WOODCHUCK WOOD PACKAGING CO Woodchuck Wood Packaging Co. ...

If you squint long enough, Mike Pulvirent just might look like Paul Bunyan. The mustachioed, fleece-clad co-owner of Woodchuck Wood, a lumber business in Staten Island that supplies fuel for many a wood-burning apparatus in Manhattan restaurant kitchens, tells me to meet him at Gabriel's, a neighborhood Italian place on the Upper West Side that uses his wood.

Though there is a certain romance to cooking with wood?a 2001, cave-dwelling kind of romance?transplanting such an elemental treatment of food into the fancy-shmantzy world of Manhattan restaurants somehow elevates (or degrades, depending on your position) it to a fussy status. Restaurants that use wood for cooking meat and fish have developed a taste for the specialty fruit and nut woods (cherry, apple, pecan, walnut) for the delicate flavors that they imbue; the less demanding wood-burning pizza set is happy with a conventional mix of maple, ash and oak.

And now, cooking with wood has grown stylish. Since the opening of Danny Meyer's hyped barbecue joint, Blue Smoke, "knowing your wood" has taken on a certain cachet that didn't previously exist. (Pulvirent implied that Woodchuck Wood supplies the restaurant's custom-built gas-and-apple-wood smoker.) According to Pulvirent, there is now a great demand for fruit woods precisely for this reason.

"People who smoked meat used hickory to do it," he grumbles. "Then this guy goes on tv and says he's using fruit wood, and now they want fruit wood."

Beyond this minor glamorous aspect, wood is a basic business. At their modest Staten Island lumberyard, Pulvirent and partner/brother Steve receive telephone-pole-sized logs from their family farm in Montgomery and other upstate New York locales, often using uncontaminated wood salvaged from sites being cleared for construction. There, a machine splits the logs and divides them into cords?stacks measuring four-by-four-by-eight?some of which are piled into their trucks for daily treks into the city, where they make the rounds, stopping, perhaps, at a kitchen near you.

Just how much wood, how many kitchens, and which ones, well, that's all a mystery. The brothers Pulvirent are stingy with such figures. Since few people, they say, are in the business, they have chosen to stay mum. I managed to squeeze out of Mike that a wood-burning-oven pizza kitchen can use a cord of wood every other week, while the fellows at Gabriel's say that they use 12 logs of hickory a night together with charcoal to grill their duck breasts, baby chickens, trout, steaks and whatever may be the daily special.

So, why wood? Gabriel's executive chef Matthew Hayden says it just tastes better. "The flavor is soft and smoky, but it's not too overpowering," he says on a break from the steamy kitchen. "You still taste whatever you're cooking, if it's meat or fish. You don't just taste smoke the way you might if you were just using coal."

Since the consensus among restaurateurs seems to be that wood is good, Pulvirent gets a lot of his business from pitching potential, um, woodies found in the Zagat guides and New York Times restaurant reviews: wood-burning oven pizzerias, barbecue joints, even Italian restaurants that specialize in Tuscan cuisine, since Pulvirent has learned that they dose heavily on the stuff. "I even have some Jewish people calling me from the matzoh bakery every year!"