Food & Drink

This spring’s ramp-age

Most chefs are overdoing spring’s earliest veggie, but Swifty’s striped bass is blissfully free of it.

Most chefs are overdoing spring’s earliest veggie, but Swifty’s striped bass is blissfully free of it. (Photo: Alex Troesch)

(Getty Images (left))

Look out — ramps are running wild, and haters of the slimy-tasting wild leeks are running for cover.

Ramps, with a disagreeable flavor between onion and garlic, are the season’s curse. Spring has sprung everywhere but on restaurant tables. Early April “spring menus” are a tease. The warm winter and summery March did not accelerate the delivery of local peas and asparagus, “spring lamb” or soft-shell crabs — which all need at least another month to appear in abundance or at all.

But customers’ demands and chefs’ egos need to be fed. So instead of the good stuff, we’re getting ramps. Because they’re the first new thing out of the ground in six months, some chefs worship them.

I’m with Gael Greene, who calls them “grisly.” When I tweeted last spring that I’d rather eat wild grasses on the High Line, like-minded ramp-haters outnumbered ramp-likers 6-to-1 in Twitter responses. But right now there’s no avoiding the damn things.

I like Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria, the popular rustic-Italian spot on Great Jones Street, but chitarra was ruined for me by ramp ooze permeating every spaghetti strand. I narrowly dodged them 100 blocks uptown at Crown, where I spotted the R-word in the nick of time listed among elements in a pasta dish.

Pity chefs struggling to deliver “spring” when it’s still basically winter as far as the earth is concerned. At least some are secure enough not to buy into the ramp religion. Stephen Attoe, chef/co-owner of modern-American Lexington Avenue bistro Swifty’s, refuses to put them on his menu, calling them “horrible, nasty things.”

But he feels the heat from customers who want “spring” earlier than it can be delivered. Attoe says, “The calendar is well ahead of the food chain. Although winter things like baby Brussels sprouts disappear, new things aren’t necessarily there to replace them.

“It’s the same in summer,” he laughs. “Like on the Fourth of July, people demand corn, but it doesn’t come up until August.”

It’s even a challenge at ABC Kitchen, a great restaurant beloved for its emphasis on fresh market products. Its dishes are so colorfully composed year-round, many bursting with greenery, that they can look like spring in the dead of January.

Yet at the moment, even ABC Kitchen has to reach far and wide for “spring” produce. Executive chef Dan Kluger says the unnaturally warm weather might actually have hurt. “Unfortunately, a lot of things are in jeopardy because they were speeded up, and then hit by frost,” he says. “Upstate farmers lost cherries and peaches.”

ABC Kitchen is still using elements from far afield. “We’ve been fortunate enough despite trying to stay local,” Kluger says. “We found people who will deliver asparagus to us from a small farm in California.”

So for now, early spring menus are more about subtracting deep-winter elements than adding spring ones. Kluger says, “Thanks to the style of our menu, we can do something as simple as making kale into a salad, instead of maybe braising it as we’d do in winter.”

At Swifty’s, Attoe dropped venison in favor of poussin. As for seafood: “Wild striped bass are running now, so we’re thinking about putting that on, as opposed to something like sole, which you can get all year.”

Meanwhile, ramps are popping up where you least expect them — even with Oaxacan lobster at Americano on way-West 27th Street. Don’t say you weren’t warned.