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Want to launch a hot new restaurant? Here's a tip: Hang out a shingle in the shape of a pig, wrap every appetizer and entrée in bacon, sprinkle the menu with heritage-breed hogspeak like "Red Wattle" and "Berkshire," and consider calling the place The Spotted Pig, or Pig's Ear, or Au Pied de Cochon.

On second thought, avoid those names: They're all taken.

The pig, in case you haven't noticed, is in.

Snubbed for decades as a banal budget meat by high-minded North American chefs, pork is now, by some accounts, the third-most popular ingredient in the fine-dining larder - after salt and pepper.

"I put it in everything," says Sean Cousins, executive chef and owner of So.cial at Le Magasin, a new Vancouver hot spot. "I've got pork with crab. I'm doing pork with salmon. I've got pork with scallops, raviolis with pulled pork in them. It's in a lot of my salads."

If that sounds like a kitchen accident or a plug for Bac-Os, fear not. Mr. Cousins uses pork to inspired, sometimes subtle, effect. For his salmon, he sears a Chinook fillet in maple syrup, then shaves a blizzard of fatty pancetta over top, creating a gratin that melts into the fish like parmesan cheese on hot pasta.

He is not the only one going hog-wild. Ferran Adria, the great Spanish eccentric, has a signature dessert - if you can call it that - of cherries glazed in the rendered fat of Iberico ham.

In the United States, superstar chefs Daniel Boulud of DB Bistro Moderne in New York and Thomas Keller of The French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., have begun showcasing a new Quebec pork nicknamed porcelait, whose dense fat tastes bewilderingly of butter thanks to the animal's unusual diet of warmed cow's milk.

At twice the price of standard pork, that may seem like a penny-wise offering compared with the extreme porcine cuisine of Jason Parsons.

The executive chef at Peller Estates Winery Restaurant in Niagara-on-the-Lake has lately been marinating a 12-kilogram suckling pig, head and all, in icewine.

Cost of the 10 bottles of sweet nectar required for the flavour infusion: $750. "If our chief financial officer knew how much icewine we were going through, he'd probably be banging on my door," Mr. Parsons says with a laugh.

Pork is hardly new to the dinner table, of course. Pigs were among the first animals to be domesticated, a foodie watershed that probably took place around 7,000 B.C.

But for the past few decades in North America, pork had become a second-class protein, something to fry up on a weeknight but not for guests or fancy restaurant dining. For special occasions, you splurged on beef, lamb or salmon.

"Five years ago, you would never, ever have seen pork on a high-dining restaurant menu," says Stephen Alexander, owner of Cumbrae's, a high-end Toronto chain of butcher shops that also supplies restaurants.

Why? Quite simply, commercial pork.

Factory-farmed pork's biggest virtue - affordability, thanks to a thrifty diet and swift, six-month journey from birth to slaughter - is also its worst drawback for chefs. When everybody knows a pork chop costs $3 at the local Price Chopper, it's hard to get away with a $25 markup on a menu.

Pork also, until recently, offended the modern chef's aesthetic, which dictates in part that virtually all meat be served rare to medium-rare.

For decades, pink pork was off-limits because of trichinosis, a once-prevalent worm infection. Better farming practices, most notably a ban on feeding hogs raw-meat garbage, has all but eliminated the scourge from farmed animals. "It doesn't have to be dry and unpleasant any more," Mr. Cousins says.

But even when you cooked pork medium-rare, it seldom tasted as luxurious as beef or lamb. That's because it lacked marbling, the all-important lines of fat that run through muscle and impart juicy flavour.

For this we can blame industrial breeding. Over the past 40 to 50 years, commercial pigs have been bred mainly to accentuate two traits - a high muscle-to-fat ratio and a flesh colour approximating that of North America's preferred white meat, chicken.

"When they bred for leanness quality, they bred out part of the taste," says Rich Pirog, associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.

Which brings us to the pork renaissance. Enter a band of small, independent farmers who have been reviving chubby heritage breeds such as Duroc, Red Wattle and Berskshire.

At about twice the price of supermarket pork at the whole-hog level, and with 35 per cent less muscle, these dark-meat pigs are not cheap. But they come with bragging rights. "Certain chefs are looking for pork that has a unique story to it, a lineage or a place-based story or a family-farm story," Mr. Pirog notes.

Arguably the most captivating farm story this year belongs to Alex Aubin, part-owner of St-Canut Farms north of Montreal. Mr. Aubin recently found a way to improve on the most coveted pork product of all, suckling pig. How? By making it bigger.

As its name implies, suckling pig gets its prized tenderness from the fact that it is slaughtered while still nursing, usually four weeks into life. The only problem, from a culinary standpoint, is that piglets are too small to yield the classic big cuts favoured by chefs, such as chops and racks. Mr. Aubin's solution was to continue feeding his pigs cow's milk for as long as 10 weeks.

It was easier said than done. The secret, he says, was in the temperature and fat content of the milk. But he declines to reveal specifics, lest competitors exploit his discovery.

Mr. Aubin says he's proud that such renowned chefs as Mr. Keller in California and Normand Laprise of Montreal's Toqué restaurant are featuring St-Canut pork. "People, when they go to restaurants, they don't want pig because you can cook pig at home - but not this kind of pig."

The rise of designer pork dovetailed with a growing hedonism among consumers that was nurtured in part by such 1990s Food Network evangelists as Emeril Lagasse, a highly respected, bacon-slinging New Orleans chef with the signature slogan, "Pork fat rules."

That famous shout-out to lard was followed by a slew of popular treatises on hog farming and the slaughter ritual by such writers as Bill Buford, Anthony Bourdain and Peter Kaminsky. The trend was keenly chronicled by food journalist and former chef Sara Dickerman in Slate magazine last year, in which she dubbed the genre the "piggy confessional."

This month, that genre was taken to a new level with Pork & Sons, the English translation of a bestselling 2005 French cookbook and memoir from Phaidon Press that might be described as the ultimate in porknography.

Written by Paris chef Stéphane Reynaud - scion of a family of pork butchers - it features myriad photographs, from slaughter to bistro table, taken under seductive lighting worthy of a Playboy shoot.

"Even in France it's changing, because you have good breeds of pork," Mr. Reynaud said recently over the phone from his hometown outside Lyon. "More and more chefs are looking for such kinds of animals, and people too, not just the restaurants."

Pork & Sons might also be seen as an homage to the pig's most distinctive culinary feature, total edibility. Its cheeks, skin, feet and ears are considered delicacies. Even its blood makes its way into sausages.

Which is why the animal has become the mascot of a new haute-cuisine movement dubbed "nose-to-tail eating," espoused by such chefs as Martin Picard of Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal and Fergus Henderson of London's St. John restaurant, both of whom have recently published acclaimed cookbooks.

Serving up odd bits of the pig has, in turn, come to be the ultimate contemporary signal of culinary prowess. After all, says Niagara chef Mr. Parsons, "there's not a lot of skill required to cook a beef tenderloin. But it takes a lot of technical skill to cook those offcuts. People appreciate the skill."

Best of all, what restaurant patron is going to know the markup on pig's blood?

Highbrow pigs

North American pigs were likely domesticated from Eurasian wild boars about 9,000 years ago. So-called heritage breeds, including the three below, are fatter and yield less meat than commercial hogs, which have been bred for leanness and a light muscle colour for mass appeal. Many good butchers now carry at least one heritage breed, typically at about twice the cost of regular pork.

Berkshire

Also known as the "black pig." Legend has it that Oliver Cromwell's soldiers, who apparently knew good bacon when they tasted it, discovered and corralled the breed three centuries ago in the county seat of the shire of Berks in England. The original Berkshire pig was sandy-coloured and was later mingled with Asian blood, yielding its current dark skin colour. Dubbed "Berkshire gold" by farmers and chefs, it is the star of fine-dining menus, with fat marbling (fine deposits of fat within the muscle) some have likened to that of Kobe beef. Perfect for grilling.

Duroc

The product of a cross between two strains from New Jersey and New York in 1830, it was named after a famous thoroughbred race horse of the day. A sort of founding father, genetically speaking, to many of today's mixed-breed commercial hogs, the purebred Duroc is prized for its rich marbling, which makes it exceptionally juicy and flavourful.

Red Wattle

Originated in New Caledonia, a French Island in the South Pacific, in the 1700s. The name comes from its suntan-like skin hue and the fleshy lobe that hangs under its chin. Slightly darker than that of most pigs, its flesh is also relatively lean and tender, known for yielding excellent hams.

Beppi Crosariol