Posted on 09/07/2003 8:48:18 AM PDT by Behind Liberal Lines
ITHACA, N.Y. – North of Manhattan, visitors find New York is a mostly rural and often unsophisticated place.
So, in 1997, it might have come as a surprise when the leading "alternative" magazine Utne Reader put upstate Ithaca at the top of its list of the 10 most enlightened towns in the country. But it was hardly a surprise to me. I've lived within 60 miles of Ithaca – about four hours from New York City – for more than 35 years and the Finger Lakes college town has long been a hip oasis of great restaurants and shops, intellectual stimulation, a vital music scene and spectacular natural beauty. It is one of a handful of places in America where the alternative culture of the 1960s established a beachhead and is still letting its freak flag fly.
Ithaca's prime example is the Moosewood Restaurant, a world-famous vegetarian eatery celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. It was started by a collective of seven young people with no formal culinary training and little restaurant experience. Today, with a middle-aged core, the collective has grown to 19 members who have produced a steady stream of best-selling cookbooks while running a restaurant that, according to Bon Appetit, is one of 13 that has revolutionized the way Americans eat over the past century (the list runs from Chez Panisse in Berkeley to McDonald's).
The collective has won awards from the James Beard Foundation, both as a regional restaurant as well as for its cookbooks. In observance of its anniversary, the restaurant's 10th book, Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates will be released in October.
With the possible exception of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, it's hard to think of any nationally known food business founded by hippies that has not only survived but thrived, all the while clinging to its counterculture image and principles. "If someone told me in 1976 that I'd still be here today, I'd be shocked," says David Hirsch, one of the collective's earliest members.
In the 1970s, eating in a vegetarian restaurant could be a pretty grim affair, when ideology rather than tastiness ruled the kitchen. But, from the beginning, the Moosewood's founders were never hardcore vegetarians and served a meat entree every day (many members of the collective remain omnivores, though meat has been dropped from the menu and replaced by fish).
"We've never made people feel uncomfortable about what they like to eat," Mr. Hirsch says. "We took vegetarian cooking, which was considered wacky, and made it a flavor-based part of the mainstream."
Although it grosses $1 million a year and is a destination restaurant that draws visitors from all over the world, the Moosewood's low prices don't allow the kind of profit margin that – split 19 ways – would make any of its owners rich. Lunches are $6.50, and dinners are $11 to $15. On Tuesday nights starting in early fall, all entrees are less than $10.
Tucked into a corner of a refurbished former high school, the 70-seat restaurant is an unpretentious, high-ceiling place with attractive woodwork, a bar and lounge, and wood chairs at simple wood tables lighted overhead by old school fixtures.
Mr. Hirsch attributes the restaurant's success to its culinary creativity, which has produced more than 2,000 field-tested recipes for the cookbooks. Although only a few hundred of the recipes are served in the restaurant, they reflect a fusion style that, for example, combines Japanese seasonings and Indonesian ingredients to create a stuffed braised eggplant. On Sunday nights, the small kitchen produces ethnic dishes. A recent ethnic night featured North African cooking: Moroccan stuffed eggplant, spinach almond beureks (a dish wrapped in phyllo dough), vegetable tagine (stew), and fish with a chermoulla sauce (a spicy melange including lemons, tomatoes and cilantro).
"Homey" is probably the best way to describe the restaurant's ambience and food. The people who prepare the food are perhaps more comfortable being called cooks rather than chefs – they don't "paint" plates with sauces applied through a squeeze bottle or construct desserts that look like a scale model of avant-garde sculpture. Still, the constant need to develop new recipes for its cookbooks keeps the menu dynamic, Mr. Hirsch says.
Given the fact that some Americans seek out the security of McDonald's even when they are tourists in Moscow, the Moosewood might have failed decades ago if not for its location in Ithaca. Located in central New York at the southern end of 40-mile long Cayuga Lake, it is a gateway to the Finger Lakes wine country, which is the second biggest tourist attraction in New York, after New York City.
It is a surprisingly diverse community and, apparently, very receptive to ethnic cooking and new horizons: 13 percent of residents are Asian, especially Vietnamese and Tibetans who have benefited from a strong resettlement program.
Of the 20,000 students at nearby Cornell University, about 16 percent come from abroad.
American students are another source of the Moosewood's staying power. Though raised in a fast-food culture, they spend their college years very deliberately experimenting. They discover, as most Americans have over the last 30 years, that dinner may be an occasion for creativity that doesn't always have to be built around a slab of meat.
...the leading "alternative" magazine Utne Reader put upstate Ithaca at the top of its list of the 10 most enlightened towns in the country.
There are none so blind...
I prefer to think I spent my college years not experimenting, but rather "refining my technique."
Included on the menu would be the "endangered fish of the day," stall-raised veal, veggies picked by minimum wage laborers, force-fed goose liver paté (but not French, of course), pigs roasted over an old-growth hardwood fire, non-union made beer, and non-French wine. At the bottom of the menu, in small type: "printed with toxic ink on 100% non-recycled bleached paper."
I think it would be a hit.
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