 5AM.

After all the years of hard living, how are you physically?

For as busted up as my body is, I work out five or six days a week, I fight in the masters division of amateur boxing. www.olddogboxing.com. We get 1,000 people at the fights. For me, to get my body to the level it’s at is a miracle—no matter how ‘off’ my metabolism will always be. I fight now with a martial arts world champion. He kicks the shit out of me, but I can handle it.

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G’NIGHT: Sea Rocket Bistro

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Harney Sushi

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Bits & Bites

A Sustainable Buzz

Love your mother with these trendy and health-conscious wine movements for Earth Day

1. Certified Sustainable Wines

Oregon Certified Sustainable Wines are at the forefront of the US sustainability movement. This group of producers ensures the land, animals, and rivers will be viable for future generations by adhering to responsible growing and winemaking practices. Our favorite is the legendary Adelsheim Vineyard, which has been making high-end Pinot Noir from the Chehalem Mountains in Willamette Valley since 1971. Try its 2008 Boulder Bluff Vineyard and you will taste how responsible practices translate to quality in the glass. $68, protocolwinestudio.wordpress.com

2. USDA Certified Organic Wines

Not only is responsibility in growing and winemaking practiced, it is regulated. In USDA Certified Organic wines, the use of fungicides, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and added sulfites are all prohibited. (Sulfites are a natural by-product of fermentation, so all wines have them. Organically made wines only limit adding more to the wine.) To celebrate the spirit of these au naturel wines, try Snoqualmie Vineyards Naked Riesling from Washington’s Columbia Valley. The 2011 vintage will impress! $11, lacostawineco.com

3. Biodynamically Certified Wines

Biodynamics are based on understanding the ecological, energetic, and spiritual aspects of nature. The idea is to treat the farm as a cohesive, interconnected ecosystem. Its most interesting detail is in the use of  “preparations”—stuffing cow horns with dung and planting them under the vines when the moon is either waxing or waning. Although this lunar-based system seems lost in space, if you talk to any of its followers, they will tell you the quality of their soil and wines have dramatically improved since they switched. Try Beckman’s Purisima Mountain Vineyard Grenache Block 8 in Santa Barbara County, and you may also drink the Kool-Aid. $53, fiftysevendegrees.com

// Lindsay Pomeroy

PARTY FOUL

Bits & Bites

“I was a little nervous. At one point I’m presented with a bowl of water with flowers and herbs to wash my hands. I nearly drank it.”

—Troy Johnson on his stint as a judge on a recent Iron Chef America episode. Read his Top 10 Observations from the show, which airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Food Network.

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