Foie gras may soon be illegal in New York City, as the fight to eliminate the liver of force-fed geese from menus here heats up in the chambers of City Council this week.
But even if the ban goes through, it may warrant nothing more than a blasé “challenge accepted” from ballsy chefs. They’ve long snuck in eyebrow-raising, sometimes outright-illicit delicacies, including beluga caviar, French cheeses and exotic animal meat.
It’s worth it, they say, for a good meal — and bragging rights in the kitchen.
Take Virgilio Martínez, the Peruvian, Michelin-starred chef behind restaurant Central, who made headlines last month when customs held him up for toting 40 frozen piranhas in a duffel bag through Los Angeles International Airport.
Although it’s illegal to import live piranhas into the US, frozen piranhas are technically OK if they’re being brought for personal consumption. Martínez — who planned to cook the sharp-toothed fish for a crowd — tells The Post that there was confusion on both sides: He has “very little knowledge” of which ingredients are legal and illegal in the US, beyond “the regular . . . list of species in danger.” (He did eventually get the piranhas through, and reportedly served them at LA restaurants Vespertine and Somni.)
But in New York, where rock-star chefs love to raise the stakes and the superrich covet gout-inducing dinners, the black market for illegal ingredients is very intentional — and very robust. Those in the know say that just about anything can be had for the right price.
“Not to make it sound [like a] drug war, but a s - - tload of product is crossing the border,” Zach Baum, founder of luxury food-and-wine concierge business Reservoir Consulting, tells The Post. “Some of it gets caught, but most of it doesn’t,” says Baum — who describes himself as well-acquainted with the culinary underground, despite only trafficking in legal eats himself.
Chief among the offenders, he says, is 007’s favorite treat: beluga caviar. Since 2005, the US Fish & Wildlife Service has banned the import of the fancy fish eggs, which come from the critically endangered beluga sturgeon. Nevertheless, it remains available to wealthy devotees.
“Access is still occasional,” a source with knowledge of the beluga caviar market in New York tells The Post. “It comes in a couple times a year, and is brought in by a few different guys. It goes for around $15,000 a pound” — roughly double the cost of the finest legal caviar, such as golden osetra or kaluga.
According to the same source, the roe makes its way to New York from either Russia or Iran. It’s packed in suitcases full of ice, flown to a European city, then sent on to New York — where it is sold to deep-pocketed gourmands.
“I don’t know how they get through customs,” says the anonymous foodie. His best guess is that they’re paying off officials. “The penalty for getting caught is so great that I have to imagine that they aren’t leaving it up to chance.”
Another way illegal ingredients find their way to Manhattan’s highest dining rooms is appropriately opulent: The contraband is flown private.
Multiple chefs, who asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, told The Post that French specialties such as poulet de Bresse (widely considered the world’s greatest chicken), fresh lobes of French foie gras and raw-milk cheeses are common items smuggled in via private jet.
The shady phenomenon dates back decades. As an appalled Chicago Tribune columnist noted in 1986, the late chef Jean Banchet reportedly opened the floodgates for nefarious foodies by hiding delicate French goose livers “in shipments packed under the fish.”
‘A s - - tload of product is crossing the border.’
“After that, everyone was seeing how much unpasteurized cheese they could get back, or figuring out what you can smuggle back without getting arrested,” says Dale Talde, the chef and owner of Talde in Jersey City. These days, he says, such dealings are so common that no one bats an eye at an illicit French cheese.
Baum thinks they’re right not to. He believes that bureaucratic restrictions on those French specialties seem arbitrary — especially in light of how available world ingredients have become in the US.
“The high level of standards and practices today means that they are very safe,” he says. “A fresh lobe of Périgord foie gras is a fragile product and there are spoilage issues. But butter makes it over here. Produce makes its over here. Truffles make it here. So I don’t really buy the argument that it’s unsafe to import foie gras.”
It’s not just rarified foods that catch chefs’ eyes abroad, either.
“Back in ’96, I went to Israel and brought back some 45-day dry-aged camel meat,” says Keven “Cheven” Lee, who cooks for celebrities and is the executive chef of My World on a Plate, a luxe catering company. “It was super delicious.”
Camel meat isn’t illegal to consume in the US, but it’s hard to find and illegal to transport across borders. Lee decided the risk was worth it, and hid the meat in a silk scarf — and although customs officials in Israel kept him for about an hour and a half, he got away with it. As a young chef, bringing back such a prized cut helped him make his mark, he says.
“I served it at a dinner as a charcuterie plate,” he says. “It was absolutely phenomenal.”
Of course, not all rule-flouting chefs are international smugglers. A lot of illegal ingredients are homegrown.
Moses — who could not give his last name out of fear of being shut down — runs a raw-milk delivery operation in Manhattan. Raw milk can only be sold at state-approved dairy farms in New York, none of which are here in the city. His company, a private co-op that requires interested milk aficionados to join in order to get the goods, has had a run-in with the Health Department, he says. But he still makes deliveries about once a week from his white, unmarked van.
“There is a big demand — huge demand,” he says of the $5-per-gallon unpasteurized milk. Though the FDA says raw milk can carry dangerous bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria, Moses says his clients buy it because “it’s healthy.”
And, of course, chefs are toying around with the most easily available illicit ingredient: good ol’ marijuana. Now that it’s legal in many other states, chefs like Michael Magallanes, the founder of Opulent Chef, says he’s never had a problem transporting the cannabis oils and powders he uses in his dinner parties — including one he hosted in May in New York City, which paired his gourmet fixings with different strains of vapeable weed. For instance, the “clementine” strain of marijuana paired excellently with his braised beets with pomegranate molasses, he says.
Magallanes, who lives in San Francisco, sneaks weed into bags of tapioca powder and coconut oil to transport it to his New York dinner parties.
“You’d never know unless a dog were to smell it,” he says. “Are they going to open up that shampoo bottle and inspect it? I don’t know of anyone who’s ever had a problem.”
Although undeclared food products can still earn you a hefty fine, US Customs and Border Protection confirms that the ingredients top chefs risk it all for aren’t a significant issue at the border, broadly speaking.
“We are currently under increased situational awareness because of the threat of foreign animal disease, specifically African swine fever,” a spokesperson for the CBP tells The Post. “We are especially diligent about preventing meat items from entering the United States.”
However, the most common foods confiscated at the border are fruits like mangos, custard apples and soursop, they say.
The reality is that outside the endangered-species list, there just aren’t that many ingredients that you can’t get in the US today, says Baum.
“Eventually people find legal channels to get what they want,” Baum says. “Even within the last five to 10 years, the amount of luxury foods that [have become legally] available in the US is so much greater. I can get sushi-grade fish from the Toyosu market in Tokyo overnighted to a client’s house. I just got trays of A-plus-grade Hokkaido uni for a party in the Hamptons. The ability to do that has never existed before. If you are rich, you can get live Norwegian king crab, live Santa Barbara spot prawns and live langoustines from the Faroe Islands.”
Given the increased access to such delicacies, Baum frankly finds the city’s foie gras uproar baffling.
“Foie gras is not an existential threat to ducks,” he says. Plus, when they’re not being force-fed, the ducks are “fully free-range and happy.”
“Anyone who eats Perdue or Tyson chicken but doesn’t eat foie gras, I have no time for,” he says.