"I love color," Campiformio says, whipping around the almost immaculate kitchen with pauses for punctuation (she never seems to come to a full stop). "I love texture. I like a LOT of humor. And in my presentations, on the plates, I love theater. I love it when people smile or laugh out loud at least once during their meal. And I love to see their jaws drop when their plates arrive.
"If I think it works, I'll put candy on salad. One of my favorites is wild blackberries and [cut-out] jicama stars on local greens with red hots sprinkled over for color and flavor."
Even combined, however, high energy, drama, and humor aren't enough to keep an haute cuisine restaurant successful for long-- even in the San Francisco Bay area-- without good food. If they were, Patricia Unterman and Michael Bauer would be hanging out at the Fairfield Chuck E. Cheeze. Far less likely are they to work for a restaurant in a location that all but requires an overnight stay just to enjoy dinner. To maintain the loyal long term (20 year) following she has at St. Orres, Campiformio has accomplished that rare feat that cooks dream of, chefs reach for, and only exceptional talents real: a personal cuisine that draws a crowd once, then again, and again, and...
A half dozen years ago, Sonoma Style Magazine restaurant reviewer Randolph Wolf placed St. Orres in Sonoma County's top 25 restaurants even though the property isn't really in Sonoma County. Wolf called Campiformio the "finest purveyor of North Coast Cuisine [which is] anything she can see out her kitchen window, including all manner of seafood; wild boar and other game; what's in her garden and orchard; and anything locally produced." North Coast Cuisine? Probably. Campiformio Cuisine? Absolutely!
She piccoloes her "like" for foods that could be (and preferably are) produced on or taken close to the land she lives on-- wild boar, venison, sea urchins, and salmon. She trumpets her love for things she can find for herself in that same area-- roses, greens, mushrooms, blackberries, huckelberries, fennel, watercress, truffles, ling cod (she LOVES to fish) and more.
"I've been a forager ever since I can remember," the chef says with a grin. "I was going out with my grandfather when I was four years old, looking for mushrooms" in the woods of Connecticut. "He taught me to look at what the animals were eating... I still do. That's where I got the idea for my Stuffed Roses with Champagne Vinaigrette. I went out in our rose garden and realized that the deer were cleaning out the rosebuds. I thought 'Well, I guess I'm not gonna have a lot of roses, but... I figured if anybody was going to eat the rosebuds, it oughta be our guests, so I worked out thre recipe." She also conceived of putting wild huckleberry sauce on venison because that's another thing they were munching on.
Aside from her grandfather, Campiformio credits wild boar for her ability to search out white truffles in her neighborhood. "I kept following their tracks and watching... and finding great mushrooms and [other delicacies] and suddenly 'TRUFFLES' hit me and I looked and they were there! I've done it so much now that-- you're gonna think this is crazy-- I swear I can smell the mycelium in the truffles even underground."
She's seriously mystical and uncharacteristically reticent about sharing this communion with the land and sea around her and the food that comes from it. "You just get a feeling for it. It's like an understanding of the rhythm. It's like it comes in through your skin. You open up and it's there."
As fast as she shares that feeling, Campiformio flashes the discipline behind it that makes her approach more than a warm-n-fuzzy-back-to-nature-'70s hangover: "If you're gonna print anything about foraging for mushrooms," she says, stabbing a finger in the air for emphasis, "say that NOBODY who hasn't taken courses, who can't identify [mushrooms] using their scientific characteristics... who can't tell you the Latin name of the mushrooms... should be gathering them to eat, much less for somebody else to eat. It's too serious. It's too dangerous!"
There are other limits to Campiformio's foraging. "No, I don't go out and shoot boar or deer or squirrels or 'possums.' In the first place, that'd be illegal from a state health [standpoint]. Even if it weren't I couldn't do it. Can you imagine? If every restaurant could go out and take what they needed? Restaurants [alone] would poach the area clean inside a year."
Whirling on a lamé heel, earrings jangling, the chef crosses the kitchen and starts rattling through flotsam on a shelf above her sink. "I wish I could find it. I have a purple-hinged rock scallop shell in here somewhere. I want you to see how pretty it is. They were really abundant along the coast here until they got fished out. Now they're just gone. I keep the shell as a reminder." Pivoting back around she adds, "I used to serve abalone when it came from Bodega Farms. One of my favorite dishes was fresh ling cod cakes made with abalone. Now I'm serving sea urchin and double checking every source to be sure we're not part of [sapping this resource]."
For her "wild" meats, Campiformio relies on Polarica Game and Nightwing, a pair of national suppliers located in San Francisco. What she does with those meats goes right back into who she is. "I told you that! You look at what they're eating. I love doing venison in wild huckleberry. Quail are wonderful with wild blackberries. I mean, that's how it works. If your readers are really interested in using what they have the way I do, they oughta look around! Look what happens around Sonoma County. Figs and walnuts and apples fall off trees and then lay on the sidewalks and by the road and nobody picks them up."
"People ought to go to their local markets... the good ones, the ones with really fresh local produce, and then go out and look where they live for the same sorts of things. If they're intimidated by that, they should just buy fresh local produce and work with it, but you have to tell them not to be afraid. They should be having fun. They oughta gamble a little. You fail sometimes, but, boy, when you win it's really exciting. It's fun!"
When Rosemary Campiformio says "exciting," she's serious. When she says "fun," she means it. If you doubt, consider "one of my favorite recipes is roasted corn salad with polenta hearts and I put popcorn [instead of croutons] on it. You should see people's faces when they see it, and then taste it... and then realize that it's good!"
One of the criticisms leveled at Campiformio as a chef is that her productions are so innovative (read "humorous, personal, and dramatic") that they're hard to follow for other chefs, much less novices. To that she replies-- eyes and earrings flashing-- "It's true that cooking is in my cells. It's in my Italian DNA, but I think if people quit being scared and started feeling food... they'd be doing some of this themselves. Maybe they should come up and see what I do..."
This profile was originally printed in Sonoma Style Magazine in November 1991.
