August 29, 2002 4:08 a.m. EDT

Tighter Budgets Force Chefs
To Resort to Gourmet 'Fakes'

By KATY MCLAUGHLIN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In this age of gourmet everything, a restaurant menu offering Argentine steak, wasabi-encrusted fish, or a cheese plate of camembert isn't unusual.

It is, however, impossible.

That is because wasabi is almost always horseradish; it is illegal to import beef from Argentina; and U.S. law bars cheese makers from using the raw milk that is an essential ingredient of real French cheese.

Call it gourmet cuisine's dirty little secret: A lot of it is fake.

Part of the blame falls on the unprecedented affluence of the 1990s, which helped turn the U.S. into a nation of "foodies," to use a word that wasn't even in dictionaries a decade ago. (The words "arugula" and "shitake" showed up about the same time.) In 1990, the average food store stocked 800 "specialty" or gourmet products. Today, the number is closer to 5,000.

But while the '90s introduced the American palate to the pleasures of expensive condiments and exotic seafood, the recession of the past two years has contracted the budgets of high-end restaurants and home cooks alike. The result: a slew of sham substitutes for upscale foods, and highfalutin names for lowly ingredients.

A case in point is wasabi. The fiery Japanese condiment is a staple in America's 5,000 sushi bars, and recently has started popping up on non-Japanese menus as well.

FRIEND OR FAUX?

How to tell if a gourmet food is what it claims to be.

Key Lime Pie
	If it's lime green in color, it's not real. Real key limes are a yellow, golf-ball sized citrus rarely found outside Florida because they are so pricey and delicate.
Balsamic Vinegar
	If it's cheap, chances are it's not true, aged-for-12-years product that Italians would recognize. The real thing bears the official stamp of Reggio or Modena, Italy. It can cost up to $35 an ounce.
Camembert and Brie
	If you're eating it in the U.S., it's faux. U.S. law prohibits making certain cheeses from non-pasteurized milk. True brie is moldier and more flavorful.
Chilean Sea Bass
	The British know it as Australian Sea Bass, but don't fool yourself. It's true name is Patagonian Toothfish.

Warren Savary/Regulatory Fish Encyclopedia, U.S. Food and Drug Administration

But that green lump beside the sushi plate is almost always nothing more than horseradish, mustard and bright green food coloring that costs a few dollars a pound. Made from a gnarled root that is tough to cultivate, true wasabi costs about $70 a pound. The taste is subtler, too.

"I wouldn't even know where to get the real thing," says Thurman Gleb, sous chef at Sea Island Grill in Isle of Palms, S.C., where the best-selling dish on the menu is the $22 Wasabi Crusted Black Grouper. The restaurant's executive chef, Enzo Steffenelli, was shocked recently when he realized the wasabi powder he was using didn't contain bona fide wasabi. "I'm going to have to look into this," he says.

Many diners are gladly paying top dollar for Argentine beef, encouraged by chefs singing the praises of hormone-free cattle grazing on the pampas. "They're happy cows," says Jorge Rodriguez, chef and owner of the Chimichurri Grill in Manhattan. His restaurant lists two cuts -- grilled prime Argentine filet mignon, and Argentine Angus.

Trouble is, the actual number of steaks imported to the U.S. from Argentina in the past year totals zero. Last year, regulators banned the imports due to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

As a result, most of what is sold as Argentine beef actually comes from Australia or New Zealand (where, like in Argentina, cattle tend to eat grass, as opposed to grain).

Mr. Rodriguez of Chimichurri Grill says his distributor has told him his steaks do come from Argentina, but are shipped via Australia.

Plenty of other ingredients, too, are getting replaced by cheaper stand-ins due to high prices or short supply. Prized "Blue Point" oysters are appearing on menus nationwide, but that doesn't mean they were pulled from the waters off Blue Point, N.Y. And Key lime pie -- currently in vogue amid a comfort-food trend of eating classic American dishes -- is almost never the real thing. Because real Key limes are yellow, a true Key lime pie isn't even lime green. The golf-ball-size fruit can cost four times as much as ordinary limes and are tough to find outside Florida.

A Humbler Dish

Sometimes a gourmet item is simply a humbler dish with a more appetizing alias. Flounder is commonly sold as sole, while Golden Snapper is, in fact, tilefish. Small sea scallops often masquerade as Nantucket Bay scallops.

On the West Coast, "Red Snapper is often nothing more than local rockfish," says chef John Beardsley of Ponzu restaurant in San Francisco. The fancy names appear to work: Seafood consumption is up nearly a pound per capita since 1996.

In fact, it is driving the Patagonian Toothfish to near-endangerment. The fish is better known on dinner tables as the Chilean Sea Bass, though it is neither Chilean, nor sea bass. "This was not originally a sexy fish -- but the exotic name change made it so popular, it's now on the brink of disaster," says Charlotte De Fontaubert of Greenpeace.

Vinegar by Any Other Name

One factor driving Americans' more sophisticated tastes: a decadelong wave of vacations abroad. In the 1990s, there were 88 million American departures to Europe -- a 57% jump from a decade before. But while Americans might fall in love with balsamic vinegar in Italy, that doesn't mean they are getting the same thing over at Kroger.

The number of balsamic vinegars for sale in the U.S. has nearly doubled since 1996 -- but few are authentic, says John Roberts, president of the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade. To qualify in Italy, it must be aged for at least 12 years in wooden barrels and bear an official government seal. It can also cost $100 a bottle. Some people sip it like a fine port. By contrast, much of the "balsamic" vinegar sold in the U.S. is simply red wine vinegar treated with sugar or caramel.

By now, many substitutions have become so familiar to American diners that they may have trouble accepting the real thing. This year, Patrick Burke, whose company grows wasabi root in Oregon, is developing a wasabi powder made with the actual plant. But in a concession to Americans' expectations, the company is spiking it with green food coloring -- to make it look more like fake wasabi. "People have become so used to it," he says.

Write to Katy McLaughlin at katy.mclaughlin@wsj.com¹

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Updated August 29, 2002 4:08 a.m.