Nora Pouillon: A Pioneer’s Odyssey to Organic

Ask Nora Pouillon about her inspi­ra­tion for a life ded­i­cated to cook­ing and you’ll get a dif­fer­ent story. “I was born in Austria dur­ing World War II,” she relates. “I remem­ber bombs falling every­where and voices telling you to go to the cel­lar.” People around her lost their pos­ses­sions, their homes; many died. There was never enough food.

But being born into a war-torn coun­try was a bless­ing, Pouillon says. Surrounded by so much dev­as­ta­tion and suf­fer­ing, this young girl was instilled with such a pro­found appre­ci­a­tion for food and life that it would per­me­ate and shape her entire existence.

Pouillon would even­tu­ally move to the United States and open one of the world’s first restau­rants based on local and nat­ural cui­sine, which would go on to become the first cer­ti­fied organic restau­rant in the US. There, she would serve pres­i­dents and first ladies, pen a cook­book, and become one of the most influ­en­tial fig­ures in the grow­ing organic and sus­tain­able food movement.

But first she had to grow up.

Informative Years

Although Pouillon’s fam­ily was well off—her father owned a safety-glass win­dow factory—they fled Vienna in the last years of the war. Driving through zones occu­pied by Russia, England, France and America, the fam­ily finally made it to a farm owned by friends in the Tyrolean Alps. “There, the farm­ers grew all of their food. It taught me how dif­fi­cult that truly is,” Pouillon recalls. “They got up with the sun and worked until sun­set. They had to pre­pare food for the win­ter months. There was no elec­tric­ity and no run­ning water.”

The farm was com­pletely self-sufficient. The farm­ers made every­thing from the soap to the shin­gles on the roof. The wheat was grown, then thrashed, then made into flour for bak­ing. Pouillon watched as the cows were milked and cream was churned into but­ter; sheep were sheered to make wool for cloth.

Pouillon and her fam­ily remained safely at the farm for three years. “Those years on the farm had such a tremen­dous impact on me. It shows just how infor­ma­tive those early years can be.”

Her health-oriented par­ents broke with the tra­di­tional Alpine cui­sine, which was heavy on meat, cream and cheeses, and this would also influ­ence Pouillon’s future.

“My par­ents were really into exer­cise and eschewed much of the heavy cui­sine like roux and deep fry­ing. My mom made lots of sal­ads and soups. We always engaged in plenty of activ­i­ties such as ski­ing, hik­ing and berry pick­ing; we learned an appre­ci­a­tion of nature,” she says. “My dad taught us that your health was the most impor­tant thing you had.”

After the war, Pouillon and her fam­ily returned to Vienna where she began attend­ing French board­ing school, at which a dif­fer­ent kind of learn­ing occurred than that on the farm. “Here, we were served a three-course meal for lunch. In that 30 min­utes, we learned about eat­ing prop­erly with a knife and a fork and hav­ing social con­ver­sa­tions with our school­mates,” she remarks. “After that we had an hour-long recess, when we could play in the park sur­round­ing
the school.”

Pouillon would con­tinue to spend sum­mers at the farm with her grand­mother, unlike her sis­ters, who didn’t want to engage in such work or be so isolated.

Crossing the Pond

In the 1960s, a newly wed­ded Pouillon moved to the United States with her hus­band, a French jour­nal­ist. Here she observed the dif­fer­ences between the Western European food sys­tem and that of America post–World War II.

“At the stores here it was amaz­ing to see all the prepack­aged and frozen food. Nothing depended on the sea­son. Pepperidge Farm was like gourmet bread. The pro­duce depart­ment was the small­est sec­tion in the store.

“I was shocked to learn that peo­ple didn’t have a rela­tion­ship with food, and I wasn’t accus­tomed to see­ing so much obe­sity and peo­ple hav­ing quadru­ple bypasses and can­cer as if it were noth­ing. The air wasn’t good, the water was pol­luted and tasted like chlo­rine, and the food was fla­vor­less and processed. I decided I didn’t want to be part of that,”
she says.

As a mother of young chil­dren at the time, Pouillon was shop­ping and cook­ing for her fam­ily daily. “I started to look for eth­nic mar­kets where I could find French bread, good olive oil and cheeses. It was the hip­pie time and co-ops were form­ing, which had bet­ter prod­ucts; I cooked at home using these ingre­di­ents. I started dri­ving to nearby farms in search of qual­ity prod­ucts. We had no money at the time and it was an epi­curean waste­land in DC then, with only one or two good restau­rants. I got really into cook­ing and we enter­tained a lot because it was the best way to have social time, given the circumstances.

“I remem­ber once call­ing up a farmer after see­ing an adver­tise­ment for farm-raised beef,” Pouillon recounts. “The woman told me proudly how the beef was fat­tened with corn and hor­mones for lots of mar­bling and given antibi­otics to stay healthy. This was actu­ally my first expo­sure to chem­i­cals in live­stock. I had learned they were being used in crops, but ani­mals I didn’t know about until then.”

Soon there­after, Pouillon found another farmer who hap­pily informed her of all the things he didn’t do to his cat­tle. “It was then that I truly started becom­ing aware of the dif­fer­ences between organic and con­ven­tional farm­ing,” she says.

As she delved deeper into cook­ing and dis­cov­er­ing sources of untainted ingre­di­ents, Pouillon’s friends took notice and wanted to learn as well. She began giv­ing infor­mal cook­ing lessons in her kitchen. She also started a casual cater­ing ser­vice where she’d make a dish and drop it off at the customer’s house.

To Restaurant We Go

In 1976 Pouillon sep­a­rated from her hus­band and had to begin earn­ing her own liv­ing. Opportunity knocked when a friend bought a bed-and-breakfast near the White House called the Tabard Inn. She asked Nora to install a kitchen and start a restau­rant within the inn. For sev­eral years Pouillon ran what was a very rudi­men­tary kitchen, but she devel­oped a fol­low­ing. It wasn’t long before she and the hotel man­ager, Steven, put their heads together and decided to open a restau­rant on their own.

“We man­aged to raise $150,000 through friends, who invested $3,000 to $10,000 each. All the investors had to agree that I would run the restau­rant my way and that it would be as organic as pos­si­ble; I ate organic at home and couldn’t see serv­ing con­ven­tional food to my customers.”

Restaurant Nora, in DC’s his­toric Dupont Circle, opened in 1979. “People told me I was a crazy lady; I was called com­pletely nuts. The Washington Post wrote, ‘Nora tells us what we should eat. How does she know?’ People were mak­ing fun of me. Advice came in like ‘Don’t call it organic; it sounds like biol­ogy class.’ I per­se­vered. I couldn’t quit.” She and her part­ner Steven, his brother, Thomas, and her staff dug in and worked 24/7. Her chil­dren would come to the restau­rant after school and do their home­work while she cooked.

The odds were against the suc­cess of Nora’s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s terms like health food and organic meant hip­pie food, gra­nola and tofu—certainly not gourmet.

But her focus on qual­ity and fresh­ness began win­ning her favor­able reviews and a loyal cus­tomer base. Produce was sourced as locally as pos­si­ble and then washed with triple-filtered water. Herbs and veg­eta­bles were planted in boxes out­side the restau­rant. Her menu changed daily depend­ing on what was avail­able, an excit­ing prospect at restau­rants even today.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

The ele­gance of the white table­cloth restau­rant also broke down pre­con­ceived notions of “heath food.” Museum-quality Amish crib quilts adorned the walls, and tables were set with fine linens and wineglasses.

The crit­ics applauded this new healthy haute cui­sine, and the cus­tomers came.

First Certified Organic Restaurant

By the mid- to late nineties, becom­ing cer­ti­fied organic was the next log­i­cal step, accord­ing to Pouillon: “I was get­ting almost all the food from organic pur­vey­ors.” When she began to inves­ti­gate how to become a cer­ti­fied organic restau­rant, she learned that no cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process existed.

Pouillon decided to set about cre­at­ing those stan­dards. She worked for about two years with an organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion agency, Oregon Tilth, to estab­lish the rules and stan­dards of what it means to be an organic restau­rant. The result­ing stan­dard required that 95 per­cent of the food used, as a cer­ti­fied restau­rant, must be obtained from USDA cer­ti­fied organic sources. “This meant obtain­ing proof of organic cer­ti­fi­ca­tion from all our sup­pli­ers,” she says. She com­plied with the lengthy require­ments, and in 1999 Restaurant Nora became the first cer­ti­fied organic restau­rant in the country.

So why have only a hand­ful of organic restau­rants fol­lowed suit? “People don’t always under­stand how com­pli­cated and time con­sum­ing it is,” Pouillon explains. “Almost every­thing has to be organic down to the spices and cof­fee. It’s a lot of work to find cer­ti­fied organic farm­ers and track down cer­ti­fi­ca­tion papers from 35-plus pur­vey­ors every year. This process has to be done each year because the cer­tifi­cates have to be renewed each year.”

Although she isn’t required to, Pouillon goes beyond hav­ing more than 95 per­cent of the food organic. The restau­rant has a sophis­ti­cated water purifi­ca­tion sys­tem, and energy for the entire estab­lish­ment comes from alter­na­tive sup­pli­ers; they also com­post all of their kitchen scraps. “It’s not just about our health but about the health of the envi­ron­ment too,” she says.

Outside of the Kitchen

Pouillon’s work in the organic and sus­tain­able food move­ment far exceeds open­ing one of the nation’s first gourmet sus­tain­able restau­rants and cer­tainly the first cer­ti­fied organic one. She has served on numer­ous boards to help achieve ini­tia­tives that move the direc­tion of the coun­try toward being more in line with her views of envi­ron­men­tal stew­ard­ship and good health.

Pouillon’s numer­ous achieve­ments include awards such as Chef of the Year from the International Association of Culinary Professionals, the Genesis Award from Women Chefs & Restaurateurs, and the StarChefs Innovator Award. In 1996 she pub­lished Cooking with Nora: Seasonal Menus from Restaurant Nora (Random House). She has lob­bied to pro­tect Atlantic sword­fish, Chilean sea bass and Caspian caviar. She was a found­ing board mem­ber of the Chefs Collaborative and is now on the board of seven other envi­ron­men­tal and culi­nary organizations.

Pouillon can also take credit for bring­ing farm­ers’ mar­kets to the DC area.

About 15 years ago, Pouillon became aware of the Union Square Greenmarket in New York City and started to talk about bring­ing such a mar­ket to the District. “I couldn’t believe we didn’t have some­thing like that in DC. It was unbe­liev­able how many peo­ple didn’t want a farm­ers’ mar­ket down­town. They were wor­ried it would be filled with dirty farm­ers and cre­ate traffic.”

But she per­sisted and was instru­men­tal in open­ing the very first producer-only farm­ers’ mar­kets in the nation’s cap­i­tal. Called Fresh Farm Markets, the net­work has grown to include ten mar­kets. “We will open the eleventh mar­ket this year,” Pouillon says. “There are so many farm­ers thriv­ing now who just couldn’t make a liv­ing before these mar­kets. Farmers are like teachers—they are the most under­ap­pre­ci­ated pro­fes­sion and make the least.”

Through her years of work­ing with farms and farm­ers, Pouillon has devel­oped a pro­found appre­ci­a­tion for not just the men and women who work the land but the neces­sity of healthy soil as well. “The soil is at the heart of our food’s nutri­tional value. We are just begin­ning to under­stand this in the United States, that the nutri­ents and microor­gan­isms in the soil deter­mine the plant’s ulti­mate fla­vor and health,” she says.

In the Shadow of the White House

Existing at the fore­front of the sus­tain­able and organic food move­ment while in such close prox­im­ity to the nation’s cap­i­tal, where so often laws are handed down that go against what she is work­ing toward, how does Pouillon remain inspired? By look­ing to peo­ple for change, not to the gov­ern­ment. “The gov­ern­ment does not change things. Change has to come through the peo­ple,” she asserts. “A good exam­ple would be cig­a­rettes. Everyone thought the gov­ern­ment would never change, but it did and it was through the people.”

Pouillon tem­pers this opin­ion with a dose of mod­er­a­tion. “You have to give options to peo­ple though; peo­ple can’t all change their lifestyles overnight. And there’s noth­ing wrong with chips, if they are organic, not made with GMOs, and you don’t eat a whole bag. We also need Walmart and Costco to offer more organ­ics. Organic can’t only be for rich priv­i­leged people.”

Today Pouillon remains very active in the restau­rant. She arrives every day at 12:30 p.m. to sit down with the chef and sous-chef. “We talk about what the farm­ers will deliver, what we have in stock, and then com­pose a menu. About 10 per­cent to 20 per­cent of the menu changes every day, depend­ing on the avail­abil­ity of products.”

Pouillon says there’s plenty of pay­off in run­ning a restau­rant for almost 35 years. “I love see­ing guests who ate at my restau­rant when they were young and now bring their kids to eat. That my food has inspired them to con­tinue com­ing and to expose their chil­dren to it means a lot. I love that I’ve been able to inspire other chefs as well—chefs like Michel Nischan and Maria Hines, who have called me up and asked for advice on run­ning an organic restau­rant, or José Andrés, whom I intro­duced to local organic farmers.”

If you ask Pouillon if she wishes she had taken an eas­ier route to becom­ing a chef, she says no. “I am happy that I never went to cook­ing school but to the school of life. I learned how to think for myself, and I was dar­ing enough to go my own way to serve the food I wanted and inspire lots of peo­ple. In the end I was not so crazy.”

While it’s get­ting eas­ier to take for granted the farm­ers’ mar­ket down the street or the local farm-to-table restau­rant, if it weren’t for the tenac­ity and risk tak­ing of organic pio­neers like Nora Pouillon, they might not exist. To accom­plish and achieve all that takes an abun­dance of courage and vision.

For more infor­ma­tion about Restaurant Nora, visit www.noras.com.