• Michael Gebert
  • Frog gigging on the golf course

Foraging for upscale restaurants conjures up an image of delicate flora being found in forests or fields, and then turned into fey little green things applied with tweezers to artful dishes. It does not, to most city-dwelling sophisticates, suggest stabbing things in the night with a big pointy pitchfork. But for Iliana Regan, of Lincoln Square’s Michelin-starred Elizabeth, foraging is as much about collecting fauna like frogs as it is delicate flora like milkweed pods or Queen Anne’s lace. And frog-giggin’ (the proper pronunciation, her girlfriend Tonya Pierce informs me) is going to be a messy business. At least that’s what I’m told as they pick me up in Regan’s Hummer outside the restaurant a little before nightfall. With their dog Grizzly in tow, we set off on the hour-and-a-half drive to a golf course in Crown Point, Indiana, not far from where Regan grew up.

That’s why we’re going to Hobart, Indiana, to pick up a childhood friend, William “Getty” Sikora. Getty maintains a couple of local golf courses and, as an avid hunter of nearly everything, is well plugged in to what you’ll find and where you’ll find it in the area. And he has a line on another golf course a friend manages, one that has water hazards are supposed to be bountiful with nice, fat frogs.

Getty doesn’t have restaurant experience, but he was a caterer for four years—which in a small town pretty much always means he did weekend pig roasts—and he’s as self-reliant a home cook as anybody who works in a kitchen professionally. He just got a new grill, some kind of contraption that uses propane, infrared heating, and charcoal for smoke all at once, so we talk about the finer points of barbecuing squirrel (general conclusion: the loins are pretty nice, but the legs get chewy; brining might help). He sums up the general attitude toward food in the area, though: “If you ain’t deep-frying it, you’re doing it wrong.” That leads to a conversation about how foraging has become a city craze. “It must be nice to be one of the pioneers,” he says to Iliana.

We arrive at the golf course, the entrance to which is blocked by a swinging metal gate. This is how you know you’re in a small town: we park next to the gate, and Getty borrows a pen from me to leave the police a note explaining who we are and why our car is there so we won’t get towed or arrested.

But now the exhilaration of chasing and catching food has squeezed out feelings about the creatures we’re hunting. “He’s cute,” Tonya declares of the creature we’ve just stuck with a fork, while Iliana comments on the fatness of the legs, the edible part, as she tosses the frog in the bag she’s carrying in one hand, her dog in the other. “Let’s hope it stays like this,” Getty says.

“You can get them at the store, and I don’t know how they manage to put a processed taste into a frog, but they do it,” he says. “These taste so much sweeter, they taste totally different. Once you try them, you’ll know.”