WEEKEND JOURNAL
Friday, March 26, 2010
Restaurants See Signs of Spring
By Katy McLaughlin
Morel mushrooms and spring vegetables at
Oliveto Restaurant, Oakland, Calif.
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Customers are coming back, suppliers have lowered
prices and it's the best wild-mushroom season in years.
Shoots of optimism are emerging in the high-end restaurant world.
Expense-account spending is trickling back and consumers are starting to shell out for luxuries again. Prices for some specialty ingredients have come down. And good weather conditions in many parts of the country are making for the best crop in years of wild mushrooms, strawberries and asparagus.
The combination is cheering restaurateurs, who are rolling out festive baby-lamb roasts, multicourse shad dinners and dishes laden with wild mushrooms to celebrate the season. For chefs, it's a welcome change from last spring, when many restaurants weathered the worst of the economic storm by promoting discounts, comfort food, cheaper drinks and bar snacks.
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Diners at Oliveto in Oakland, Calif.
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In some parts of the country, nature is lending a hand to chefs. On the West Coast and particularly in California, lots of rain this winter has yielded a huge wild-mushroom crop and an early harvest of other spring favorites, from fava beans to English peas. The bounty means chefs can afford to be generous with special items without raising prices.
Oregon Mushrooms, which ships wild mushrooms to restaurants around the country, says it is selling morels, a wild mushroom harvested in the spring, for $20 a pound wholesale, compared with $33 a pound last year. Restaurateurs in California, where spring hits first, are paying even less. At Oliveto in Oakland, Calif., chef Paul Canales says for the first time in his career he paid $12.50 a pound for morels--half the typical price. Professional foragers stop by the restaurant offering wares they collect from Northern California forests, Mr. Canales says.
"We've had a few really bad years of spring," Mr. Canales says. "This one is going to be amazing." Oliveto has been getting local asparagus all month--"typically you don't see that until April," Mr. Canales says.
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