It started with chanterelles, those frilly yellow mushrooms with pleated throats like the jabots women used to wear. By 1984, Ingrid Bengis, a finalist for the 1972 National Book Award for her searingly honest memoir, Combat in The Erogenous Zone: Writings on Love, Hate, and Sex (Alfred A. Knopf), had gone through the money earned from her book. A New Yorker born of Russian émigré parents, she commuted back and forth between a city loft and Stonington, Maine, where she had written the book in a $2,000 house with a hand pump in the kitchen for water. (Whether in the money or out, the enormously energetic Bengis always seems to have two or more places to live.)
While in New York, she had noticed how high the now-defunct Balducci’s Market priced its chanterelles. When she returned to Stonington, she called the store and offered to sell them some.
Balducci’s buyer asked, “How many do you have?”
“I don’t have any yet,” the brutally honest Bengis replied.
“Well, when you have some,” he said, “let us know.”
She went out in the woods and found chanterelles, but they weren’t ripe, so she called the buyer and told him the mushrooms needed one more rain before they’d be ready to pick. (She is very free with the phone. If a thought occurs, it is usually followed by one or more calls.)
“There was a small pause,” she said. “I think [he] was quite surprised, but I was just telling the truth.”
When the chanterelles were ready, she picked ten pounds — no mean feat considering the weight of a mushroom — and, to be sure, they arrived fresh. She drove them to the Bangor airport and shipped them air freight, then called Balducci’s to say they were on their way. (At the time, there was no such thing as Federal Express.)
Upon recognizing the perfection Bengis insisted upon and discovering that she lived on an island off the coast of Maine, Balducci’s buyer asked if she could supply the market with lobsters and crabmeat. Twenty years later, Bengis described sitting on the cement floor at the Stonington Lobster Co-op, opening up containers of crabmeat, sniffing each for freshness, and learning that she’d have to find her own crab-pickers. Thus began her, you might say, vocation to find the freshest and most beautiful seafood.
Others may well produce seafood of equal freshness and beauty, but Bengis was looking for local products. This demanding woman scouted out the best fishermen on Deer Isle and began providing Balducci’s with top quality hard shell lobsters, crabmeat, scallops, mussels, cod, monkfish and halibut.
With no money of her own to work with, she would have Balducci’s buyer wire her money so she could pay the fishermen, pick up the seafood, pack it in seaweed, drive it to the airport, ship it air freight to New York and pay herself a bit.
Bengis’s business-management skills were, to be generous, 19th-century. The business did not get computerized until a year ago. She remains computer-illiterate. She said she’d sit down at a café after she left the airport and figure out how much she had paid to whom for what and for how much she had sold it — in pencil, in a little black-and-white notebook from the five-and-ten. She didn’t price her goods much over expenses and never thought about charging for her labor. If she cleared $100 a week, she was happy.
Deer Isle oyster farmer Daniel Weed grew up near Bengis. He sold her lobsters, urchins and mussels, and occasionally picked up and packaged the seafood. “She knows how to get what she wants,” he said. “Things don’t stand in her way. She paid more to get the quality product.”
Weed called her innovative and a pioneer. In fact, despite her being exacting and sometimes difficult, people with whom she has had dealings speak of her with respect and admiration, and an understanding of why she is so driven.
Despite the problems of getting product from ocean to buyer as quickly as possible, by the end of that first season, Bengis’s brother, Steven, suggested she add a few more accounts to her business rather than being dependent on one buyer. So the next time she went to New York, she stopped in three top-notch restaurants and talked lobster to the chefs. Few knew the difference between hard shells and soft shells — they knew they didn’t like the watery soft-shell lobsters, but didn’t know they had a choice. When they realized they did, they were willing to try Bengis’s products.
One reason her business succeeded was timing. When she reached out to this country’s new, young chefs, Thomas Keller, Eberhard Müller, Wolfgang Puck, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and others, they hadn’t yet reached the pinnacle they now enjoy. Each sought precisely what Bengis offered: the best of the best. Bengis’s manager, Susan Buxton, explained her employer’s method by saying of the fishermen, “They bring in 80 pounds, but she only wants 40 pounds and the 40 best, and that’s what the chefs like.”
She brought them together, the young chefs and the people who harvested the finest seafood she could find, and to make sure the seafood arrived as fresh from the ocean as possible, she delivered it herself. Nobody else in this country was doing that. What Alice Waters did for fresh, organic vegetables, Ingrid Bengis did for fresh-caught, perfect fish and shellfish. She’s the Alice Waters of seafood.
Eberhard Müller, then executive chef at New York’s Le Bernardin, which was the model for top quality, perfectly prepared seafood, began buying halibut and other seafood from Bengis back in 1986 and is proud of being one of her first customers.
In a telephone interview he said, “I was very, very interested in scallops, sea urchins, monkfish, halibut, and other fish, but only if it was the best. The fish would have my name on it,” he said, pleased. “Ingrid would call and say, `I have a fish with your name on it,’ or I would call her and ask, `Do you have any fish with my name on it?'” She would only tag a halibut that met all her criteria: it had to have the right amount of slime on it to protect it and keep it moist; it had to have been bled; and when cut into, the flesh had to be translucent. Halibut never even goes on ice at Ingrid Bengis Seafood; it’s brought in within hours of being caught, boxed, and sent to the airport.
Thomas Keller, owner and chef of The French Laundry restaurant, in California’s Napa Valley, viewed by some as the best restaurant in America, owns three other restaurants including Per Se, in New York. Twenty years ago, though, he was at New York’s Rakel.
In a recent interview he said he bought from Bengis “Because she was the best and because Eberhard Müller and Bernardin were using [her]. They were the benchmark of fresh fish as a restaurant.” He felt anybody Le Bernardin bought from was a resource he wanted to tap into. Bengis, though, didn’t take him on immediately. “Everyone was calling her in the beginning,” he explained, saying that she had to select her customers based on their personalities and respect for the food. “It’s about the relationship, the way the product should be treated, and respect for each other and for the product,” Keller said. “She has helped define a set of standards for small suppliers.”
Depending on the time of year, Bengis sells fish and shellfish to from 20 to 25 of this country’s best restaurants.
“Real Fussy”
Fisherman and lobsterboat racing champion Andrew Gove, who lives across the cove from Bengis in Stonington, sold her halibut in the early days.
“Ingrid was real fussy,” he recalled. “The halibut had to be the right size: between twenty and fifty pounds. If they rubbed over rocks, she didn’t think they looked good.”
Asked why Bengis wanted small halibut — the largest one he ever caught weighed 343 pounds — Gove said, “The meat is whiter looking when they’re small. When they get bigger, the meat gets sloppy and yellowish, though it tastes the same. It’s like a young person’s skin is tight and an old person’s is wrinkled.”
Gove said he sold Bengis very few lobsters because she was so hard to please. “One wouldn’t suit her, and you’d have to take it back, or she’d say she’d have to eat it. It wasn’t worth it to me. I understood what she was trying to do, but sometimes you get too picky, and the fishermen won’t want to deal with you. You’re selling looks instead of fish. The thing that is more important than looks is how long the fish has been out of the water.” Bengis agrees.
Stonington fisherman Lawrence Bray, Jr., who lives right down the road from Bengis, sold her lobsters for ten years and tells a revealing story about her. She hadn’t bought from him in a while and usually would give him some notice as to the size and number she wanted. But one late spring or early summer day, she called “out of the blue,” he said, asking for a certain number of pounds. She arrived, and they talked outside.
“These lobsters are all one size and very small,” he recalled her saying. “They’re not what I need.”
He said, “She thought I sold my bigger stuff to somebody else,” and explained, “some times of the year you can’t get bigger lobsters.” He told her he hadn’t sold to anyone else and was not in the habit of lying. “She shouldn’t have distrusted me,” he said. “That kind of done it for us. I told her to take them or leave them.”
He went back in the house, disgusted, then looked out and saw her sitting on the lawn, weeping. He walked back out and asked what was the matter.
“Why does everybody hate me?” she sobbed.
He assured her that people didn’t hate her, but said she picked away at them and was pushy. “You should stop buying from me,” he said, “and we’ll still be friends.”
They did just that until recently when Bray started selling his shrimp again to the more diplomatic Buxton. (Bengis calls herself a bull in a china shop.)
She feels so strongly about the quality of the seafood she sells, she invited her chefs to Maine to meet the people who produce them. Müller took Bengis up on the invitation and, among others, visited Brooklin aquaculturist Paul Brayton, just then trying to make a go of his Tightrope Sea Farm. When Müller expressed his pleasure at seeing the beautiful small mussels Brayton was growing, even though at the time he was fighting a losing battle with the big eider sea ducks that were eating most of his crop, he remembers thinking that if Müller and Bengis and her other customers thought so much of his mussels, well, then, that was the quality he was going to strive for. He credits the two for setting him on his now successful course.
Müller has since moved on three times — he’s now executive chef at Bayard’s, in Manhattan — but said that he has kept alive his relationship with Bengis and takes great interest in everything she does; in addition, he continues to buy her mussels and oysters, lobster and shrimp, halibut and other fish, and scallops.
“She bought a pile of scallops from me,” Junior Bray recalled one snowy January day. “For some reason she liked my scallops better than anybody else’s except for Frankie Jones because I did not wash my scallops in sea water until I was done for the day. My father taught me to do that and not to cut a scallop from the shell because it loses weight — it’s sold by weight, so is worth more in the shell — and if you cut it and it bleeds, you lose it.”
Bray said washing the scallops in sea water after finishing for the day “keeps the goodness in them and doesn’t give them a chance to heat.” If a fisherman washes his scallops too soon and leaves them in a bucket, he explained, they start to smell.
“I’m not going to sell junk,” he declared. “I don’t bring it ashore;” at which point, his wife, Joyce, said, “He’s like that about everything.”
As it happened, scallops provided Bengis’s big break. She had started to supply a New York restaurant called Jams, and its chef, Jonathan Waxman, told her he would be doing a benefit with Wolfgang Puck at Spago, in Los Angeles, for Meals on Wheels and wanted to use her scallops. This meant the ever-present problem of delivering fresh product would be even more difficult given that the scallops had to go from Bangor to Atlanta, where they’d change planes, and then fly on to California.
Bengis decided to carry them there herself. “I found a very cheap ticket,” she said — these were the days of People Express. “I knew that I had to meet the scallop fisherman at 1 p.m. I met him, and he gave me six gallons of scallops. I put them in the car, jumped in it and drove to the airport, put them on the plane and got them out there. I brought them into the restaurant at midnight.”
They had been out of the water for only 12 hours, and everybody loved them. Lots of chefs attended that benefit. They all ate Bengis’s scallops and started ordering them from her.
Once her business took off, Bengis worked so hard that for the first six years, she had no time for writing. But in 1986, she started going to Russia once a year to sing with an amateur opera group from nearby Surry. After the first performance, a Russian woman came up to talk with her, and Bengis, struck by the woman’s beauty and complexity, became, as she said, mesmerized. She began spending more time in Russia each year and in 1991 moved to St. Petersburg to teach Comparative Literature and write. Since then, she has continued to spend an average of six months a year in Russia, having married, five years ago, a Russian former ballet dancer with a teenage son. Her second memoir, Metro Stop Dostoevsky (North Point Press, 2003), details her observations of those first years after the collapse of Communism and her love affair with Russia and Russians. It’s a rich book deserving wide readership, but (perhaps because it was published the week the Jason Blair scandal erupted and this country went to war with Iraq) it has received little notice.
Bengis is working on a new book and still works actively at her seafood business, though these days, despite her energy, she does very little of the physical work.
“I can’t anymore,” she admitted. “I can’t carry the boxes,” but added that her husband and Buxton’s pitch in when they can. She sticks to oversight, talking with new chefs and finding new restaurants. Buxton runs the business day-to-day except in summer, when Bengis takes over. “She’s like a partner,” Bengis said, “and I hope some day she will be. She’s a wonderful asset.” Partly because she’s a Deer Isle native, Buxton has a particular affinity with the fishermen, and although Buxton works with the chefs much of the year, the internationally sophisticated Bengis, with her fluent French, shares with them a more natural rapport.
Bengis just landed the seafood account for the restaurant at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and couldn’t be more pleased. “I’m so happy with that,” she said, “because it brings together two of my worlds: high culture and the seafood business.”
Looking back at the success of Ingrid Bengis Seafood, she said, “The whole thing was a history of not being satisfied with the way things were normally done. It was improvisation all along the way.”