FOOD, Page 63The Game Is Up!Deer, boar and other woodland creatures are appearing onmore menusBy Naushad S. Mehta/With Reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles
Memere's, a Louisiana-style restaurant in Oak Park, Ill.,
has a loyal clientele for its rattlesnake gumbo. The New Deal
restaurant in New York City's Soho is corralling herds of diners
with its beaver empanada, kangaroo yakitori and black-buck
antelope. Next month Fallow Deer Associates of Hudson, N.Y., will
begin supplying health-food stores with prepackaged ground venison
and venison burgers.
Licking their chops at Americans' growing taste for game,
restaurants are now serving more of it than ever before. Food Arts,
a magazine for professional chefs and restaurateurs, puts game high
on its list of gastronomically fashionable items this fall. Four
years ago, the Zagat survey could name just 13 New York City
restaurants that served game; today there are 133.
According to Tim Zagat, whose pocket-size books rate
restaurants in 14 American cities, game has taken off this season
partly because of "an overall interest in finer foods." Joseph
Baum, co-owner of New York City's Rainbow Room and Aurora
restaurants, agrees. "Flavor is in again, and game is full of
flavor," he says. "It's evocative of the past, of tradition. It's
romantic." This season Aurora has set up a special game menu for
its dinner guests. Last week's offerings included medallions of
venison with dried fruit, saddle of hare with black- and
white-peppercorn sauce and roasted Scottish grouse.
Health-conscious Americans are hunting out game because it is
generally lower in calories, cholesterol and saturated fats than
other meats. Game also appeals to food purists because it is raised
without artificial hormones or antibiotics. People see it as
"natural and of the earth," says La Toque owner-chef Ken Frank,
whose venison dishes are popular at his tony Los Angeles
restaurant. In Phoenix, chef Vincent Guerithault, owner of Vincent
on Camelback, has developed a line of "heart-smart" game entrees.
Once chefs had to scramble to find a brace of partridge or
pheasant. Not anymore. Game suppliers and game farms have sprung
up across the country to meet the demand for everything from
antelope to zebra. D'Artagnan in Jersey City sells two kinds of
venison and four different varieties of duck, as well as fresh
grouse, wood pigeon and pheasant from Scotland. Five years ago,
D'Artagnan was pulling in $500,000 annually; this year it will do
$7 million in business.
Eighty percent of the 1.5 million lbs. of venison sold in the
U.S. comes from New Zealand, but American farmers are starting to
catch up. Over the past seven years, the yearly production of
farm-raised deer has increased sixfold, to 30,000 lbs. Game
ranchers sell another 100,000 lbs. of wild venison. Farm venison,
however, appeals to more people because it tastes milder than wild
deer. "Every deer farmer sells all he has," says Raleigh
Buckmaster, president-elect of the North American Deer Farmers'
Association. "Restaurants are calling us all the time."
They are likely to keep calling as long as foodies like Wall
Street banker Dwight Bush continue to indulge their taste for game.
"It's something different from your basic pasta and pizza," Bush
