Dinner at Six

LITTLE ROCK — A.J. Liebling wrote it, of course: "The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth

setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities

for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing

the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a

prizefighter's hours on the road." If you've seen a photograph of the great Liebling,

gourmand-at-large for The New Yorker when he wasn't

writing about boxing or a world war, you'd know that he

religiously practiced what he penned. His advice is along

the lines of Never Trust A Skinny Chef, and may have been

spot on when Liebling was eating his way across Europe

in the 1940s. But today, the hands-on study of gastronomy

trends away from the Liebling doctrine and towards healthy

eating, away from gluttony and toward ingredients at such

peak flavor that a little goes a long way.

Chefs preach the gospel of fresh foods locally grown and

a minimalist approach in the kitchen. The word organic is

used a lot. Cholesterol? Sure, so long as the eggs are farm

fresh from naturally fat hens and as big as your fist.

We have Alice Waters to blame for this.

Ms. Waters is a California chef who opened a restaurant

named Chez Panisse in the 1970s in Berkeley, Calif., which

is a description of her akin to calling Hillary Clinton simply

a lawyer.

In a way, Alice Waters re-introduced food and taste to

gourmet cooking. Her little restaurant gave America the

kind of French cooking that you might find in French

homes, not tourist stops-simple, fresh from the market, with

a sense of place. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, who's

written up Waters several times and now sits on one of herdo-good boards, described her as "a kind of materfamilias to a generation of chefs."

One of those chefs and a Waters disciple is Scott Thomas McGehee of Little Rock, Arkansas. Or as his growing fan base knows him: Scott McGehee of Boulevard Bread Co.-the bakery and gourmet shop in the Heights that is so full of regulars that it may as well be a club-and, as of last week, ZaZa, a pizza place that's also Watersian in its sense of food as good for the soul, diet and community. McGehee opened ZaZa with his partner and Boulevardian ex-pat, John Beachboard.

Later this year, McGehee and another longtime co-worker at Boulevard, Sonia Schaefer, will team up to open a French cafe/upscale breakfast dining/wineand-cocktail bar called Big Orange in the ground floor of the new Riviera condominiums in Little Rock's Riverdale area.

You could easily arg ue that McGehee, 38, born in Fayetteville, is the most exciting restaurant innovator around right now-if you could find somebody to articulate the opposing view. Rebekah Hardin, who opened the restaurant Nu Cuisine and then got Velo Rouge up and running at the same spot in Little Rock's River Market, says there's "very much" a Cult of McGehee that's developed in the Arkansas restaurant business. "He's a good teacher," she says, "and he's essentially established a mini-school of talent at Boulevard."

"He reminds me so much of me at that age it's scary," says Mark Abernathy, 59, veteran of the Arkansas restaurant scene and proprietor of both Loca Luna and Bene Vita-each located across the street from the space that will become McGehee's Big Orange. Abernathy partnered with Scott's father, Frank, in opening both Juanita's and Blue Mesa Grill-a couple of culinary landmarks-where Scott first worked in a kitchen. (Despite their business partnership, Frank McGehee and Abernathy clashed hard and often. These days, Blue Mesa is long gone. Sadly. Folks still speak inhushed, loving tones of its white-cheese dip. And Abernathy no longer has a stake in Juanita's.)

Beachboard tells this story: One of his friends in the food business recently described him and McGehee and the rest of the Boulevardiers as the "Wu Tang Clan" of Little Rock. I had to look that one up. Seminal rap group. Lot of hits. Ah, here we go: Wu Tang Clan spun off loads of talent that effectively dominated the market.

Starters

The idea was to invite myself to dinner. We'd cook together, I told Scott McGehee, as if that held some great appeal. It was an angle I'd stolen from Adam Gopnik, who had offered to cook dinner for Alice Waters when she visited him in Paris. Gopnik prepared for the intimidating event by going out and buying a new set of dinner plates. It was a decision, Gopnik wrote, "more or less in the spirit of a man who, having in an insane moment invited Michael Jordan over to play a little one-on-one, decides that he might as well use the occasion to put down a new coat of asphalt on thedriveway."

I didn't buy a thing-would you have the nerve to appear with a bottle of wine at the house of a renowned chef?-and brought only my appetite and practically useless kitchen skills.

Thus my invitation to Scott McGehee was more or less in the spirit of a man who, having in an insane moment invited Michael Jordan over to play a little one-on-one, opts not even to provide Gatorade, much less practice his free throws.

Please Wait To Be Seated

I wasn't sure if dinner was at 6 or 6:30. I'm fairly certain I suggested 6, but McGehee replied, "Yeah, see you at 6:30" before hanging up. So I decided to split the difference. I arrived at the door of Scott and Christina McGehee's house in Hillcrest at 6:15, whereupon I was greeted by Hercules.

Hercules, a 9-month-old black furrball of a dog, is followed quickly by Christina McGehee. Scott isn't home yet.

Turns out I'm both empty-handed and early.

Before-Dinner Cocktail

Christina escorts me to the back of the house and the renovated kitchen, which could pass as an intimate bistro itself. It has all the accoutrements of a chef who never stops cooking, which is McGehee. There are the restaurantquality appliances, the deep sink, the fresh fruits and vegetables scattered about like permanent knickknacks. There is Hercules ("Down!" Christina McGehee instructs. "He still jumps.") and the McGehees' two boys Milo, 8, and Eli, 6, who wander in individually, each soaked from a formidable watergun fight in the neighborhood. Luckily, it's bath night.

There is also the orange-red tile backsplash that rings the kitchen above the countertops. It was a point of contention during the re-do. Christina hates it. Scott insisted.

Christina kindly offers to make a cocktail. I have what she's having, vodka with freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. Everything in the McGehee universe seems to be freshly squeezed, plucked, cut or baked. It's become part of the Boulevard/McGehee ethos as handed down by the High Priestess Waters,who has been known to serve as dessert at Chez Panisse nothing more than a perfectly ripened, locally grown peach on a plate.

Christina McGehee is an entrepreneur in her own right. She owns and operates Tallulah, a clothing shop not far from Boulevard's Heights location. And, aside from Alice Waters, Christina McGehee is most responsible for making Scott eat healthier and see green. (Among other things, Boulevard's carry-out boxes are biodegradable. Which ain't cheap.) She doesn't allow junk food in the house, and weaned her husband off fast food entirely about three years ago. He still admits a weakness for McDonald's French Fries. At one point, it must have bordered on addiction, because he kept it up even after Alice Waters spied him coming out of a San Francisco McDonald's one day and gave him what-for.

When I spy an empty box of macaroniand-cheese on the counter-dinner for the kids-Christina pleads guilty but notes that "at least it contained organic ingredients." Appetizer

"Do you eat meat?" Scott McGehee says as he streams into the kitchen like a man who's used to being apologetically late. He's carrying a bag of, undoubtedly, fresh food for tonight's feast. On the menu: naturally raised beef, risotto and salad.

Simple.

As McGehee trims the fat from the ovals of meat, and I watch helpfully from a safe distance behind the vodka, in walks Christian Shuffield.

Wearing a scruff of beard and cowboy hat, the 40-year-old Shuffield is a local farmer and sometime supplier for Boulevard. He's also helping Christina with some landscaping.

Shuffield came late to farming. He spent the majority of his adult life in a rock band in San Diego. Now he farms west of Little Rock.

Shuffield is typical of the people in Scott McGehee's orbit, cult, Wu Tang Clan. McGehee surrounds himself with eclectics, if not eccentrics. It's another Waters trademark. Her first staff at Chez Panisse had little or no experience in the restaurant business. Waters famously hired one woman as she washed salad greens, listening to the applicant behind her, asking no questions, then turning, looking her in the eye and giving her a job on the spot.

Rod Bryan, the independent candidate for governor last time out and all-around great quote, worked at Boulevard. And Beachboard, 28, played in the band American Princes with Matt Quinn, another McGehee hire, before showing up at Boulevard with nothing on his resume besides music gigs. "I had two passions: music and cooking," Beachboard says. "I never went to culinary school." Whenhe spent more time in the kitchen than in rehearsal, Beachboard was politely asked to leave the band. He surfaced at Boulevard, where he was promptly turned down for a job by McGehee.

Evidently, the interview didn't go so well, Beachboard having brought a musician's vanity to match Chef McGehee's. Sonia Schaefer hired Beachboard anyway. Five years later, he's opening a new restaurant with the man who first refused to hire him. "He was incredibly hard on me," Beachboard says. "But there's no other way. He developed my palate and work ethic."

McGehee places the beef in a pan with his fingers.

Shzzzzzz.

"Boy, I need some tongs."Main Course

To watch Scott McGehee work in his kitchen is to watch a concert pianist play without once looking at the keys. He pours risotto in a medium-deep pan, stirs a time or two, and walks away to visit, confidently trusting the timer in his head. Unlike a handsy amateur like me, he leaves the beef alone, not patting it with a spatula or shuffling it about or sticking a knife inside to gauge readiness.

He and Christina perform a kind of dance in the kitchen; she moves inside him to scoop Ovaltine into a blender to make smoothies for the kids; he reaches around her for those tongs. It's Dancing with the Stars meets Emeril-with running commentary from Scott McGehee.

"Scott, you've got to get on with it," Christina says as she notes the lack of progress in the kitchen. "He's not writing a novel."

Is he always like this?

"You mean non-stop talking? Yes."

That and the way his motor is always running, as if he would need a personality transplant to slow down.

She rolls her eyes. Lovingly, but still. Christina and Shuffield go into the other room to talk, and McGehee drifts back to Berkeley, California.

He still remembers the three-course meal he made for Alice Waters in order to secure a job at Chez Panisse: (1) grilled zephyr squash with roasted corn, salsa verde and shaved pecorino cheese; (2) sauteed squid in basil broth with focaccia and aioli; (3) "the sweetest and best" organic summer nectarine with blueberries big as grapes and soft ripened Artavaggio Italian cheese.

"You're either damn good or damn lucky," he was told after the meal. He leans toward lucky, but he had the gig. He was cooking for Alice Waters.

He recites the Waters Dictum: "Buy things local. Support local producers and local farmers. Food is about people, family, spending time together. The best food is the simplest food. It's notsomething that's described with 15 adjectives and you can't recognize it when you get it."

For a Berkeley liberal who went Green before going Green was cool, Alice Waters' philosophies on food sound awfully conservative. Why, it sounds like an old-fashioned family meal on the farm, where the whole tribe gathers 'round the table to share their lives.

In short, the Waters-McGehee Dictum represents something of a return to the past. But don't go telling Alice that. There's a bohemian radical image to uphold.

As for McGehee, the man in the white t-shirt and khaki shorts with the buzz cut and short beard may be fluent in Waters but his native tongue is Arkinsaw.

"I was a hick from Arkansas when I got out there," he says. "I was a stalker. I just kept showing up at the restaurant until they said, 'We don't typically do this. But come back tomorrow and bring your knives.' I rushed out the door and bought some new knives that I had no idea how to use."

He's still got 'em . . . somewhere.

"I need some white wine for this risotto," McGehee says. He already has added chicken broth, reduced by half. After the white wine and some more simmering will come freshly chopped tomatoes.

I've encouraged him to talk about ZaZa, which is his answer to the fastfood dependence of busy parents. "I'm opening it so my wife can get in and out quickly and still get a healthy meal," he says. "There'll be no sugar in the tomato sauce. We'll have half the fat of an American-style pizza."

His Big Mac-deprived son Milo wanders into the kitchen. He sees the leftover fat his father has trimmed from the beef. "Can you save that for Hercules?" he asks. "Sure," his father says, tossing the sort-of fat from the Naturally Raised Beef on a pan and placing it in the oven.

It's good to be a member of the McGehee household at meal time.

At table

After having set the table, Christina McGehee discovers that there are no steak knives. Scott has taken them to his restaurants. But we don't need them. The beef is tender enough to cut with the side of a fork. The salad, Christina's creation, is made of greens from the Dunbar Garden Project-an outdoor classroom and community garden tended by kids from Gibbs Magnet and Dunbar Magnet Middle schools in central Little Rock. She's mixed the greens with some coarse salt, pepper, olive oil and hand-squeezed lemon juice. The risotto seems to disappoint the chefs, but tastes fresh and perfectly blended. Hard, crusty bread with real butter completes the table.

Simple.

Scott is now talking about Big Orange, which will open when the renovated Riviera condos do, perhaps as early as this fall. He says he recently bought 100 chickens for one of his suppliers, so he can get just the right eggs.

By now, he's talking so fast I can't keep up. And, truth tell, I don't really want to as I'm stuffing my face with the sauteed beef. But I jot down snippets: "great coffee" . . . "killer wine list" . . . "French cafe, upscale diner" . . . "breakfast" . . . "4 to midnight cocktails and wine" . . . "Spanish tapas."

I interrupt. Boulevard has three locations. And now ZaZa. And then Big Orange.

Are you spreading yourself too thin, too quickly?

"Uh, yes," says Christina, always the voice of reason and adult in the room.

"My focus will always be Boulevard Bread Company," McGehee counters. "But I love the idea of developing and opening creative restaurants. I envision myself playing the Alice Waters role of tasting and critiquing."

He notes that he has equal partners in both new ventures.

Still, it may not be the best time to be opening restaurants-even if you are Scott McGehee. Wholesale food prices are way up. The cost of fuel is, well, you know. The weak American dollar has China and India buying here and driving up food prices. "It's a perfect storm against us," says the veteran Abernathy, who has put on hold his plans to open a barbecue restaurant until the economy settles.

"This is such a hard business to be in," Abernathy says. "There are two kinds of restaurateurs: The franchise guys who are more about business than creativity, and the mavericks that want to do their own thing. Scott is a maverick."The Wine

To steal another line from Liebling, the wine was far too good for me, perhaps because my hosts had nothing between the insulting and the superlative.

It's a Crognolo, which translates from the Italian into Red Table Wine That Goes Down Way Too Easily; Say, Scott, Do You Have Any More Of This Stuff?

"I chose this wine special for tonight," says McGehee. It's a favorite of his from his days hanging with family in Italy.

"I ate black truffles and Roquefort as a kid in Provence," he says. "I was willing to eat anything. I wanted to try it all."

For years, McGehee's uncle, the late Scott Dickinson McGehee, operated Accademia dell' Arte, a school in an Italian villa maintained for American students pursuing the arts.

For years, the younger Scott McGehee led local folks on culinary tours of Tuscany. One of the Arkansans who took the trip several years running was a woman named Nena Valentine. Her husband? Bill Valentine, the forever general manager and now VP of the Arkansas Travelers whose love of Italian food might rival his love of baseball. When Bill Valentine started looking for somebody to help create his new ballpark restaurant at Dickey-Stephens Park, he thought about his wife's good friend and Tuscany tour guide.

"Good luck," Nena Valentine warned her husband about landing Scott McGehee. "He's got more going on than he can keep up with."

Bill Valentine being Bill Valentine, he asked anyway. "Scott didn't blink," Valentine recalls. "He loves baseball and loves food. And he's the best chef in Arkansas. He's got that Alice Waters background and this wonderful talent to just create. Everybody in the kitchen came through him. The menu, the staff, the concept, the training, he was in all of that."

Valentine's was named Best New Restaurant in Central Arkansas by three different publications. McGehee still works as a consultant for the restaurant.

Dessert

It occurs that my contribution to this meal has been to eat it and chronicle it. I have not lifted a tong. So it's only fair that my dessert is an exposition on kickball. Arkansas' capital city has one of the largest kickball leagues in the world. And for a long while, McGehee's Boulevard team was kind of the New England Patriots of Little Rock kickball. Of late, it's been a different story. "We're rebuilding now," McGehee says, promising a return to the kickball pinnacle. Yes, here's a surprise: Scott McGehee is passionate about competitive kickball.

(Cue Christina's eye roll.)

Putting aside the merits of Sundays at the kickball park, it's one more example of Wu Tang McGehee. Join the clan and you're not just working at a bakery and gourmet shop, or a restaurant, you're on the team. Literally. And the alums tend to remain loyal. "I went and tasted the gelato at ZaZa, and it was incredible," says Rod Bryan, who now runs his own Internet-based business and has never been known to mince words. "Food-wise, anything he touches is phenomenal."

The evening ends with a clap of thunder. Another storm has moved in, stirring Hercules from his place on the kitchen floor. Scott McGehee seems as if he could go on all night, but the Crognolo is kicking in and so is that storm.

I check my watch as my host walks me to the door. Almost 9 o'clock. It was the kind of meal that was an evening in itself, the kind that would make Alice Waters proud-long and lazy, full of conversation and good, simple food.