Locavore Adventures: One Chef's Slow Food Journey

Chapter 15. The Brothers Moon and the Bent Spoon

The Brothers Moon and the Bent Spoon Will Mooney’s stars aligned when he was a kid of fourteen hawking fresh local produce from a farm stand in Cranbury, New Jersey. By the early 1980s, when young Will was plying his roadside trade, an entire generation of Americans had grown up relying on efficient but impersonal supermarket chains for most of their daily food. Most people were satisfied to pluck cucumbers from a bin rather than the ground and to eat restaurant salads with iffy pedigrees. As Will says, “they didn’t even realize it wasn’t grown around here.” But Will’s time was coming. Twenty years after he started selling fresh local produce, Will and his brother Sean opened a restaurant, the Brothers Moon. Today, the restaurant (which he now owns with his wife, Beth Ann) is a big supporter of the seasonal menu concept. And though it will always be hard to convince some diners that asparagus isn’t grown year round, the idea of fresh food in season continues to delight customers. Will’s known that for a long time—ever since the days he watched motorists screech to a halt on a dusty country road to buy locally grown beans and tomatoes from a New Jersey teenager. That was the Garden State at its best. But Will’s not the only local restaurant owner with that classic image of the Garden State on his mind. It’s also been on the mind of Gabrielle Carbone, a special education and psychology major turned serious foodie, who graduated from the French Culinary Institute in New York. In the mid-2000s, Gab and her partner, Matthew Errico, opened the Bent Spoon, an ice-cream shop. “Everything is made from scratch,” she told me. “It’s a really great thing that seven months out of the year we can make ice cream using ingredients we buy from farmers we know.” Both Will and Gab run businesses that are totally geared to using seasonal, fresh foods from nearby farms and producers.Their success just goes to prove that, when given a choice (and even if it costs a bit more), the public is gravitating to food that, as one of my friends has put it, comes from an address you actually 15  157  recognize. Will and Gab are also very much involved in the Princeton-area Slow Food movement. Yet to appreciate how important it was for these two entrepreneurs to create businesses dedicated to food that’s good, clean, and fair, you need to step back and remember the kind of world they are trying to shake off. In the 1970s, when Will was barely a teenager and Gab still a toddler, mass production looked like it had won the food wars. The standard for high quality meant that food had to withstand cross-country trips, stay as well preserved as a hockey puck, and be as colorful as a neon sign. Yet even in the heyday of mass food production, people were beginning to suspect something was being lost. Nutrition? Flavor? Varieties? Thank goodness the pendulum has swung back to fresh, local fare. Today, Chef Will Mooney is working with meat from pigs that lived happily just over the Pennsylvania border, and Gab and Matt are sending 158  Locavore Adventures Chef Will Mooney Photo by Jim Weaver their employees (affectionately known as spoonies) into local strawberry patches to pick the core ingredient for their strictly seasonal ice cream. The Go-To Guys Will and I met in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the late 1980s, when he was cooking at the Frog and the Peach and I was the chef at Panico’s. Technically, we were competing with each other (our restaurants were a few blocks apart), but that didn’t keep us from becoming friends. Not until later did we find out we were totally in sync with the idea of the Slow Food movement. Will had an unusual background for the food business. His father is actor, writer, director, and professional storyteller Bill Mooney, and his mother, Valerie Goodall, was an opera star. This is why Will celebrated his first three birthdays in Europe. How do you make the leap from stage and screen to the restaurant business ? According to Will, “it’s another version of the arts!” By the time we’d opened our own restaurants, we’d both fully signed...