Merchant with A Mission

Good food and more at the Wilton Organic Gourmet

At 8 a.m., pale sunlight floats through the front window and creeps along the floor to the little kitchen at the back of the store. Suzie Quaranta, who prepares meals here once a week, and Pete Leventhal, the founder, owner, head chef and resident guru of the place, are busy cooking. Specials of the day include Turkey-andouille sausage with vegetables and white beans; turkey shepard’s pie with butternut squash; gluten-free vegetarian lasagna; brown rice and vegetable “burger” with sunflower seeds, and more. “What about the rollatini?” asks Suzie, flattening chicken breasts. “What should we serve with that?”

“Rosemary roast potatoes,” answers Pete without shifting his intense concentration from the chicken and avocado wrap he’s rolling into a tight cylinder.

Time for a cleanser

At that moment the cowbell hanging from the front door rings softly, announcing the first customer: today it’s Antonio Bazar, an electrician who works nearby. He grabs a bottle of organic juice and a sandwich made with tongol tuna, which Pete serves because it’s classified as a “Good Alternative” by Seafood Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “When I feel like my diet has not been too healthy,” Antonio told me, “I come in here to clean up my act.” He pays up and heads off, the bell jingling as the door closes behind him.

And so begins another day at the Wilton Organic Gourmet, a friendly and sprited one-of-a-kind enterprise that’s partly about food, partly about vitamins and supplements, partly about personal care products and all about a philosophy of health that defies easy categorization. Science is certainly a part of it: Pete has a master’s degree in clinical nutrition, which he puts to work not only in his cooking and in his counseling practice but also in the knowledgeable advice he freely dispenses over the counter. “Did you ever have a fungal infection?” he inquires of a customer who’s looking for a specific remedy. When a shopper came in a few years ago to purchase an expensive skin treatment, Pete questioned her closely about her diet. He convinced her that paying attention to what she ate was likely to do her more good in the long run, though he could have easily made the sale. After losing thirty pounds under Pete’s guidance, that customer has no doubt he was right.

Present at the creation

Indeed, Pete’s dedication to helping people is another factor that sets the Organic Gourmet apart. An unabashed mixture of

missionary and merchant, Pete says “My goal is to put as much organic food into you as I possibly can.” A city kid from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he grew up looking at the trees and green grass of Central Park and longing to be closer to nature. After college he took the obligatory hippie highways and by-ways tour in a VW Camper, learning how to cook along the way. Upon his return, he found work as a hired hand on a few of the very few organic farms in Fairfield County at the time. He also got involved with an organization that did work with disturbed teen-agers. “I noticed that the food these kids were eating was extremely high in sugar and carbohydrates,” he says, “and I thought there was something wrong with that. That’s actually what first got me interested in nutrition.” In 1974, he found a  tiny health food store for sale in Old Greenwich. He loved the work from day one. He opened the Wilton store in 1987, and subsequently closed the one in Old Greenwich.

He recalls that in the mid-70s there was only one other health food store in the area: its name was Leonard’s Eco-Farms. Based in Norwalk, it closed long ago, but not before achieving one small (okay, tiny) cultural distinction for its owner, Leonard Urbanowicz: no one had ever combined the words “eco” and “farm” before.* That’s how new the organic

food movement was at that point. “Even when I was in graduate school in the early 80s,” Pete recalls, “there were professors who insisted that vitamins had no value, despite a mountain of data that said otherwise. I was a radical back then, and I got pretty worked up.” These days, he observes, doctors send their patients to his store to get specific herbs. “Half the time they’re not asking for the right remedy,”he notes, “but it’s a start. Medicine has come a long way.”

Less of a radical now, at least by his own reckoning, Pete is still fastidious about every item he offers. His prepared food has attracted a loyal following, and deservedly so. Recently, a man in business attire told me to order the split pea. I complied and was happy I did: the soup was rich and peppery, loaded with carrots, celery, spinach and other vegetables, all the flavors clean on the one hand and well-married on the other. The tofini salad was also satisfying: a creamy, carroty mixture with just a little whisper of curry in the background. You don’t have to be a health food nut to like this gutsy, flavorful food.

In addition to the popular daily specials, soups, salads, smoothies and sandwiches (the tuna really is outstanding), Pete’s small store offers an impressive variety of hand-picked organic products, ranging from the Swiss company Biotta’s exceptional fruit and vegetable juices and Julie’s addictive, gluten-free ice cream sandwiches to frozen grass-fed beef from Uruguay, frozen wild-caught salmon, a large assortment of grains and cereals, oils and vinegars, local honey and more. The economy has had an effect on his nutritional counseling practice, to be sure, but he still sees clients, recognizing that it sometimes takes years before a person starts to use natural products, vitamins and supplements to achieve a dietary balance.

Rx for a healthy community

This patience appears to be one of Pete’s great virtues. I asked him: As health food transformed itself from a fringe business into a fast-growing billion dollar mainstream category, and as Freshfields gave way to Wild Oats and then to Whole Foods, wasn’t he ever tempted to

cash in? No, he says, never. One reason is that he has no interest in technology, management,  business models and other corporate trappings. In fact, you will look in vain for a single computer in the store, not to mention a website or a Facebook page. More important, though, is his devotion to what he calls “community retail.” This is perhaps the highest and best expression of the health that Pete promotes. “I get to know the people who come into my store, and they get to know me,” he explains. “There’s an attachment that develops, and it grows. In this way we help to hold our community together, rather than tear it down.”

Pete’s holding things together in the kitchen, at the counter or in between six days a week, from 8 to early afternoon, and often later. The store closes at 6.

Wilton Organic Gourmet
Peter Leventhal, Proprietor
33 Danbury Road
Wilton, CT  06897
203 762 9711 T
Hours: Monday – Saturday, 8 to 6

*Fifty years among the new words: a dictionary of neologisms, 1941-1991,
Edited by John Algeo, Cambridge University Press