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| GreenLeaf Produce
By Emily Kaiser
Edible San Francisco Spring 2006 You’ll never see the name GreenLeaf on Bay Area menus. But for a surprising number of local chefs in search of the freshest produce and most exotic ingredients, seasonal cuisine would be impossible without the efforts of GreenLeaf Produce, one of the region’s preeminent produce distributors. Tucked away in offices above the truck bays of the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market, the company delivers products from over 100 farms to over 500 Bay Area restaurants. Working at cubicles lined with well-thumbed copies of the Sunset Western Garden Book, the Oxford Companion to Food, and Elizabeth Scheider’s opus, Uncommon Fruits and Vegetables: A Commonsense Guide, GreenLeaf staff play equal parts matchmaker, delivery service and culinary coach. Chefs call in with queries ranging from when Louis Iacoppi’s fava beans are coming in to where they can get samples of Willey Farms’ basil to how they can source blueberries from Chile. Each week, chefs planning new menus pore over GreenLeaf’s newsletter, a dozen pages listing every produce item available that week, when planning their menus. “It’s an awesome list. It has virtually the same effect as going to the market and taking a look at what’s available,” says chef Traci des Jardins of Jardinière restaurant in San Francisco’s Civic Center neighborhood. At RNM restaurant in the Lower Haight, chef Justine Miner finds inspiration from the newsletter. “I love its suggestions, its descriptions of specialty items,” Miner says. “I love experimenting with things I’ve never used before, so I’m always looking for ideas of new produce.” GreenLeaf’s role in the region’s cuisine is heady stuff for a company that got its start as a quintessentially hippie endeavor. As a member of the Hunga Dunga commune, GreenLeaf founder Jameson Patton organized co-ops intended to circumvent large grocery chains by dividing up the bulk wholesale cases and bags of food products amongst members. Beginning in 1975, Patton bought organic wholesale produce and resold it to area communes, natural food stores, and a few area restaurants. Then in 1983, a line cook at Chez Panisse named Sibella Kraus caught Patton’s attention when she spearheaded the experimental Farm Restaurant Project, which aimed to introduce local chefs and local farmers. Pioneering farmers like Warren Weber and Dale Coke were starting to grow new varieties of vegetables like Italian baby greens and Japanese eggplants, and Krauss saw a natural market for their wares in up-and-coming chefs like Patricia Unterman at Hayes Street Grill and Judy Rodgers, then at the Union Hotel in Benicia, who like Alice Waters wanted to try a more seasonal approach to cooking and were hungry for the freshest possible ingredients. Both groups were both thrilled with the initial results: the growers got top dollar for their goods, and chefs got much higher-quality vegetables direct from the fields. Patton then invited Kraus to continue the project under the auspices of his company and help GreenLeaf expand. “A huge amount of this project turned out to be logistics,” Kraus said. “The trucking, the packing, the pricing, the ordering. In an industry where the standard had been to deliver a pallet two times a month, we were now delivering just five cases to these restaurants every day.” Many of the logjams could be cleared with systems already in place at GreenLeaf. A number of local farmers who were first recruited by Kraus over twenty years ago are among GreenLeaf’s suppliers today. Coke Farms in San Bautista, Devoto Gardens in Sonoma County, T & D Willey Farms in Modesto, Knoll Farms in Brentwood, and other stalwarts of organic agriculture still work with GreenLeaf. “It’s great being able to drop $1500 worth of produce on one dock instead of $50 at some restaurant,” Kristie Knoll says. “With the restaurants, sometimes you have to push to get them to order even fifty bucks’ worth. And then you’ve got to make ten restaurant stops to come close to one GreenLeaf stop.” GreenLeaf grew steadily until 1993 when Patton tragically died of AIDS. During Patton’s illness, the company fell into disarray, but chefs and farmers continued to support GreenLeaf. “We were all just so intensely loyal to Jameson,” says Unterman. “We kept using GreenLeaf because we wanted to do what it took to keep it going.” Bill Wilkinson, the recently retired general manager of Campton Place Hotel, learned about the crisis at GreenLeaf from the hotel’s chef and and decided to come out of retirement to buy the company. Although a hotelier by trade, Wilkinson knew a thing or two about chefs and fine dining – he lured Bradley Ogden away from the American Restaurant in Kansas to run the restaurant at Campton Place and later persuaded a rising New York chef named Thomas Keller to take over the kitchen at the Checkers Hotel in Los Angeles. “I thought I’d fall into the ocean with the first big earthquake,” Ogden says. “I turned him down the first two times he called me. But after the third call, he persuaded me, and in July 1983 I moved out.” At Campton Place, the two transformed both the hotel and restaurant industries with their emphasis on seasonal American cuisine, a radical departure from the standard fare at most hotel restaurants. Not surprisingly, Ogden’s produce supplier at Campton Place was GreenLeaf. “I was told they were the best in town,” he says. Now more than a decade into his “retirement job” as he calls it, Wilkinson once again has GreenLeaf on strong footing. In addition to produce, this year the company will include dairy and specialty goods like chocolate, oils and vinegars in their shipments, capitalizing on available space in their busy trucks. In many ways, Wilkinson says his vision for GreenLeaf is the same as his philosophy for hotels. “The standard hotel model is to have a glorious lobby, chandeliers, gold chairs, the works, but fairly ordinary rooms upstairs,” Wilkinson explains. “I don’t like that model. You don’t do any one thing extraordinarily and let the rest suffer. You just do everything very well.” |
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© 2001 - 2008 Emily Kaiser |
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