Nora Pouillon: Organic Pioneer

Nora Pouillon, founder of Restaurant Nora, the first certified organic restaurant in the U.S.
Before “farm-to-table,” “slow food,” and the explosion of farmers’ markets in this country, there was Restaurant Nora, the first certified organic restaurant in the U.S., founded by chef, restaurateur and local-food advocate Nora Pouillon, who opened the elegant D.C. establishment in 1979.
Her riveting new memoir, My Organic Life (Knopf; 2015), not only reads like a novel, it serves up a very personal history of the evolution of the local and organic food movements over the last 50 years.
Pouillon grew up in the Austrian Alps, eating fresh, seasonal vegetables and meat that was raised in a manner we now have to qualify as “humane,” to distinguish it from the factory-farmed variety. When she arrived in Washington, D.C., as a young bride in 1960, she was shocked to see canned and frozen out-of-season vegetables, preservative-laden and processed foods, hormone-injected meats.
As a cook, Pouillon was determined to share the value of the healthy, delicious food she was raised on. “I was hoping that more people would be aware of what they put into their bodies, and more concerned of where their food comes from,” says Pouillon.
When she opened Restaurant Nora, Pouillon had to convince farmers to become certified organic, so that she could buy from them. “The biggest challenge was to find certified organic ingredients,” says Pouillon, “especially in the quantity that I needed for the restaurant.”
Since there was no organic restaurant certification, she eventually helped create one, with Oregon Tilth, but it took time. “It had never been done before,” she says. “I needed to prove that at least 95 percent of whatever comes from the restaurant comes from certified organic sources. This was a challenge. But I succeeded.”
Restaurant Nora became a go-to for journalists, celebrities and politicians in D.C., from former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn, to the Clintons and Michelle Obama, who recently celebrated her birthday there.
“The biggest changes in this country are that more chefs now make an effort to buy local food and support local farmers,” says Pouillon. But it didn’t happen overnight. “The farm-to-table movement took 20 years—20 years, really, after I opened the restaurant. I am happy that it happened, but it was not a very fast happening.”
Pouillon shares her recipe for the best strawberry rhubarb pie ever, here.