Chefs explore granola's upscale potential

For many years, granola was the lumpy woolen sweater of the food world.
You dipped your spoon into that hearty bowl of oats, nuts and dried fruit in the same way you might slip on a third layer of clothing on a cold morning. Granola has always signified back-to-the-earthiness, the whole-grains ethos that sprouted out of American counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s — so much so that its very name became a synonym for hippie living.

Granola could be many things, from a dorm-room staple to a parfait topping, but it was decidedly not chic.

If you’re still talking about it that way, though, take a closer look at the cereal aisle in your supermarket, or the menu at that innovative gastropub around the corner. Granola has traded in the bulky sweater for a little black dress. All over the country, small-batch entrepreneurs see granola as a booming growth sector, while chefs view it as an elegant and wide-open canvas for culinary experimentation.

Born in the better-eating movement of the late 19th century and revived a half-century ago as an earnest health food, granola is suddenly sowing its wild oats, in variations that are lavish, whimsical and sometimes unapologetically fattening.

Any tour of this new world should start by kicking off one’s sandals at Sunny Spot, a Caribbean-island-spirited restaurant in Southern California hatched in 2011 by Roy Choi, the man who introduced the world to the Korean taco. At brunch during the balmier months, Sunny Spot serves a granola dish that might have been dreamed up in a collaboration between Bob Marley and Andy Warhol.

For one thing, it’s not sepia-toned. It’s green and orange and yellow and blue. When Mr. Choi first went to his Sunny Spot team and suggested a fresh take on granola, he told them he wanted to see color. “It’s always just so brown,” he said. “Why can’t we make it really, really festive?”

He also told them to shake up expectations. “I wanted it to be this bowl of twists and turns, instead of just one scoop after another,” he said. “I don’t understand the process of eating things just to submit yourself to boredom.”

While the oat-and-nut clusters woven into his dish are fairly traditional, nothing else is. Depending on the season and the whims of the kitchen, you might get a mouthful of pickled mango, green papaya or compressed pineapple. You’ll probably find fresh leaves of sorrel and mint. And, floating in a luxurious pool of almond milk and crème fra?che, you’ll encounter nuggets of childhood nostalgia that might give Alice Waters an attack of the hives: Fruity Pebbles.

As Mr. Choi put it, “Every bite, you get a new thing.”

That might as well be the mantra for the American granola renaissance, especially in restaurants. There are plenty of new morning variations, like the one at Longman & Eagle, in Chicago, where the chef, Jared Wentworth, has applied his modernist technique to a question that he, too, put to his team: “What would make a cool granola and yogurt dish?”

The answer involves chewy “leather” made of dehydrated yogurt; house-made Corn Pops that are soaked in milk for hours and turned into a sweet purée; the snap of cranberries and walnuts that have been reduced to a nub of tartness; and a smear of dulce-de-leche-style caramel. Think of the dish as Wonderland, with granola as the innocent Alice who’s ambled in.

But chefs are also whipping up granolas — sweet ones, savory ones, spicy ones — that bring extra layers of texture and flavor to appetizers and main courses. A rosemary-and-pistachio mix becomes a crust around a piece of elk at OAK at Fourteenth, a restaurant in Boulder, Colo. A pine-nut-and-citrus granola might accompany seared scallops or roasted sweet potatoes.

And if there’s a subtle hint of hippie consciousness in that, all the better. After all, said Steve Redzikowski, the chef and an owner, “we’re in Boulder.”

Yet the same holds true at a crossroads of Manhattan power. “I want people to know that the Four Seasons is actually serving hippie food,” said Julian Niccolini, the man who presides over that sleek East 52nd Street dining room, where a root-vegetable salad with granola is part of the winter menu. “The ’60s were good times.”

That cultural echo is just fine with the chef Aimee Olexy, especially “if you associate ‘hippie’ with real, down-to-earth stuff,” she said. Ms. Olexy runs a restaurant in Philadelphia, Talula’s Garden, and Talula’s Table, a country store in Kennett Square, Pa., that morphs into a showcase for an expertly wrought tasting menu in the evenings. At both spots you’ll find “lots of granola,” she said. She might make it with coarse black pepper or chunks of bittersweet chocolate; she might marry it with goat cheese or a torchon of foie gras.

Crunch, nuttiness, honey, dried fruit: a well-composed granola often harks back to “the things that you’d typically see in a cheese course, but it’s all compressed into one bite,” Ms. Olexy said. (And she added a fine gastronomic point: In terms of mouth feel and concentration of flavor, granola can be a college-cafeteria cousin to the funky, edible “soils” that powder plates at revered restaurants like Noma in Copenhagen.)

Marco Canora, the chef at Hearth, in the East Village, describes himself as “a fanatic for texture.” For the spring, he’s developing a dish that will involve smearing homemade yogurt on the inside of a bowl full of beets; he’ll top the yogurt with a savory granola that could incorporate sunflower seeds, tarragon and puffed grains like farro and quinoa. “Granola is a vehicle for fat,” said Mr. Canora, who pointed to the Eleven Madison Park cookbook as an inspiration. “And granola is a vehicle for sweetness.”

Really it’s a vehicle for everything, which is why a stroll through the granola section at a market like Whole Foods can feel like a marathon trip to the Museum of Modern Oats. “There’s a ton of innovation in granola,” said Errol Schweizer, a Whole Foods executive who keeps a close watch on trends. “You can do a lot with it.”

Depending on where you shop, you might spy artisanal granola; gluten-free granola; chocolate granola that flirts with being a crumbled-up candy bar; “raw” granola laced and studded with “superfoods” like maca root, spirulina, mesquite pods, amaranth sprouts and camu camu fruit; and even kosher-for-Passover Matzolah, which contains fragments of Streit’s matzo. “That’s the beauty of diversity,” Mr. Schweizer said. “It’s a polyculture.”

The country’s cavernous appetite for a diverse array of products also means that cooks whose granola might otherwise have remained legendary only at church socials and family gatherings are becoming players on the national food scene. Granola Factory started with something that Suzanne Virgilio served to hungry customers at her Pennsylvania bed-and-breakfast. “We had guests over the years saying, ‘This is delicious, you should package this,’ ” said her son Calvin Virgilio.

Nekisia Davis, a veteran of Gramercy Tavern and Franny’s, cooked a batch of granola on a lark one day in Brooklyn. She later sold some at the Brooklyn Flea; word of mouth spread. Now she oversees an expanding brand called Early Bird, whose most basic granola is “essentially the recipe that came out of my oven the very first time I made granola at home,” she said.

In Maine, Lucy Benjamin began hawking Mason jars of Lucy’s Granola about four years ago at bake sales near her village. “Then people started coming to my house and knocking on my door,” she said.

And at Baked, a bake shop in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, “we were making our granola daily for all of our walk-in customers,” said Matt Lewis, a founder. “One day somebody from Whole Foods walked in and said, ‘We’d like to put this in our stores.’ ”

Indeed, all of these brands line supermarket shelves in various regions of the country. “We make about 100,000 pounds a year,” Ms. Davis said. “I mean, that’s insane.”

Just last month, at the annual Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, granola proved itself a nationwide obsession, with offerings from Napa Valley (Nature’s Habit) and North Carolina (Millchap Bakery’s version, which is made with sweet potatoes) and countless points in between. “We’re seeing lots of permutations and combinations,” said Louise Kramer, the communications director for the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, which held the event.

Credit the growing hunger for all things local and handmade. Credit the ever-churning American obsession with health, even though granola, with its generous strafings of sugar and fat, has always been something of a sweet-toothed crasher at the spa-food party. “There’s a healthy glow around granola,” Ms. Kramer said. “People don’t seem to be counting calories as much as they used to. They’re looking for a nutritious punch.”

Credit childhood, too. Granola, like macaroni and cheese, is something that a lot of us grew up eating, which makes it a tempting target for chefs who want to elevate and expand the essence of what a common food can be.

In fact, mixing oats and honey once played a key role in helping Ms. Olexy, the Pennsylvania restaurateur, reach a childhood milestone.

“That was what we did to get our little Girl Scout badge,” she recalled. “Here I’m 40, now, and I’m doing the same thing.”