SACRAMENTO — THE NEWS in July that the Corti Bros. grocery on Folsom Boulevard was closing spread through town like wildfire. You'd have thought the city was losing its NBA team, or even the state Capitol.
A petition to keep the store in its current location was started and quickly amassed almost 1,500 signatures. Mayor Heather Fargo got involved in the effort.
Then, when a who's who of the area's chefs gathered last week for a press conference to protest the closing, the event turned instead into a celebration when it was announced that the seemingly unprepossessing market -- home base of Darrell Corti, chief provisioner of the 1970s California food revolution -- would remain where it is, at least for now.
The competing gourmet business that had leased the building even took out an ad in the Sacramento Bee to announce it was abandoning the site and to explain its side of the story.
All this fuss over the closing of a single grocery might seem hard to believe, but only if you don't know about Darrell Corti.
And these days, when once-exotic ingredients such as Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, good olive oil and balsamic vinegar are available even at supermarkets, why should you know about him?
But back in the day, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Corti Bros. in Sacramento was a name that conjured up a then-unimaginable bounty of hard-to-find ingredients.
Gourmet magazine editor Ruth Reichl, who was then just starting out as a restaurant critic for New West magazine, says, "I remember the first big thing I got from Darrell was Parmigiano-Reggiano. If you can imagine, there was a time you had to send to Sacramento for Parmigiano."
"What did we get from Darrell? Balsamic vinegar, white truffles and fantastic olive oils . . . and lots of beautiful ingredients from Amador County," says Alice Waters, founder of Berkeley's Chez Panisse. "Darrell opened my eyes to products from around the world. He is an amazing person who knows everything about everything. Not just what it is, but how it's produced from beginning to end. That's very unique."
Corti's role in the food world went well beyond mere merchant. He is deeply knowledgeable on a wide variety of culinary topics and always willing to share that knowledge. For many food lovers, before there was Google, there was Darrell.
