O.C. chefs band together to ‘Fight for Foie’
ORANGE — Chef Pascal Olhats daintily stuffed a Medjool date with duck liver pâté and crowned his concoction by fitting it into a paper container rimmed in elegant folds.
The tiny cup went onto a tray filled with bite-sized dead ringers. These were just the “amuse bouches” — a French term for a pre-dinner treat to tickle the palate and whet the appetite — for a feast that the Newport Beach-based star chef was helping to prepare Monday night in the Haven Gastropub’s kitchen in Old Towne Orange.
Olhats then turned to a large casserole on the stove’s burner and gently stirred its contents. This was the Frenchman’s pièce de résistance, a “broth of late-harvest wine and duck confit sautéed with foie gras de canard,” which he was contributing to a seven-course feast.
He was one of seven chefs from acclaimed restaurants and fine-dining establishments around Orange County who gathered at Haven Gastropub, which was closed for regular business, to cook the special dinner tied around a common ingredient: foie gras, French for the “fattened liver” of a duck or goose.
According to the chefs, the foie gras was made with humane and ethical farming standards. In this case, the livers all came from New York state’s La Belle Farms, one of the three American producers of foie gras.
The seven were banding together in a culinary demonstration, dubbed Fight for Foie, before Senate Bill 1520 takes effect July 1. The statewide law bans the production and sale of delicacies made through the force-feeding of ducks and geese so as to fatten their livers.
“I don’t think that politics should enter my kitchen,” said Olhats, who is associated several establishments in Newport Beach and Corona del Mar. He also serves as a consultant for French 75 Bistro in Laguna Beach.
“We are professional enough to know when ingredients [are] good and raised in proper ways,” he added.
Olhats and Greg Daniels, the managing partner and executive chef of Haven Gastropub, explained that ducks and geese have esophagi that swallow food whole in the way that pelicans do.
Because of this trait, ducks and geese don’t suffer from “gavage,” the act of feeding birds by inserting a tube down their throats.
“They aren’t fattened a lot to the point that they’re sick and throwing up,” said Daniels, who, earlier in his career, trained under Olhats. “They’re fed a lot, and they’re happy about it.”
Monday’s special menu featured items like a foie gras parfait made with pineapple Jell-O and caramelized onions, Santa Barbara spot prawns garnished with fennel, kumquat, pancetta and a foie gras foam and — for dessert — a foie gras cheesecake and bon bon with vanilla crumble made with hibiscus gel and micro tangerine lace.
For his part, John Cuevas, the chef at the Crow Bar and Kitchen in Corona del Mar who was among the cooks taking part in Fight for Foie, cooked up pan-seared foie gras, accompanied by homemade oatmeal cookies, first-of-season cherries and white chocolate syrup.
At his restaurant, Cuevas serves foie gras as a special and as a spread for bread. He said he also cooks his French fries in duck fat and expects cooking oil prices to go up if S.B. 1520, which was passed in 2004, finally takes effect.
“I think that it’s exaggerated,” Cuevas said, alluding to claims by animal rights activists that the gavage method is inherently cruel. “If it’s mistreated, us, as the buyers, would see the effects.”
He and the other chefs cooking Monday belong to a coalition that dubs itself C.H.E.F.S. — the Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards.
Earlier this month, chefs representing the coalition, including Daniels, traveled to Sacramento to deliver a letter to state lawmakers and present them with the C.H.E.F.S. charter.
“Instead of banning it, we’re asking that we can still serve it as long as it’s humanely and ethically done,” Daniels said.
Meanwhile, as diners sat down to their foie gras delights inside Haven Gastropub, outside along South Glassell Street near the Orange Circle, a group of protesters from the Animal Protection & Rescue League demonstrated silently against the special dinner and in favor of S.B. 1520.
Two police officers kept an eye on them from a distance as they held up a banner decorated with graphic photos of ducks and geese in various states of abuse and misery. The photos were taken at one of the American foie gras-producing farms by an activist working there undercover.
“The only way to fatten a duck’s liver is to overfeed a duck — it’s not natural,” said Brenda Calvillo, a Huntington Beach resident who was among the protesters.
Dina Kourda, who chairs the league’s advisory board, was even more direct in rejecting the chefs’ assertions that the foie gras was produced in an ethical way.
“It’s a lie,” she said.
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