Forget Paris

THE AMERICAN WAY Crafting a diverse cheese list—or wine list, or charcuterie selection—no longer requires a passport.

The first reason Steve McDonagh decided to pull together an all-American wine list for Hearty, the American comfort-food restaurant he’s opening this week with partner Dan Smith, was because he wanted to. “You know the phrase, if it grows together, it goes together?” McDonagh asks. “We’re focusing in on that with wine.” The second reason? “Because we can.”

The American wine industry has grown tremendously over the past few decades—and not just on the West Coast. “We are so focused on California and now Washington and Oregon,” McDonagh says. The bulk of Hearty’s list does come from acclaimed wine-producing states on the Pacific, but it also includes a semi-dry Riesling from Hickory Creek Winery in Baroda, Michigan, and a viognier from Barboursville Vineyards in Virginia. And while getting those wines to Illinois was itself a struggle (“I am the wine puppet master,” McDonagh says of his experience finding a distributor for a wine that had never been served outside Texas), selling those wines to diners poses a challenge as well, even as American interest in wine has grown alongside the vineyards themselves. “The trickier part is…coaxing people out of their comfort zones,” McDonagh says. “I want someone to walk away from a restaurant in Wrigleyville and say, ‘I just drank a dessert wine from Georgia; what the hell?’”

And if quality wine is coming from all corners of the country, so is cheese—and, for that matter, cured meats, beer, chocolate and practically any other item that, 20 years ago, would have been imported from Europe. “I consider American cheese to be 20 years behind American wine in terms of its progress,” explains John Caputo, the chef at BIN 36, bin wine café and A Mano. After ten years of serving some of the best cheeses from Europe, BIN 36 recently bid farewell to its global selection: “It was time to show off American cheese exclusively,” Caputo says. Like McDonagh, Caputo was interested in showcasing as many regional flavors as he could: The list culls cheeses from 21 states, from Kentucky to Louisiana to Utah.

But despite McDonagh’s and Caputo’s pride over their collections, going all-American isn’t without its drawbacks. While certain American products have displaced European forebearers and captivated Chicago chefs—“The La Quercia cured meats from Iowa have to be one product that is made here that is as good or better than most from Italy now,” says Province chef-owner Randy Zweiban—others haven’t been so resoundingly replaced. “Olive oil from Tuscany is still the best,” says Suzy Crofton, the chef-owner of Crofton on Wells. Then there’s the question of cost. Surprisingly, “The price point of some of the American products [olive oils, wines] is so much higher [than] for a comparable European product,” says Zweiban. Caputo would add cheese to that list, as well, by virtue of the high price of milk in this country. And giving up a European product you’ve grown attached to isn’t all that easy. “Cheeses are like having children,” Caputo says. It’s hard to favor one over another. Which is why saying goodbye to a particular Italian robiola was tough. “I thought I would miss it the most,” he says—until he found Robiola di Mia Nonna (pictured) at Reichert’s Dairy Air, in Knoxville, Iowa. “It’s a goat’s-milk robiola that rivals the original, so I miss it less.”

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