Tracey Taylor

California restaurants focus on suppliers

Financial Times, June 6 2009

The cocktails have been ordered, the birthday greetings extended. Now comes the complicated part – deciding what to order from the menu at Pizzaiolo, an acclaimed restaurant in Oakland, California, known for its blistered wood-fired pizzas and regional Italian specialties. The conversation among friends gathered for a celebratory dinner centres not on appetite or taste but on the intricacies of provenance.

A dish of braised goat prompts the most debate – the meat is listed as being from Bill Niman’s ranch in Bolinas, 50 miles north of Oakland. Niman’s humanely raised Niman Ranch beef was the darling of the foodie set for years. But Niman left the company and has started afresh with a small herd of grass-fed goats, as well as a young wife nicknamed Porkchop. So what about the goat? No one doubts it will have lived a good and healthy life. But has anyone tasted the squid pizza with aioli whose main ingredient was sourced just down the coast in Monterey Bay? Another diner is leaning towards the Becker Lane pork with cannellini beans, artichokes, fennel and spring onion salsa because he’s heard the pork from this organic farm is unequalled.

Such menu dissection is not uncommon among northern Californian diners. They are choosy and, invariably, knowledgeable about where their food comes from – a result of interaction with producers at farmers’ markets and the fact that restaurants routinely highlight the provenance of food on their menus. They also live in a fertile part of the world with a climate conducive to producing quality ingredients.

The focus on suppliers is not new. Its local pioneer was Alice Waters, owner and executive chef of the legendary Chez Panisse restaurant and café in Berkeley, who, along with her peers and protégés, has been interpreting farm-to-table cuisine for years, providing shout-outs on her menus to all her favoured producers.

Chez Panisse was also one of the first restaurants to proclaim unadulterated fruit a more than suitable dessert option. It has been featuring a simple offering – whether a single peach from Frog Hollow orchard in Brentwood or a bowl of Sparkling Red nectarines – on its menus for several years. Last month’s café menu listed a bowl of Pixie tangerines from Churchill-Brenneis Orchard and Medjool dates priced at $8.

In January, Todd Kliman, the food and wine editor of Washingtonian magazine, pondered on National Public Radio’s Monkey See blog: “Do we really need to know the provenance of an egg?” And more to the point: “Shopping is not cooking.”

Russell Moore, chef-owner of Camino in Oakland, agrees that there is a way of writing menus that can make them seem like shopping lists. He and his partner Allison Hopelain don’t put producers on the menu. “There isn’t a bigger supporter of farmers than me,” he says. “But ultimately it’s about customers liking the food.” Moore only serves organic or biodynamic wines and doesn’t touch refined sugar but neither of these facts is conveyed to diners. “I don’t want to come off as holier than thou,” he says.

A backlash against showcasing suppliers doesn’t seem likely. For those who live in one of the gastronomic capitals of the world, there is profound satisfaction in knowing that the lamb chop you are about to tuck into was not only raised humanely but done so on local pasture land by a farmer whose name you recognise.

There is no doubt that producers have taken on minor celebrity status. Chefs on both US coasts are discovering goat meat from sources such as Niman’s BN Ranch and Marin Sun Farms. Chef-owner Daniel Patterson at Coi in San Francisco is serving it with “sprouted beans, seeds, nuts and wheatgrass”.

Thomas Keller, owner of French Laundry in Napa and Per Se in New York, likes to highlight the fact that he uses yogurt made by Soyoung Scanlan at her Andante Dairy in Santa Rosa for his yogurt sorbet with a cream scone, sour cherry and proprietor’s blend tea foam. And Boulevard, one of San Francisco’s most venerated restaurants, is proud to proclaim that the quinoa used in its quail stuffed with duck merguez is from Rancho Gordo, a producer whose heirloom beans have become so well-known they have spawned a blog and a book.

They may not appear on his menu, but Moore at Camino is happy to name-check several producers he holds in high regard, including Annabelle at La Tercera, “whose chicory and shelling beans are superb”. Just don’t go to Camino any day soon expecting to eat chicken. If Soul Food Farm isn’t sending Moore its “spectacular” fowls, they’re off the menu. “We haven’t served chicken since November,” he says.

www.pizzaiolooakland.com
www.caminorestaurant.com
www.chezpanisse.com

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Who’s hot in California

Coffee
Ritual Roasters, along with Blue Bottle and Four Barrel, represent the new breed of San Francisco “artisanal micro-roasters”.

Chocolate
Scharffen Berger is closing down its Berkeley factory, so the mantle for best chocolates has been passed to Recchiuti in San Francisco. Also winning plaudits are edible chocolate boxes from Emeryville’s Charles Chocolates; and truffles from Oakland’s Sôcôla.

Dairy
Cream-top organic milk in distinctive glass bottles from Straus Family Creamery in Marin; French brothers David and Benoît de Korsak bring the concept of terroir to their creamy Saint Benoît organic yogurt made in Sonoma County; goat milk, yogurt, kefir and cheese from Sonoma’s Redwood Hill Farm.

Meat
Ducks from Liberty Ducks in Sonoma; lamb from Napa Valley Lamb Company and Cattail Creek Ranch; chickens from Mary’s Farm in Fresno, Hoffmans in the San Joaquin Valley and Soul Food Farm; quail from Wolfe Farm in Brentwood; goat meat from BN Ranch and Marin Sun Farms; guinea hens from Grimaud Farms in Stockton; hormone-free rabbit from Devil’s Gulch Ranch; pigs from River Dog Farm in Capay Valley.

Produce
Vegetables and herbs from Star Route Farms in Marin, Chino Ranch near San Diego and Cannard Farm and Greenstring, both in Sonoma; spring garlic from Full Belly Farm in Capay Valley; gold cipolini onions from Dirty Girl Produce in Santa Cruz; heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo in Napa; shelling beans from La Tercera in Bolinas; Frog Hollow Farm’s signature Cal Red peaches available at the Ferry Building Marketplace, San Francisco.

Cheese
Soft-ripened Mt Tam from Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes; goat cheese from Petaluma’s Andante Dairy; award-winning cheddar from Modesto’s Fiscalini Cheese Co; raw-milk San Andreas sheep cheese from Bellwether Farms; Original Blue from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company.

Preserves
British expat June Taylor shows Californians how to make fruit butters and lemon marmalades at her workshop in Berkeley (www.junetaylorjams.com). Newer arrivals include Blue Chair Fruit, whose artisanal preserves are served at Oakland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen for breakfast; and Loulou’s Garden in San Francisco.

SCROLL DOWN THE PAGE TO SEE ALL ARTICLES IN THIS CATEGORY.

Financial Times, May 2, 2009

Elizabeth George is the author of many acclaimed novels of psychological suspense, including the Inspector Lynley mysteries, which have been adapted for television by the BBC. She won the Anthony award and Agatha award for Best First Novel in the US and received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France. Although she is American, most of her books are set in England, a country she fell in love with as a teenager and continues to visit regularly. George lives on Whidbey Island, off the coast of Washington state, near Seattle, US.

How did you end up building a home on Whidbey Island?
My husband, a retired firefighter, and I had settled on the Pacific north-west as the place we wanted to live. We wanted to be near to an international airport, so I could get over to England without too much difficulty. We also looked mostly at islands and small towns. I had lived in Huntington Beach [near Los Angeles] for 34 years but I was never a real southern Californian. I’m not a beach girl and I like big weather. We didn’t intend to build a home but when our real-estate agent called us and described these 10 acres on a bluff above the water, close to the town of Langley, we bought it sight unseen. This was in 2002 and it was the day before we were getting married.

Did you have a dream home in mind?
I had no idea where people even began designing houses. I had never built a home before. So I made sure to find a one-stop-shop architect, one who would put in the level of detail I needed – not least because I was designing it from 1,200 miles away in California. I favoured a traditional Cape Cod style with a shingle exterior. I made a scrapbook for Jed Miller, my architect, full of clippings from architecture and interiors magazines. And I compiled a list of all the things I wanted, such as a self-contained office and a workout room. I found a picture of a house and sent it to him with a note that said: “There isn’t anything about this house that I don’t like.” That was the jumping-off point.

Describe the house.
It is positioned so that every room has a different view, whether it’s the water, Mt Baker or the North Cascades [national park]. The sitting area of my office has a huge round window and it looks straight up the passage to Coupeville, which is 28 miles away. In the front entry there isn’t a dramatic stairway as you might expect. Instead the stairs are hidden. There’s an upper gallery for my black-and-white portrait photographs and the lower gallery has many of our landscape pastels by local artists. We have an English cottage-style walled garden and a gazebo for barbecuing. I love showing guests the potting shed because they always ask whether it’s a guest house. I tell them it’s Jed’s idea of a garden shed. It’s beautiful.

What’s your favourite room?
The home’s one defining room is the library. The bookcases are custom-made of cherrywood and they line three of the four walls. But my favourite is the upstairs sitting room, part of the master suite. On cold, rainy days I love to sit there with a fire going, to read or take a nap.

How did you choose the decor?
I have worked with interior designers before and part of the problem with them, bless their hearts, is they always want to rush off to the design centre to buy $5,000 chairs. I worked with a sales person at a good furniture store in Seattle. We spent four months choosing all the furniture and fabrics. We bought all our Asian rugs in Newport Beach, California. When it came time to choose our wall colours, we unrolled them in an underground parking garage in Seattle. We set up daylight lights and chose all the colours for each room. I was really nervous about it but it worked. My natural inclination is towards autumnal tones but with the guest house, which we finished in December, we went for a totally different look with yellow, green and the accent of violet. It’s in the woods so I wanted something brighter.

What’s Whidbey Island like?
There are only 1,100 people in Langley. I didn’t realise until we moved here that it’s the centre of the Whidbey Island Writers’ Association. It has two theatres, two orchestras and a jazz festival. There’s also an annual arts festival. There are so many artists on the south part of the island that you can’t throw a stone without hitting a watercolourist or sculptor. This is a very social community and I’ve had more parties here than I ever had in 34 years in Huntington Beach. But it’s casual. This past summer I wanted to have a gathering so that people could really enjoy the gardens before the winter set in but I couldn’t face the idea of throwing a huge party so I had a BYOE (bring your own everything) party. People brought wine or a picnic. We had croquet and ping-pong. It was wonderful.

Do you have a writing routine?
I start work at 6am. At the moment I’m making changes to the third draft of my 16th novel. I will stop at 8am so that I can spend one hour studying Italian before my assistant arrives. If I’m working on the rough draft of a new novel, I’ll usually work until about 11am.

Do you have any future projects for the property?
We hope to get access to the beach in some way; whether it’s with a tram or stairs, I don’t know. We keep two small boats there. But it’s tough because you don’t want to compromise the bluff in any way. We are also restoring the forest on the property – replacing invasive plants like blackberries and sage ivy and putting in natives such as ferns and huckleberry.

Do you miss your home when you’re away?
Since moving, I’ve reduced my travelling because it’s so lovely here. If I travel, I miss something. And I mean literally miss something, not in a nostalgic way but in the sense that I might not be there for something important like the big storm.

MY FAVOURITE THINGS

Figurines and portraits

My collection of whimsical English pottery figurines . Some are animals but most have a function too; they might be a vase or a planter. They are all secured in case of an earthquake and are absolutely adorable.

A portrait of George Harrison, my favourite Beatle, that hangs in my office. I got it by chance in San Francisco. I like portraits that show what the person is really like. This reveals a great deal of sensitivity and there’s a haunted element about the eyes.

I collect black-and-white photographic portraits and I have one of César Chávez that I saw in a coffee house. I tracked the photographer down and asked if he had a copy he would sell me.

I have seven oil paintings by the Chinese-American artist Zhao Kailin. I came across him in a gallery in Laguna Beach, California.

Then there’s my collection of miniature paintings from England, mostly of women and probably from the early 19th century. People carried them before photographs.

Financial Times, January 13 2007

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It took more than 20 years to negotiate an acceptable plan
but Mission Bay, San Francisco’s newest neighbourhood,
is now thriving, writes Tracey Taylor

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It was described as “the last great hole in the fabric of San Francisco” – 300 acres of blighted land with an abandoned railway yard that once served the city’s bustling docks. Then, in 1998, after more than two decades of tangled planning negotiations, a decision was reached on how to fill it. Today, Mission Bay is a brand new neighbourhood emerging in the middle of a world city, an urbanist vision in the throes of creation.

Strolling through the area, which is just south of downtown San Francisco on its eastern waterfront, one can see the transformation first-hand. Flanked on three sides by the bay, embracing a water channel, Mission Creek, and incorporating an existing public-transit infrastructure, it is a promising site in different stages. Parts of it are still scraggy tracts of wasteland, while others are construction areas with buildings rising at breakneck speed.

There are also now quarters with housing, shops, offices and parks. And two venerable San Francisco institutions have moved in, helping to jump-start regeneration. At Mission Bay’s north gateway is a retro-style stadium for the beloved Giants baseball team built in 2000. South of the channel, a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), campus dedicated to life sciences is in its second phase of construction, with several teaching and accommodation buildings, a terracotta-hued community centre, leafy plazas and an imposing Richard Serra sculpture. A cancer hospital will complete the biotechnology centre.

The broader $4bn-plus master plan for Mission Bay calls for 6,000 homes, 28 per cent of which will be “affordable” units designed to alleviate the city’s housing shortage; 5m sq ft of commercial office space; a hotel; and integrated parkland.

One of the first projects was a residential block of affordable housing on King Street, north of the creek. There is also a community centre for senior citizens and the first new library built in San Francisco for more than 40 years. Linda Sobuta, principal architect at SMWM, which designed the residential building, describes the arrival of a Safeway grocery store in 2003, as a turning point. “It wasn’t a neighbourhood until Safeway moved in,” she says.

On a walking tour, Sobuta says she’s enjoying watching Mission Bay become an “urban village”. Its grid, she explains, is based on the historic Spanish vara unit that emphasises short blocks with view corridors and pedestrian-friendly access ways. She points to the promenade that has been created alongside the creek with its attractive slabs of single-unit paving stone and high-quality street furniture. The landscaping on the water’s edge has been designed to create a natural habitat for indigenous birds. And the owners of a cluster of houseboats further down the channel have been promised they can stay.

Like any blossoming neighbourhood, Mission Bay has yet to burrow its way into the city’s consciousness. “It’s not yet sizzling. It needs to be scuffed up, to get the patina of use,” says John King, architecture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. “But it’s fascinating to see a neighbourhood pop up out of thin air. And it’s a very good long-term investment for San Francisco.”

Donna Dell’Era moved into the area eight months ago. Her top-floor condominium was one of the last available at 235 Berry, a smart residential complex overlooking the creek, where three-bedroom, three-bathroom “townhome-style” homes sold for $1.3m. Dell’Era, who works for a public utility company in the city, describes herself and her husband as empty nesters. They sold their large home in Marin County, across the bay, when their fourth child went to college. “My pipedream for when we retire is to swap condos with people around the world,” she says. “And what better place than this? The interiors are very nice and it has views of water and the city.” Dell’Era also appreciates the neighbourhood feel. She and her husband enjoy meeting fellow dog-owners on walks by the creek and, before Christmas, they attended a tree-trimming party for their building’s residents.

Nelson Rising, the former chairman and chief executive of Catellus Development Corporation, which recreated Mission Bay, also bought a condominium. “I love the convenience,” he says. “I love having restaurants nearby and the fact that I can walk everywhere.” It takes about 15 minutes to walk from his home to the Embarcadero, the foodie heaven that is San Francisco’s Ferry Building and on to the main shopping drag of Market Street.

Catellus, which has since been merged into ProLogis, won the rights to develop Mission Bay after a long history of planning applications that stumbled at the starting block. Rising is credited with having had the vision to craft a proposal that would win approval from notoriously outspoken city residents, who invariably file lawsuits to oppose new projects. “Nelson understands the complexities at the political, environmental and community level,” says Doug Gardner, who led the Mission Bay project at Catellus. “He created the goodwill to make it happen.”

Crucial to the plan was the landmark deal that Rising, with the help of then San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, engineered to attract UCSF, which was considering alternative locations. The university was offered 43 acres of land free, a donation valued at more than $170m. Rising also attributes the proposal’s success to its sensitivity to public policy imperatives. “It included a system of parks, integrated affordable housing and was very transit oriented,” he says. The extent of citizen consultation also helped. “The planning team was respectful of the public realm.”

One controversial issue was building height. In the end restrictions were agreed so that no building is taller than 160ft, roughly the same height as the ballpark’s main tower. This is a point of contention for some. “San Francisco used to be violently against height but you only have to look at the city’s skyline to see to what extent that has changed,” King says. “The danger with long-range planning is that it’s too time-consuming to revisit it. Now we have a collection of short, squat buildings at Mission Bay.” But residents of Potrero Hill, to the west of the area, made it clear that they wouldn’t tolerate having their bay views obstructed.

There is one wrinkle in Mission Bay’s grand plan: the dotcom bust and subsequent economic fall-out that left a recommendation for 5m sq ft of commercial space looking optimistic. “So far they have only built 600,000 sq ft due to lack of demand,” says Amy Neches, senior project manager for Mission Bay at the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. “It will take time. It’s a 20- to 30-year development project and it’s based on the knowledge that real estate markets work in cycles.”

Otherwise, Mission Bay appears to tick most of the boxes for a grand-scale, mixed-use urban development. Jim Chappell, president of public policy think-tank San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, which consulted on the process, deems it to be a “great success”. “The big surprise is the aggressiveness with which the university has been able to develop its projects. They have led the private sector and been the engine of the project,” he says. Chappell also believes having a single developer was an asset. “Mission Bay demonstrates one of the advantages of a large-scale co-ordinated development. You can’t provide all the amenities with a parcel-by-parcel approach.” Perhaps most importantly, he adds, the area’s residential market flourished immediately. “Housing has flown off the shelf.”

It’s possible that Mission Bay, one of the largest ongoing urban developments in the US, will one day be seen as a model of how it’s done. At the very least people might be drawn there for a little sunshine. In a city notorious for its fog and damp, the developers are keen to point out that the new neighbourhood offers not only terrific new lifestyle but also a superior microclimate.

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Financial Times, January 8th, 2005

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Venice has many magical qualities, but its tendency to draw crowds isn’t one of them. So it is smugly satisfying to discover a way to avoid them entirely in the Palazzo Ducale (the Doge’s Palace), one of La Serenissima’s most popular attractions.

The “Secret Itinerary” is a private tour through parts of the palace that are not usually open to the public. A phone call at least a week in advance secures you a very special 90 minutes.

Having ascended the ornate, gilded steps of Scala d’Oro with the heaving masses, our guide unlocked a small, plain door and we left the hordes behind, slipping into a warren of tiny, wood-panelled offices where the real, day-to-day business of this, the nerve centre of the Venetian empire, took place.

The warren of tiny rooms is little changed from when the city’s clerks worked there in the 1790s - there are simple candle-sconces on the walls and scrubbed desks for the mountains of paperwork.

Up some narrow steps we came to the elegant chancellery, lined with map cupboards for storing treaties. Up again are the piombi, prison cells reserved for the more notorious criminals (petty offenders were kept on the ground floor). In his memoirs, Casanova tells of how he made a daring escape from here - stopping for a morning espresso at Caffe Florian before making his getaway by gondola.

We entered the torture chamber, where a single, ominous rope hangs from the rafters. Here, suspects were suspended by their wrists and questioned by the three “judges of the night”. But, the best is saved for last: right up under the eaves is the underside of a huge “floating” ceiling belonging to one of the state rooms below. Built by the Arsenale’s shipwrights in 1577, its muddle of criss-crossing beams is a formidable feat of engineering.

Emerging back into the public rooms we were invited to continue visiting the palace independently. We resisted. Somehow it would have felt too ordinary.

The “Secret Itinerary” costs Euros 315 per person, 00 39 041 520 9070.

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Financial Times, April 1st, 2006

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If, like me, you relish taking post-prandial strolls around your neighbourhood purely so you can peer into people’s front rooms before they have shut the curtains for the night, the appeal of one of the US’s most popular Sunday pastimes will be obvious.

Open-housing is about more than keeping an eye on the property market. It provides a sheen of respectability to what is little more than glorified snooping. It’s also free and can be enjoyed by all ages.

It works this way: over coffee on Sunday morning you peruse the Open Houses pages of your local paper and map out your day. All the houses for sale are open from 2pm to 4.30pm, so other plans need to be scheduled accordingly. Many of the listings include a line- drawing of the home in question - vulgar photography is reserved for houses of the lower order.

There are different types of pleasures to be had from prying into other people’s homes. There is the bittersweet gratification of finding that the multimillion-dollar, architect-designed show stopper with its wrap-around deck and outdoor hot tub is the stuff of your dreams; and there is smug superiority, as in “I can’t believe someone with such obvious wealth has such appalling taste.”

In the part of California where I indulge this hobby the architectural styles range from modernist hill houses with great views of San Francisco, to delightful, shingled craftsman homes with their dark panelling and built-in cabinetry.

There is also fun to be had in discovering what the professional “home stagers” have been up to. Their presence is obvious in any house in the $2m-plus bracket in the Bay Area - spot the potted succulents on the porch, the tray of wine and (plastic) nibbles and the covetable linen on the plumped-up beds - I have even seen a guitarist strumming in a rose garden as the hordes poke their collective nose into the guest cottage.

What can I say? Legitimate voyeurism: it beats snoozing with the Sunday supplements.

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Financial Times, May 11, 2004

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Never underestimate the importance of awards to the advertising industry. Anecdotes abound of the lengths agencies will go to to secure a prize. One French network promised each of its creative directors a share in a €1.5m ($1.77m) bounty if their work made it into one league table, and a Brazilian agency chief ordered his creative team to come in at the weekend “so that they could do the ads for Cannes”.

In some quarters there is a cynical belief that certain campaigns are created with a view to winning awards for agencies rather than driving sales for clients, or that competition juries favour big-budget and cutting-edge campaigns with which mainstream viewers are rarely familiar. None of which will, of course, prevent the industry’s creative tribes from descending on Cannes next month for the Golden Lion advertising awards festival, the industry’s equivalent of the Oscars.

Donald Gunn knows more than most about awards. Once dubbed “the man with the best job in advertising”, Mr Gunn, who spent three decades at Leo Burnett, has latterly dedicated his career to analysing creativity and tracking the best-regarded advertising and the agencies or countries which produce it. The results appear every November in the Gunn Report, probably the most respected, and certainly the best-read, measure of excellence in an industry obsessed by rankings.

So, to what does he attribute this compulsion to be honoured? “In every field there is an appetite to be the best and for that to be celebrated,” he says. He concedes that, compared with other creative industries such as music or design, advertising has a disproportionate number of awards. But their role in powering the business is fundamental, he says.

For agencies, awards create a virtuous circle: they establish reputation, attract talent and bring in new business. Even so, Mr Gunn believes they should be seen only as the icing on the cake. “Agencies should set out to create the best advertising for their clients. Winning an award is a bonus.”

The benefits may not be so obvious for advertisers. “Awards are not a priority for advertisers, but they do want the best, most original advertising, so an award provides reassurance: they are getting good work and they have good people at their agency.”

Mr Gunn has also examined the relationship between creativity and effec tiveness and has proved to his satisfaction that award-winning advertising increases market share. A study of 400 of the most-awarded campaigns in the world between 1992 and 1995 found that 86.5 per cent of the ads were associated with market success. In other words, ads with award-winning qualities were two and a half times more likely to achieve, or surpass, clients’ objectives. Leo Burnett reprised Mr Gunn’s study in 2002 and unveiled similar results: four out of five award-winning campaigns achieved positive market results for clients.

Mr Gunn’s insights stem from his experience as an agency creative chief and from the phenomenal databank that forms the backbone of the Gunn Report, launched in 1999.

While at Leo Burnett, Mr Gunn founded two institutions that still set creative benchmarks today: the Great Commercials Library, started in 1986, and the Global Product Committee. The latter involves a commitment that many agencies would find daunting: every three months, 20 of Leo Burnett’s top creative staff from around the world meet for a week to view the entire network’s output. Ads are scored and feedback is given.

To compile his report, Mr Gunn combines the winner lists from 52 national, regional and global award schemes (32 for television, 20 for print). But, just like Coca-Cola’s secret recipe, he has never revealed which ones they are. He says this is to avoid harming the contests that are not included (though it also makes it impossible for agencies to challenge the rankings). After much data-crunching, the league tables emerge - including top commercials, top agencies, top production companies and top countries - as well as a Showreel of the Year featuring the 100 most-awarded campaigns in the world.

Given Mr Gunn’s influence in the industry, one wonders if his rankings have ever been questioned, or if he has been offered incentives to skew results. “Much to my amazement nobody has ever seriously challenged the tables,” he says, “although there have been the usual queries about methodology”. A US network once hired a headhunter to find out which awards had made it into the report; it failed.

“There was a theory at one point that if you threw money at the awards and entered the maximum number of shows, you would come out well,” he says. “In fact, the agencies that spend the most are often those who are entering mediocre work.”

He has his own view about what makes an award-winning ad. He believes an agency’s shared vision and passion for good work - as well as a willingness to take risks - are more important than incentives (such as bonuses), or even strong leadership.

He has identified 12 “master-formats” which, he says, are a good starting point for delivering a selling idea in an engaging way: “Sitting down with a blank sheet to create an ad can be a lonely, scary process.” Approaches such as the testimonial or the celebrity endorsement can dramatise a proposition. Mr Gunn will flesh out his master-formats concept at a presentation in Cannes this year.

Mr Gunn has also spotted a welcome rise in creative standards across the world. “Three years ago, there were 22 markets represented in the 100 best commercials reel. Last year there were 28. Countries such as Canada, Mexico and India are moving up,” he says. Australia, he notes, has regressed since its 1980s heyday, while China has improved as Hong Kong talent has moved into Shanghai and Beijing.

This year, Mr Gunn is handing on the bulk of the work involved in compiling the report to his sister-in-law and brother-in-law. But, before then, he must complete possibly his most ambitious project to date: an online library of award-winning advertising he has tracked since 1962. “It will deliberately be the smallest online commercials library because it will only feature the best - and all the best - ads from around the world,” he says. The Gunn Report Library will be launched by BEAM TV this summer.

Mr Gunn claims he is taking it easy, but his diary tells another story. He has just returned from an advertising conference in Argentina, and later this year will attend festivals in Asia and eastern Europe, as well as Cannes. For this “awards supremo”, it is business as usual.

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Tuesday December 23, 2003

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Scotland’s ancient language is making a comeback,
explains Tracey Taylor

As children, Mary Galbraith’s grandparents were belted if they were overheard speaking Gaelic in the playground, even though it was the language they spoke at home. Even as adults they never properly mastered English. Just two generations later, Galbraith’s commitment to her grandparents’ native tongue is such that although she doesn’t speak it herself she sends her two daughters, Seona and Moire, to a school where the entire curriculum is taught in Gaelic.

Glasgow Gaelic school (Bunsgoil Gáidhlig Ghlaschu) is Scotland’s only dedicated Gaelic-speaking school. Children have all their lessons in the language and only start some lessons in English after they have been there three years. However, across Scotland more than 5,000 children learn Gaelic, many of them from homes where neither parent speaks the language.

What motivates parents to have their children learn a minority language? Gaelic is in decline - 99% of Scots don’t understand a word of it and, if the number of speakers falls below 50,000 (it now stands at around 60,000), Gaelic will be officially dead. Nevertheless, the Scottish Executive invests more than £3m a year in Gaelic education. A Gaelic language bill, currently in draft stage, is due to be introduced to parliament next summer with the aim of securing the status of Gaelic in Scotland.

For Mary Galbraith the answer is straightforward: “I wanted to give my children an opportunity that wasn’t there for me. I never learned Gaelic. The girls were looked after by a Gaelic-speaking childminder so they were already bilingual. It made sense that they continued with a Gaelic-medium education.”

Reconnecting with one’s roots and cultural heritage is clearly a significant factor. Gaelic was the main language in most rural areas of Scotland until the early 17th century, but it was outlawed by the crown in 1616, and suppressed further after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. “For hundreds of years, and until fairly recently, Gaelic was seen as a second-class language,” says Margaret Maciver, educational officer at Comunn Na Gáidhlig, a body set up to promote Gaelic.

Bringing up children to be bilingual has been shown to offer other, more general advantages including enhanced creative thinking, improved test results, higher self-esteem and greater tolerance. For this reason it is not only those with Gaelic ancestry who are rediscovering Scotland’s mother tongue. “We see families who have moved from England who are having their children taught Gaelic as it is the ‘local’ language,” says Donald John McCloud, Gaelic education advisor for the Highland council which, along with the Western Islands, embraces the Gaelic heartland.

These facts are not lost on Caroline Stewart, mother to seven-year-old Alexander, who also attends Glasgow Gaelic school. “My older daughter spent a year at school in France and has spoken French since. Children who speak more than one language have been shown to have better cognitive skills. I wanted Alexander to be bilingual so I was looking for a school that taught a second language. The fact he was learning Gaelic rather than another language was secondary at first. But now I am pleased: the more I learn about the history of the language the more important I feel it is to preserve it.”

Gaelic now features at all levels of Scottish education: pre-school, primary, secondary, further and higher education, and as part of teacher training. In 2002-2003 there were 1,928 primary-level and 375 secondary-level children in Gaelic-medium education. Another 3,000, approximately, learn Gaelic as a second language, usually in special Gaelic-language units within schools. The number of Gaelic-speaking teachers graduating in 2003 was 25 (for primary school teaching), an increase of eight on the number qualifying in 2002.

These are not big numbers and, despite the avowed support of Peter Peacock, Scotland’s minister for education and young people, who has said his aim is to ensure Gaelic “survives and thrives”, the Gaelic lobby faces a struggle. Obstacles include a lack of Gaelic-speaking teachers, a paucity of teaching materials and a drop-off in the provision of Gaelic education at secondary level. Detractors also point to the limited usefulness of Gaelic compared to, say, a modern European language in the increasingly globalised career market.

Boyd Robertson, senior lecturer in Gaelic at the University of Strathclyde, which trains Gaelic teachers, says the teacher-shortage problem needs to be solved urgently, particularly within secondary schools. “At the primary level there is something of an equilibrium between supply and demand, but the numbers of secondary school teachers are not growing in the way that is required.”

Supporters of Gaelic tend to look for inspiration to Wales, where concerted efforts since the 1930s have resulted in census figures that show that 26% of people under the age of 35 can now speak Welsh, which has been included in the national curriculum since 1988. One in five primary pupils are taught in classes where Welsh is used either as the main medium or for teaching part of the curriculum; one in seven secondary school children are taught Welsh as a first language, and four in five learn it as a second language.

One technique used to accelerate the take-up of Welsh has been “immersion education”, a concept that is now being put into practice in Scotland. The idea is for children as young as nursery school age to “plunge” into a language completely speaking, reading and writing it all day.

In order for Gaelic to have a good chance of reproducing itself, at least a third of under-25-year-olds need to speak the language. Scotland is a long way off achieving this. The Scottish Executive, which earlier this year set up Bórd na Gáidhlig, a development body to promote Gaelic, has given itself a target of a 5% annual increase in the number of Gaelic medium-educated primary school children. Privately, however, civil servants admit they would like to see a much higher take-up. “To be truthful, we are very jealous of Wales,” says one.

The pupils at Glasgow Gaelic school can take credit for a small victory in the crusade. Fed-up that they couldn’t read about their favourite fictional character in Gaelic, this summer they sent dozens of letters to Bloomsbury, publishers of Harry Potter. As a result, a Gaelic edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone looks set to appear next year.

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The Guardian, March 30th, 2005

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Tracey Taylor was blown away by a Californian online network for mums. But is there anything like it here?

Earlier this month, Maria was feeling desperate: alone at home with two young children and a husband who worked all hours, she was sleep-deprived and depressed. She submitted a posting about being at the end of her tether to an online parenting network. Within two days she received 27 email replies from mothers in her neighbourhood. They offered practical advice on good therapists and playgroups that would give her a break from the children, as well as many sympathetic reassurances of the “You are not alone” variety.

This was Berkeley Parents Network, a US service I discovered when preparing for my family’s move this summer from London to California. Since subscribing to the free network, I have received an overwhelming amount of information about this leafy suburb of San Francisco.

While worrying about how I could avoid becoming either a “soccer mom” or a Desperate Housewife, I also needed practical information such as: which neighbourhoods were the most desirable and/or affordable, how to find a house for rent and schools to shortlist. I now know which paediatrician my two boys “must” sign up with and where to find a babysitting cooperative, as well as a multimedia summer camp (whatever that is).

Angela, who recommended her paediatrician, has been a regular correspondent. She has already done extensive - bordering on obsessive - research on schools for her offspring and, although my views do not always correspond with hers, her advice has been welcome.

Berkeley Parents Network was started by Ginger Ogle in 1993 - before the worldwide web in its current form even existed. Ogle was a computer science graduate student at Berkeley with two school-age children. Originally a list of 14 student parents campaigning for improved parental leave, the database grew to encompass all parents on the campus, then, eventually, was made open to all parents in the community.

Today, this non-profit-making, parent-run email forum has a subscriber base of more than 10,000, most of whom are parents or carers who look after young children and who live in Berkeley, with its population of around 100,000.

BPN works entirely online, predominantly by email. Busy parents post questions about child-rearing, local resources and community events, look for childcare and sell household items. Newsletter digests with dozens of parents’ questions and the responses they generate are emailed to subscribers eight-10 times a week. As Ogle puts it: “Our success is a combination of an early start, my technical background and an unending supply of smart and altruistic parents.”

What is surprising is that such patently useful grassroots services have been relatively slow to take off, even in tech-savvy America. “I hear about other lists for parents but they are much smaller - at the level of a neighbourhood or a school,” says Ogle. “There are for-profit efforts too that have mostly not worked out, although I continue to hear about these.”

So, does the UK offer anything as useful and well-run as Berkeley Parents Network? No - but there are encouraging signs. Netmums.com, for instance, bills itself as a “local network by mums for mums” and hosts local sites around the country that include forums such as Meet a Mum and Buy and Sell. Some are more trafficked than others. When I looked up my area in south-east London it had only one posting listed under Childcare, two items for sale in the Nearly New listing and a mere handful of email exchanges from mothers wanting to meet up. However, the Bristol section is very active. And the Harrow and Hillingdon section, where the site has its roots, has 5,000 members and its discussion boards are buzzing.

BPN demonstrates how “nappy valley” neighbourhoods can exploit the web to help create dynamic and mutually supportive communities. Clearly these online tribes can go some way to replacing the extended families of past generations. When I move to the west coast and am looking for a soccer club for my football-mad nine-year-old, I’ll know who to call.

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Financial Times, February 18th, 2006

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First it was blue-collar misery in America – now the writer has exposed the lot of its corporate workers, writes Tracey Taylor

As soon as I meet Barbara Ehrenreich, renowned chronicler of America’s working class, we are thrown into an awkward social moment. Our plan is have tea somewhere inside the swanky Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco. We wander into a restaurant off the hotel’s lobby that looks appropriate but a woman behind a desk stops us and says we need to be club members to eat or drink there. As we turn on our heels, Ehrenreich mutters: “You see, you come somewhere as upscale as this - which I’m not used to at all by the way - and you think you have reached the top. Then you realise there is a whole other level.”

The incident doesn’t phase Ehrenreich. You sense that there isn’t much that would. This is a writer who chose to work as a waitress, stack shelves at Wal-Mart and clean “three different kinds of shit stains” from toilets as a housekeeper to gather material for her best-known book: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. And this at an age when most people would be comfortably retired.

Ehrenreich, who is 64, has a brisk manner and a practical appearance: her hair is cut in a bob and she is wearing black trousers, a coral shirt and what she describes as “slouchy” flat sandals. She assumed a new identity to see at first hand how the other half live for Nickel and Dimed, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years after it was published in 2001.

The “immersion” style of writing is in the tradition of George Orwell, whose descriptions of coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier aimed to shock middle-class readers out of their complacency. Ehrenreich herself has spawned imitators in the UK and Australia. Her new book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, (which comes out in paperback in the UK in March) takes the same approach but this time her focus is on the white-collar world - the middle managers and account executives who toil at the corporate coalface.

These are the people “who did everything right”. They earned degrees, postponed child-bearing and dedicated themselves to climbing the career ladder. But now, as Ehrenreich describes it, they are in trouble. Setting out to find a job as a PR director or speechwriter, Ehrenreich found a white-collar netherworld full of people who have been downsized or outsourced or were still employed but heard “the drumbeats of lay- offs”; or had survived cuts but were burning out doing the jobs of two people.

Ehrenreich found the project hard-going, she tells me, as we settle at a table in a rather soulless dining area where we have been assured we will be served tea. “It was more enjoyable with Nickel and Dimed,” she says. “I liked the camaraderie of the workplace. There might have been similar camaraderie in some white-collar places but I got the feeling that it is very different, that people are more anxious and mutually distrustful in the white-collar world. A lot of people described the workplace to me as cold and unwelcoming. “I don’t mind manual labour,” she continues. “And I like the straightforwardness of the blue-collar world in that there is a job, youdo it and you get paid fo rthe job. There is not all this . . . ” - she pauses before choosing a word that she thinks can be printed in the Financial Times - ” . . . this manipulation about attitude and personality.”

Ehrenreich, who has been gesticulating to make her point, stops talking and looks flustered. She explains she is concerned that our waiter, who is standing some feet away, may have interpreted her hand movements as a rather cavalier summons. She mouths apologies to him. Maybe her experience as a waitress explains why Ehrenreich is going out of her way to be nice to the waiter. (I, on the other hand, am feeling less sympathetic and would be happy if this particular one did his job: we have been in the deserted restaurant for more than 10 minutes and he has not yet taken our order.)

The manipulation Ehrenreich refers to is most apparent in what she discovers is called the “transition industry” - the career coaches who help reveal one’s “true occupational passion”. What Ehrenreich finds galling, rather than amusing, however is the message the coaches invariably impart to their vulnerable, often depressed audience, about blame. “I could see this philosophy being dumped on people - this new-age idea that it is really your fault because you control everything with your attitude,” she says.

The job-seekers Ehrenreich meets in the book seem prepared to take this analysis at face value. I ask her why she thinks that is. “I think this mind-over- matter idea is quite deep-seated in American culture. In fact, I encountered it and wrote about it when I was being treated for breast cancer five years ago. There is this strong ideology that it is all in your attitude whether you recover or not. It creeped me right out. You find it in the 19th century with Mary Baker Eddy, in the mid-20th century with Norman Vincent Peale and with EST (Erhard Seminar Training) in the 1970s.”

The waiter arrives to take our order and Ehrenreich again apologises to him for what he may have interpreted as her “uppity” behaviour earlier. She orders an iced latte - decaf, one shot, with 2 per cent fat milk. The waiter mishears and assumes she wants iced tea so she reiterates the minutiae of her order. She collects her thoughts and sighs. “I really don’t know what to make of the corporate world after all this. A great deal is being demanded of white-collar workers that has nothing to do with getting the job done. There seems to be so much emphasis on relationships: do you get along with people? They say 90 per cent of hiring decisions are based on an emotional response to you. I am so amazed by this world where decisions are so irrational, where there is a lot of delusional thinking going on - controlling the universe with your thought forms, for example. It makes me wonder how anything gets done.” She laughs: “Then I suddenly realised: this is the culture that leads to Michael D. Brown heading up Fema. I’m sure he’s likeable and he knew all the right people - dresses nicely, good-looking fellow. Probably a lot of fun to have a Margarita with.” [Brown was the Bush-nominated head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who lost his job after what critics saw as a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina.]

Despite almost 10 months of searching and an investment of more than $5,000, Ehrenreich failed to find a job. She had honed her CV to perfection, had a makeover, networked frantically, and displayed admirable flexibility, “applying at one point for a job as PR director of the American Diabetes Association and then switching sides and offering myself to Hershey’s”.

“I now realise that it was a kind of hubris to imagine I could find a job in half a year or so,” she says. “As I got into it and began to meet all these seemingly terrifically well-qualified people who had been searchingfor well over a year, I thought, ‘this is what it is really about, the white-collar underworld’.”

So the book ends up being a call to arms. Ever the activist, Ehrenreich urges the unemployed, and the anxiously employed, to exploit the endless networking events they attend. “If people had been allowed to, say, share their stories, that would have broken through some of the feelings of isolation and worthlessness.”

She says she wants those that read the book to realise that it’s not their fault if they are being badly treated by companies. “I see it as a possible antidote to [the business tome] Who Moved my Cheese? which says, ‘You’re going to get jerked around, get used to it.’ I would like people to read Bait and Switch and think, ‘Yeah that was ridiculous’ - to feel free to have such a subversive thought.”

Ehrenreich advocates fundamental change at policy level, too: “There is a simple agenda: one, let’s get going on universal health insurance: having it attached to your job is ridiculous. Two, let’s have a more secure and adequate unemployment compensation. And third, let’s stop tax breaks and subsidies to corporations that are made in the name of job creation but actually have nothing to do with it.”

At this point Ehrenreich’s mobile phone rings and she excuses herself to see who the call is from. “I just want to check whether it is one of my children or someone else,” she says squinting at the phone’s small screen. “No it is a publisher,” she snarls, “To hell with you.” Her phone rings again and she frowns, making clear it is her publisher again. “I see that 212 area code [her US publishers are in New York], then my cellphone died as far as I’m concerned.”

So what does she see as the way forward for corporations? “We have to find ways to make corporations more accountable to the people they serve. I don’t think they just serve the shareholders - there should be a broader vision of stakeholders, which includes consumers, communities and employees.”

As we get up to leave, Ehrenreich points to the pretty three-tier cake stand on the table next to ours. It is filled with delicate sandwiches and petits-fours in pastel hues. “Look what we missed,” she says, grinning. But somehow the image of Ehrenreich sipping Earl Grey tea from a bone-china cup and nibbling on miniature cakes doesn’t quite cut it. The immaculately groomed ladies of leisure who are doing so are enjoying the fruits of capitalism. Ehrenreich is too busy fighting its flaws.