Chefs Gone Wild
By Rachael Jackson
“Candy cap mushrooms,” chef and forager Iulian Fortu begins to explain as he unscrews the lid on a jar of small and twisty fungi. “These super tiny mushrooms usually grow with either pine trees or beech trees,” he says. “When you dry them, they’re almost like maple syrup.”
At Poplar, his new restaurant in DC’s Brightwood neighborhood, Fortu’s pantry tour continues—here are almonds, not from California but handpicked by him and a friend in a nearby park; here are dried slices of trifoliate oranges, an invasive that grows wild in the region (a citrus fruit here in the Mid-Atlantic? Yes!). He pries the top off a container of a rugged brown spice—spicebush berries that Fortu plucked from the edge of a Maryland forest, then dried and ground up. The powder smells peppery, woodsy, and a little like allspice. He’ll mix it into a persimmon bread pudding.
As Fortu knows, edible plants abound in our region’s forests, fields, backyards, and urban spaces. His restaurant, which opened in February, reflects growing interest in foods harvested from wild or semi-wild spaces in the District, Maryland, and Virginia. Foraged mushrooms and ramps grace our local farmers’ market tables. Guides offer foraging tours and mushroom walks everywhere from neighborhoods to the woods. “Food forests” fill some formerly overlooked spaces, while various organizations teach monthslong intensives on eating wild.
Even if traipsing through natural areas, basket in hand, isn’t your cup of yaupon tea (Try it! Yaupon holly grows locally and contains caffeine), you can book a table at a restaurant like Poplar, which, depending on what nature’s serving, might dish up anything from sunchoke soup to wild mushroom and ramp kimchi.
“For me,” Fortu says, foraging is “about knowing where stuff comes from. It’s about the different flavors that you don’t find from commercial products. It’s about balancing your nutrients as well.”
The region’s foraging scene is tiny but growing fast, says Lincoln Smith, founder of Forested, which develops “food forests” or managed ecosystems loaded with edible plants.
“I think, evolutionarily, we’re very set up to closely identify plants and see subtle characteristics. So it’s something that I think anybody can learn.”
Smith suggests starting with easy-to-identify plants. Dandelion flowers and greens, he says, are very nutritious, with a bitter edge that can wake up modern palates. Pick them in pesticide-free areas away from roads, he advises. Food forests, like those he designs and manages, are also great for beginners as plants may be labeled.
“It’s not too hard to find a foraging walk or workshop around the DC area,” he says. “You can certainly get good foraging content on the Internet, but I personally think that connecting with real, live people in the field where they can hand you something and reassuringly tell you, ‘Try this and observe these characteristics about it,’ is better.”
Guides can help you understand foraging restrictions. For example, foraging isn’t allowed in Rock Creek Park. Responsible foragers, of course, harvest with an eye toward ecosystems’ long-term health.
“Generally, if you’re picking any sort of underground part, you have to be careful because you don’t want to destroy the plant,” Fortu says. On the flip side, aggressive harvesting of invasive plants like garlic mustard helps the ecosystem.
Smith estimates hundreds of very usable plant species grow in the region—still more if you consider medicinal plants, those that are technically edible but not that appealing, or those that are hard to gather efficiently. He wishes more people knew about foods like American persimmons, which flourish in the Mid-Atlantic and bear “incredibly sweet and delicious” orange fruits.
And sochan, also called cutleaf coneflower, is a native wildflower related to black-eyed Susans that thrives in meadows. Smith eats sochan greens raw or steamed. Twice a year, his organization hosts forest-to-table dinners.
New restaurants and special events aren’t alone in serving up foraged fare. Beverly Morton Billand, who has operated the award-winning Restaurant at Patowmack Farm since 1997, describes her menu as earth-to-table and has long used the fields and woods around her Lovettsville, Virginia, farm as the restaurant’s pantry. She admits with a chuckle that decades ago, she had little idea how much the local landscape could contribute.
Her executive chef, Colby Janowitz, now regularly braises the tart greens and blends them into pesto.
Sam Fitz, director of operations at Poplar and co-founder of Anxo Cider, says foraging makes you see the forest differently, putting you in touch with its rhythms and aberrations. Are you at the edge of a forest, near a creek? Look for red spicebush berries. Find yourself on a south-facing slope? That sunnier area is more likely to sprout morels as their season begins.
In years when cicadas crawl out of their deep sleeps, Fitz says, serviceberries abound—birds gobbling the slow-moving bugs don’t bother with berries. After a drought last summer, wild mushrooms were harder to find.
“If you put me in the woods five years ago, I couldn’t tell you anything about what’s around me,” Fitz says. “Now when I go in the woods, I start to notice where water flows and how that affects different areas. You’re like, ‘Now I understand why that tree is there.’”
For years, Fortu, whose training includes a bachelor’s degree from the Culinary Institute of America and an internship at Noma, a world-renowned restaurant in Denmark, has combed the region’s green spaces, selling his finds to chefs and food enthusiasts. Iulian’s mushrooms, garlic mustard, and wild berries are regularly featured at Michelin-starred DC restaurants, including The Dabney and Reverie.
At Poplar, where nearly everything served is foraged or locally sourced, he’s now running a one-person kitchen adjacent to an airy, 20-seat dining room. The restaurant, named for a tree known as a beacon for morel mushrooms, is open Friday and Saturday evenings. Each week’s menu posts on Instagram on Tuesdays. Fitz pours drinks. His wife, Cerrissa Fitz, owns the restaurant and is also its interior designer, hostess, and server.
In lieu of a traditional oven, Fortu roasts and bakes in a red-tiled pizza oven, inherited from the prior business. Refining his recipes to work in a pizza oven is a challenge, but his make-do approach is exactly what you’d expect from a forager whose menu is guided by what the landscape offers.
Of course, our local landscapes, Fortu says, offer so much more than people expect.
“I think it’s always a surprise to people how many different things can grow around here,” Fortu says. “Even I find new things almost every year, things that are edible and usable in some way.”
Poplar
701 Kennedy St NW
Washington, DC 20011
