Gloria Ciccarone-Nehls: A chef who has walked the wild walk
By GraceAnn Walden


When you talk to Gloria Ciccarone-Nehls, the long-time chef of the Big 4 restaurant in The Huntington Hotel high on Nob Hill, she has a quirky, but short story about how she got interested in cooking wild game.

“I dated the owner of a Bay Area wild game purveyor – briefly,” she says. That was in the 1980s. Her association turned her on to the world of wild game beyond the ubiquitous venison and wild boar.

Ciccarone-Nehls has been the chef at the Big 4 for 29 years. Over the years, the diminutive chef has garnered a slew of accolades, been the chairperson of Les Toques Blanches and (who is surprised?) has not garnered a San Francisco mainstream media review in 12 years. She deserves to be on the top of the heap. Enough with a whole slew of chefs who never touch a stove, but who are the darlings in certain quarters.

Ciccarone-Nehls has now been cooking game for 27 years. Every fall, for the past 17 years, she constructs a menu from the best she can get, sourced from (mostly) the Midwest. It’s called Wild Game Week, and during the sold-out week last month, she used 700 pounds of product. “I’d like to use the local purveyors, but they’re just too expensive,” she explains. She also deals directly with Alaskan Inuit people for caribou.

There are some controversial products she has stayed away from – certainly anything endangered. She thinks alligator is too ordinary and turtle is just too much work to clean. She also stays away from frozen products.

Off the menu, but available in the last game week, was lion. Farm-raised for human consumption, but yet, not something neither my dining companion nor I wanted to try. We did enjoy the pancetta-crusted tenderloin of Himalayan yak rossini (me) and the pan-seared rack of Rocky Mountain wapiti (a type of elk) for Roger.

In the early days of her game-cooking career, someone set up a TV shoot with the old Evening Magazine show. Ciccarone-Nehls invited many of the top chefs in the City, including Hubert Keller of Fleur de Lys, to partake. There was venison, antelope, and someone had given her a whole bear leg. “I cooked this bear leg all day, ladling off tons of bear grease – it was gross,” she says. The TV people came and all the chefs sat there chomping down on the bear and smiling. “It was bad,” says Ciccarone-Nehls with a slight smile.

Another time, someone sent her a beaver tail. “It was just so greasy – just awful,” she says.
Around that time, she had buffalo chili topped with crispy onion rings on the menu. That dish, now made with venison, is a favorite nosh to have at the Big 4 bar, until 11:30 every night.

The Wild Game week took a while to percolate. At first, game was run as nightly specials, and all the while, she was learning about it. “It was weird. I learned that it was good for game to have a little age on it, for it to be brown. I stopped sending it back when I came to that realization,” she says.

Growing up in a restaurant family in Connecticut, and later studying at the Culinary Institute of America, Ciccarone-Nehls has a strong classical cooking background. “I knew instinctively, as did the masters of the 19th century, that Cumberland sauce was right with game,” she explains. (Although variations exist, the common ingredients of Cumberland sauce include red currants, port or red wine, mustard, pepper, orange, ginger, and vinegar.)
With all her years of experience, she has lots of advice to impart to home cooks about dealing with game. A red wine marinade with juniper berries and bay will change the texture of the meat, tenderizing it. For flavor, she likes to use dry and wet rubs on venison, antelope, duck, rabbit, caribou, and yak. She also smokes antelope after rubbing it with a mixture of coffee, cocoa and spice (that recipe is one she wouldn’t share, alas.)
As for turkeys, Ciccarone-Nehls likes the free-range Brannigan turkey from Yolo County. “It’s delicious, fed on corncobs and apples, and of course, organic,” she advises. She agrees with me, that brining a turkey just makes it salty.

Here is her recipe for adding flavor to turkey parts, rabbit or chicken. I call it:

Gloria’s Delicious Marinade
2 cups buttermilk
2 tablespoons thyme
1 tablespoon lemon zest
1 teaspoon garlic (minced)
1 tablespoon salt
½ cup olive oil
1 teaspoon white pepper
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

Whisk all these ingredients together. Marinate a quartered rabbit, two pieces of turkey or two chicken breasts and two thighs in it overnight. Wipe off marinade. Heat a mild-flavored olive oil in a pan and brown the meats on all sides quickly. Roast in a moderate oven until done.

The Wild Game Week is so popular, she is thinking of adding one in May of 2009. I know I will be there.

GraceAnn Walden has hunted wild tofu in Bolinas, but not by helicopter. She does conduct tours of the City that feature lotsa good food; learn more at www graceannwalden.net.