The crew left Oregon on a Sunday midnight red-eye. Arriving Monday afternoon, they had half a day to see New York before reporting to the Beard House kitchen a little before 7 am on Tuesday. They flew home Wednesday at 6 am. The jocular, round-faced chef knows a thing or two about tough conditions. A third-generation mushroom hunter, he learned from his father and grandfather that some days would be spent hiking around in the rain, returning home with only his knife in his basket.
Mushrooms are a strange, elusive treasure.
Similarly, in the two years since Jack and Heidi moved from Reading, Penn., to Dayton, buying a house on the National Historic Register and naming it for its builder, a Northwest pioneer and author, Oregon has come to hold a mystical place in their galaxy. It was their dream to open a mushroom restaurant in wine country, and when Jack's dad died in 1995, they both thought instantly of the place they had honeymooned 26 years before. But good press can't make cheese cake with candy cap sauce. By Tuesday mid-morning, then, the Beard House was already permeated by the thick, earthy smell of cooking mushrooms. Clay Triplette, the house steward and James Beard's old friend and assistant who had once sewn silk bowties for the chef before he died in 1985, leaned over a bowl of bubbling broth.