Gourmet chef makes organic meals for Costco

Kate Coleman, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, September 19, 2009

Paul Bertolli's credentials as a chef are impressive, including 10 years at the helm of Chez Panisse and a turn as private chef for Sir Harold Acton in his Florentine Villa la Pietra, where he served such guests as Princess Margaret and Rex Harrison.
Bertolli left that world in 2006 to found Fra'Mani in Berkeley and began producing artisanal salumis - salami, pancetta and sausages.
Now, he's aiming at the home table, with a line of fresh, ready-to-heat-dishes now available at Costco warehouse stores.
The four dishes - organic polenta, penne Bolognese, beef braised in Zinfandel with vegetables, and organic turkey meat loaf - are unfrozen and organic with no preservatives or hormone additives. The meals serve five, and none sells for more than $14.
Working with Costco is a startling move for a celebrated chef who has been committed throughout his career to small-scale dining with fussed-over, perfectly grown, raised and sourced ingredients, expertly cooked and seasoned, for the enjoyment of well-heeled patrons at the Bay Area's top restaurants.
Bertolli, 55, departed the glamorous but grinding restaurant work after nearly three decades for several reasons. One was his desire to spend time with his family. "I was tired of working late every night," he said. Equally compelling: He saw a need for the kind of product he had been making exclusively for the restaurants where he worked.
Bertolli had learned early what those foods should taste like. It was an education he received from his Italian grandparents, who had a butcher shop in Chicago. After he moved West with his parents when his farther got a job at Chevron, he landed a job at Petrini's in San Francisco when he was just 13. He was made a journeyman union butcher at 14, making up to $18 an hour. He also worked at Maison Gourmet, selling San Francisco's best sausages and preserved meats like Saag's, Molinari, Columbus and Gloria.
But it wasn't until 1996, when he put on a "Whole Hog" dinner event at Olivetto, that he realized "people were really craving that Old World sausage stuff. People wanted to buy what I was making, yet I couldn't sell it behind Olivetto's door.
'Real nostalgia'
"I decided to bring back the old ways of doing things to satisfy the real nostalgia for that kind of product people were expressing to me after eating my salumis."
What changed in recent years was the loss of a whole generation of salumi makers, he said, along with machine manufacturing for the sake of product uniformity.
It meant the end of natural casings and hand-tying, so everything was speeded up, he said, which affected the taste. "I couldn't find a product that I wanted to eat. There was a real void in the marketplace, so I decided to bring the old way back."
While initially uninterested in selling to megastores, at the urging of his business partner, Tom Garrity, Bertolli checked out Costco's products. "I saw first-growth Bordeaux, cave-aged-Gruyere, organic Reggiano parmesan from a producer I respected, mozzarella flown in from Campagne every week," he said.
Last year, Bertolli decided to branch out from his salumis to produce fully cooked dishes for Costco's precooked food section. Costco approved.
He tracked down Piedmontese beef for his braised beef in Zinfandel and for the Bolognese sauce for the pasta. "It's just what I used to do at Chez Panisse, finding the best organic ingredients." He went to natural food trade shows and found Montana farmers raising organic beef, a breed called Piedmont beef cattle that are actually from Switzerland. "It's lean with lower cholesterol than chicken breasts."
Top-notch ingredients
He buys his polenta from San Francisco's Al Giusto flour company because it mills the whole kernel of corn, preserving germ and bran. Bertolli uses organic turkeys that are raised "under the sky" and slaughtered and processed at a family farm in Sonora.
Bertolli also had to find a manufacturing partner who could produce the recipes exactly. He's producing his Costco line with Delmonico Specialty Foods in San Jose, under his supervision.
And is he happy with Costco, the megastore for the masses? "They've been impeccable, I have to say, and there's no mystery about it. Their markup is capped at about 14 percent, for one thing. Your product either does well or it doesn't, and you know right away. "
Costco's 3,000-item inventory means vendors must sell a certain volume each week. "If it doesn't, you're out and somebody else is in," he said.
Bertolli, said restaurant insiders, was once known as a purist, even an elitist. But times have changed, and so has he. He points to the souring economy and restaurant businesses down 30 to 40 percent.
"And those with family aren't going out because they also can't afford child care," he said. "But they still want restaurant-quality meals that they can afford that are also convenient."
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