A Culinary Yankee in Queen Alice's Court
Dan Barber Schools the Purists with Face Bacon, Super-Chickens, Sous-vide Lamb and Tough Love
which is awful, but please keep reading; the piece gains momentum as it progresses.
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| Norman architecture: Blue Hill at Stone Barns |
In his crisp, white togs, framed by tall corn stalks, he is the image of the modern chef. Dan Barber is...bucolic. On this small farm in the lush Hudson Valley, it’s a perfect, buzzing summer afternoon. Distant spruce and maples sway in a soft breeze. A waterlogged storm cloud peeks from the south. A black and white farm dog follows us from patches of beans to stands of corn to rows of summer squash that look like the trunks of baby elephants.
I’m hungry and happy about it. I’m planning to nurse my hunger well into the evening, and then take my seat in the bright, vaulted dining room a hog’s snort from where we’re standing, to settle in for a long summer feast replete with ingredients I actually can see workers yanking from the ground at this very moment. Every crop in the soil we stand on is organic; everything here with a heartbeat ranges free before slaughter. I pet the dog, take in the scent of sweet decay in the air, as the chef with the curious mind, the receding hairline, the dirty mouth and the cooking-flame tan interrogates the farmer, scribbles in a notebook, releases periodic ejaculations: amazing, wow.
Barber is the ultimate farm-to-table chef, the farm for his tables stretching across nearly thirty acres surrounding his restaurant on an old Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, New York, twenty-five miles outside Manhattan, called Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Last January, as part of a fundraiser organized by Alice Waters, he was one of an elite group of top chefs dispatched to Washington to prepare meals for the nation’s new power elite on the eve of the Obama inauguration. Barber worked out of journalist Bob Woodward’s kitchen, served pig snout, lamb, a winter salad, chatted up members of the president’s cabinet and his economic council.
Man Bites Dogma
If he is the emerging voice of a sustainable food movement in its ascendancy, then this colorful, seemingly thriving farm/restaurant is like the movement’s Vatican. This morning I’ve joined Barber to do farm chores: driving stakes, rotating fences that contain the free-range chickens, grabbing wily, stupid-eyed birds hiding under wagon seats and tossing them onto the new grass. It’s wet, dirty work, but the chef seems willing enough. He says the movement’s rank and file likes to think of him as a farmer, even though he isn’t one. He seems so reasonable, so companionable, but in the shade of the greenhouse, when I ask the him about the purists in his movement, those people you meet, too sincere for argument, who demonize any and all industrial agricultural methods, and he lets lose with a slicing dismissal so thorough and unexpected, it's actually kind of thrilling:
“I just throw that out the window,” he tells me. “That’s ridiculous. I think it’s reactionary. That says to me, ‘OK, let’s harken back to a Shaker Village.’ That would last about as long as this conversation. It’s too much Alice Waters, who also influenced me more than anyone. But I don’t want to look back. I don’t want to have this farm perceived as a Shaker Village or an Amish thing of the turn of the century. It means nothing.”
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| Chefs in the fields at Stone Barns |
Dan Barber is only thirty-nine (he's probably forty-eight now), but he’s been talking about the environmental and gastronomic genius of fresh, local ingredients, about this new, old way to grow and distribute food, since long before he was out standing in his field of corn. He comes from a Manhattan family not of cooks but of eaters, the son of a world-traveling businessman, a widower who would take Dan and his brother, David, on the road, and into fancy restaurants for business meetings. Paris, Hong Kong. Cincinnati. Early on the boys learned to appreciate the exotic and the mundane. Summers were spent on their grandmother’s small dairy farm. She adored the land, the open spaces. Her grandsons have that genetic marker and they obviously know it. Their two restaurants are named for her farm. Blue Hill. They own that farm now. It provides their kitchens with butter, yogurt, milk, and the occasional pig or lamb. It was during summers on the farm that Barber says he began to feel like a small farmer himself, to comprehend their skills and their plight.
In New York, in the late Nineties, the brothers started a catering business. Barber was back from two stints cooking in California (including a brief stop at Waters’ Chez Panisse), from a two-and-a-half year stage in France that began in the kitchen of Michel Rostang. With Dan cooking and David managing, the catering business flourished, so the Barbers opened a restaurant to push it; instead of auditioning in unfamiliar kitchens, they could invite potential clients to Blue Hill. But then the elegant little basement restaurant a half-block off Washington Square, the one largely relying for its ingredients, in all four seasons, on the bounty of Hudson Valley farmers, caught on. A review on Bloomberg radio started a stir. A rave in Gourmet in late 2000 was seminal.
There are chanterelles when chanterelles freckle local hillsides, wrote Jonathan Gold, and local corn shoots in the salad when they pop out of the ground in June, then ramps and fiddleheads and local zucchini.
There in the middle of the lower part of the big, great city, a small restaurant was doing its best with what the local climate and soil gave it. Back then they still imported fish from Hawaii, still got a few other mainstays from far away. But the local farmers were catching on to the fact that Barber didn’t just serve their produce, their lamb, their pork, he featured it, mentioned the names of farms on the menu, talked them up when the media came calling. At Blue Hill, the chef might cook the food, but the farmers determined the menu.
Rich in Soil and Pocket Both
Around the time that Gourmet review appeared unfathomably rich nonagenarian David Rockefeller was setting out to turn a chunk of his family estate near Tarrytown into a nonprofit agricultural education center. He wanted to honor his late wife, Peggy, who had long been dedicated to the well-being of the small farmer. There would be wild spaces for hiking, pastures, and a working farm. The beautiful old outbuildings and the stone dairy barns long in disuse, and modeled after ancient French-Norman towers, would be converted into offices and, what the heck, there’d be a restaurant. Mr. Rockefeller likes good food.
He’d given his young right hand man, James Ford, this dream assignment: find the proper chef for a restaurant at Stone Barns. But fifty restaurants and fifteen extra pounds later, Ford was getting frustrated. The famous chefs wanted too much money. The un-famous ones didn’t fit the spirit of the surroundings. On the day he stumbled upon the original Blue Hill, Ford says he was only vaguely aware of Barber’s effort to use local ingredients. That night, he was pretty much just looking for a meal. But he found that he loved the food and the peaceful feel of the place in the Village. He was intrigued by Blue Hill’s commitment to sourcing in the Hudson Valley. He asked to meet the Barbers. Eventually he brought Rockefeller to Blue Hill, to discuss the project at Stone Barns, to eat. The old man was a sitting duck.
By 2004, Rockefeller had spent $30 million, to convert the fields, six acres for vegetables, twenty-two acres for livestock to graze, to build the 23,000 square foot greenhouse, and construct Barber’s big, gleaming kitchen. Now Rockefeller is known to hitch up his horse and buggy, literally, and ride on over to the Barns for a meal, his largesse is finite. Although it is large.
The farm is a nonprofit. Barber does not own it, or farm it, per se. He buys from the farm his produce, chickens, lamb, pork, geese and rabbit, at wholesale prices. Today his two kitchens get about seventy percent of their ingredients from the farm and greenhouse at Stone Barns, and from other Hudson Valley farmers, many of whom truck their produce into Manhattan and set up shop at the Union Square Green Market.
Face Bacon
One raw, drizzly Saturday morning around eight I meet Barber there. I’m a nuisance, but he doesn’t make me feel that way, although twice he leaves me perched under a lamp post to stand still and wait, like a child you like okay, but really wish had stayed home this time. Now just stand here and don’t get into any trouble. Daddy will be right back. Daddy loves you! Meanwhile he goes rummaging behind stalls and into the private stashes of vendors, who all know him well. He has a cap on backwards; it has a beret effect. He’s wearing small-framed glasses, looks pale, sleepless, very Lower-East-Side intellectual artist. It’s very early spring, so we pick up asparagus, onions, turnips and ramps. Just as we’re about to leave, a guy calls Barber over, then pulls from a blue cooler a plastic bag with two big, greasy pigs feet he’s been saving for the chef, who is thrilled. Now he can make foot bacon. Sounds gross. Won’t be. The night before Barber had served me face bacon, a delicious, thinly sliced, beautifully marbled, crunchy, pungent sliver of porcine physiognomy. Although it is important to ignore the eye hole.
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| Fields at Stone Barns |
Sometimes when I’m winding my way down the long drive at Stone Barns I feel as if I’m entering some great Nineteenth Century agrarian novel. Workers toil in the fields that slope away from the looming, round barns of timeless gray. Lambs graze, hogs root, chickens scamper in a frenzy. Then, as I sit in the bright, wide-open dining room and look out over the fields, I half expect that Aunt Maryushka will appear, holding a cast iron spoon with her tea-stained fingers, waiting to serve me turnip soup.
Instead, a well-manicured, well-informed captain will come to my table and engage me in a conversation. There is no menu at Blue Hill, but a list of ingredients proper for the season. So, frankly or furtively, he or she will check on my allergies and my limitations, such as, am I anti-meat? Am I not too fond of tomatoes? Am I curious about wine, or am I just looking to make an impression by blowing my expense account on the Opus One? Is it clear that I am a foodie so excited to be here that I already know what crops are in season, what dishes they’ve been serving lately, what Barber himself ate for breakfast today, how tall he is (5’ 11”) and that he has a book contract, not for a cook book, that will come, of course, but for a narrative? From here, my “foodie level” will be encoded on the ticket, possibly my age-range, as well. I could be judged “excited,” “adventurous,” “interested,” “younger,” “conservative,” even, alas, “middle-aged.” My wine choice might be discussed in the kitchen, and then the big, affable chef de cuisine will begin calling out my dishes. Four quail egg! Four chicken! Four lamb! Four sweet potato marshmallow! On a given night, there are ten to fifteen plates for the kitchen to choose among, another five Barber describes as “orbiting.”
Barber says they want diners to get what will please them most. Codes allow everyone to avoid, say, innards-inspired unpleasantness. They wouldn’t want to serve a conventional, unadventurous diner sheep’s brains or venison heart. If they have only fifteen lamb chops that night, they want those chops to go to those who are enthused. Sure, like at any restaurant, they might harbor some mild frustration with a vegetarian or a disdainer of tomatoes during a summertime service. Certainly with a vegan, but who wouldn’t?
“We lose a lot of people,” Barber tells me. “Diners say ‘Fuck. I’ve waited two months to be here and you’re telling me I can’t fucking order a steak?’”
The first time I ate at Blue Hill it was winter, which meant root vegetables, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, beets.
“Before Dan, this kind of approach to food,” says Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Polan, “was not something you heard about on the East Coast, it was much more of a West Coast thing.”
Often, Blue Hill waiters describe ingredients as “this morning’s,” as in “this morning’s egg.” Just laid. In summer there are a dozen varieties of tomatoes. In winter time there is the meat of the pig, the whole pig. For the really adventurous among us, a server will bring out a tray of half-cooked pig anatomy, an ear, a snout, a jowl. This is it, no pretense, no hiding, and here is what we will do with it. If not pig parts, the server might present a tray of just-harvested beets, soil still clinging like blood to a newborn. They are supine, uncooked, uninteresting even, until you are told that tonight’s beets have survived upwards of seven frosts, that the gift of the frost is their sweetness.
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| Stone Barns beets |
“We switch to serving cold weather crops after a few hard frosts. After a deep frost the brix (a measurement of sugar content) is a hundred fold sweeter. Cabbages, Swiss chard, Brussels sprouts, we tested them in August and the brix was 6.8, and we tested them after the fourth frost and they were 12.6 parts per billion of sugar. A plant physiologist who is also a poet explained it to me this way: the conversion from starches to sugars is the plants or the roots trying to avoid ice crystallization within their bodies by converting to sugar, because sugar raises the body temperature. What you're tasting, what the plant or the root is telling you is, ‘I don't want to die.’ Right now it’s a fucking total blow out celebration of that.”
A Culinary Mark Twain
Dan Barber has no TV show, no book or blog, he is neither barefoot nor naked, but he is in demand. He gives talks, draws crowds. He sits on many panels, the kind with fawning audiences blogging and twittering and moderators who take off their shoes and cross their legs, hold lots of index cards in their hands and go for laughs and try not to seem nervous. But Barber is always the funniest one onstage, the one whose profound fascination, whose awe of the earth and the edible stuff it offers up borders on the Druidical.
Audiences eat it up.
Once after a performance in San Francisco, Barber and I try to walk approximately one-hundred yards from the stage door to the theater exit and it takes us almost half an hour, as fans, some with shyness, some desire, approach him to thank him for what he does, and then, to my surprise, to say they look forward to someday eating at his restaurant. They love him, but they have never eaten a dish at Blue Hill.
“There are few people you meet that are as good at one thing as Dan Barber is at cooking,” says Polan, “and who have these other skills: journalist, writer, promoter, storyteller. All these different kinds of things.”
In person, when Barber gets really into a story, really excited about the topic, he taps your shoulder, over and over again. It’s endearing, if at times walking the farm or riding next to him in his gray minivan that sometimes smells like onions, sometimes goat cheese, I worry about bruising. But onstage, he is a performer, a yarn-spinner, a culinary Mark Twain by way of Woody Allen, whose narratives tend to have a moral. Also a good deal of angst and self-deprecation. To the crowds he sometimes tells his tales while pacing, gulping, flipping through slides, anything to subdue his nervous energy. He can seem so agitated at first, that you find yourself getting a bit tense, you start rooting for him just so that you can relax. Soon all is well, he’s rolling, telling the story about his secretly failed carrot experiment, in which while attempting to duplicate the delicious effects of a farmer he’d met in Burgundy, he tried sprinkling pounds of almond dust on the soil where the Napoli carrots grow. So confident was he that on the day the carrots were to be harvested, he’d already put an item on the menu: Almond-Carrot Salad.
“I had a dream the night before,” he tells the audience, “of me on the cover of Gourmet with a farmer’s hat, holding a bunch of carrots, with the title, Dan Barber: Chef Revolutionizes Farming.”
Problem was, the carrots tasted strictly carrot-y, not a trace of almond anywhere. So quickly he splashed some almond oil on them and the salads were a huge hit, ninety-five orders among 140 covers for the night. Customers wrote out comment cards with four stars. Someone on the staff triumphantly exclaimed: Ferran Adria has foams, but Dan Barber has carrots!
Then there is the classic story of Boris, a boar at Stone Barns. Barber and the livestock farmer are watching Boris trying to “make love,” as Barber puts it, dryly, to various sows in heat. “Don’t know if any of you have ever seen a sow in heat,” he says, “but suffice to say, they are not picky.” But Boris is too fat. The sows reject him. He has out-lived his usefulness and the farmer matter-of-factly announces his intention to shoot the old hog.
Barber the Manhattanite is mortified, and goes on a quest for optional fates for Boris. One, “castrate and slaughter,” is accompanied by a large slide of the white, filthy, drooping, masculine, torpedo-like balls of Boris, still hanging proudly.
The stories demonstrate curiosity and daring on Barber’s behalf. But I think they also betray a control on the farm beyond influence, beyond what he tends to claim he has, and far beyond the farmer-dictated gastro-future he himself promotes: If a hundred years ago the diner determined what was on the menu -- Oysters Rockefeller and mutton seem to have been popular items -- and over the last thirty years creative chefs took menu-control, showing us new, pleasurable ways to eat (and becoming the celebrities we can’t avoid today), then in the 21st Century it’s the farmers’ time to take the reins. Not to worry, though. The great chefs will still decide what to do with the farmer’s crops.
“The gourmet will be the leader of the world,” he says, meaning the food world, I assume, although his enthusiasm and proto-Marxist formulations make me wonder.
Barbs
Vision and timing have transformed this chef into a leader of, if not the world -- yet -- then a movement. A similar thing happened to Polan after Omnivore’s Dilemma. Polan had told me how strange it was to go from journalist to spokesperson for a cause, from interviewer to subject. His hope was to go back to journalism as new voices emerged. But the time had been right, as it is now for Barber.
“You get historical opportunities and you have to take advantage of them,” says Polan, “and the culture is willing to listen to this now, to these issues that have been knocking around for thirty years.”
For more than thirty years, of course, Alice Waters has been saying and doing many of the same things Barber says and does now. If her effect on the food industry at large has been limited, her restaurant is legendary, her acolytes are many. Her cookbooks read like little miracle-guides to ethical pleasure. Even as Barber’s reach grows, in the throbbing, emerging community of green foodies, Waters is rightly ubiquitous. Barber cites her as a primary inspiration, and surely if he can keep Blue Hill afloat and Stone Barns fertile, and show the way for others, her vindication will be nearly complete.
But there is a mutual distancing.
Barber is a realist. He is anti-quaint. If the small, organic farmers can’t make money, then what is this but some theoretical Eden? For now, the farm at Stone Barns may be a nonprofit, but the restaurant has to pay rent; it has to share its profits with the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. And so they engage in selective environmentalist no-nos. They raise sheep genetically cross-bred to lamb in twos and threes instead of nature’s one-at-a-time. The birds here eat naught but grass and bugs, but they are of a breed of super-chickens developed by evil agri-giant Tyson foods to grow to eating size in seven weeks instead of the fourteen nature intended. Barber serves it all with pleasure.
“This bugs the Slow Food people,” says Barber, referring to the worldwide collection of chefs and food-producers dedicated to the demise of big agriculture and the return of non-industrial methods of growing and food preparation. “But it’s better for the bottom line.”
When I talk to Waters and Barber about each other, they try to bury their conflicts under, in Barber’s case, cutting jocularity, in Waters’ case, a soft, pillowy sweetness backed with a slap. She says Barber is “articulate” and has “great taste,” but she wishes he would cook “peasant food.” He says he’d cook peasant food, maybe, if he was in South Dakota, but he’s in New York, it’s an expensive operation, he charges a lot of money. People have expectations. They have expense accounts. As Polan puts it to me, a chef in New York has to “dazzle.” So Barber does not serve peasant food. It would be hard to define, say, a refreshing celery/apple juice I had one spring at Blue Hill, a light-green liquid that finds a paradise between sweet and earthy I never knew existed, as peasant food. I don’t think the peasants spent a lot of time juicing. Waters can romanticize them, but for a modern like Barber to pretend to embrace their ways would be disingenuous.
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| Carrot from the farm at Stone Barns, soon to be eaten |
Like Waters, Barber is a champion of the small farmer and the old pre-chemical ways of farming, but he is far more likely to subject his ingredients to the kitchen techniques of the 21st Century, to bring the products of those old ways into the now and assimilate them with extreme prejudice.
So, he says, when diners sent back his grass-fed lamb because they thought it was too tough, he adopted, with pleasure, the sous-vide cooking technique. As with the super-chickens and fecund sheep at Stone Barns, he says some purists in the movement disdain use of the high-energy, plastic-vacuum-packed sous-vide process. Very modern.
Anyway, Waters tells me, sous-vide is not for her; she is more for the grill. She needs to have the smoke and the fragrance. For her, that problem with grass-fed toughness was more a question of “learning how to cook it.”
As I listen, I feel a painful pull in two directions, one foot in the honorable past, one sliding unfettered into the inevitable future. I love them both. And without Waters there would be no Barber. But in a world were big agriculture and a non-feudal economy predominate, without a Barber-like focus on the bottom line, it might take another thirty years to change things.
“I don’t think there’s a contradiction between Alice’s ideals of heritage and looking to innovation and technology to interpret them,” says Barber, “because otherwise they don’t move forward.”
My Dream Date with the Chef
Nearly every interview I do with Barber seem to take place in transit, moving forward, as it were. We’re walking. We’re driving. Until one night when I actually succeed in wrenching him away from his two kitchens. It’s like I’ve won a Dream Date with the Chef. His minivan is strewn with foodstuffs. Tiny spotted dry beans jostle in the console. He takes me to three restaurants, each dedicated to serving local, organic ingredients. He spends the evening ordering my food, my wine, telling me stories hard won from the crazy, periodic, one-night-and-a-day pilgrimages he makes from Manhattan to London, or Spain, or to exotic Western New York, to witness the work of obscure, innovative farmers, or to visit the kitchens of famous, innovative chefs.
At lively, candle-lit Marlow & Sons in Brooklyn, he tells me about the Spanish foie gras maker, said to be the world’s best, who doesn’t gorge his birds, but just let’s them come to the food as they will to get their over-fill.
At a bright pizza joint called Frannie’s, while we’re savoring a pork terrine, he says, “You’ve got fat in your mouth, but not greasy fat. I love that.” He talks about a farmer outside London who is resurrecting a hundred neglected varieties of wheat, and about a grower of kosher grains in Penn Yan, New York, who has found that the presence of wild onions in the field, the ones the rabbi is now helping him avoid, had been holding back the flavor and size of his harvest. Eliminating them with the help of the rabbi has been a godsend. It’s the Torah as farmer’s almanac.
We end the night in Chelsea, at the counter at Dell’Anima, eating hand-made pastas and talking about his stint as a judge on Top Chef, how during a break in filming he’d wandered over here to 8th Avenue for an exceedingly rare, quiet meal, alone, at dinner time. He has the wistful tone of a botanist who’s found a species of plant long thought extinct, but then lost the specimen.
I’d sensed a similar longing in him at Marlow and Sons, over a simple salad of fresh radishes, tomatoes, greens, and peaches so juicy they were mouth-cleansing. While we marveled at the flavors of this peasant food, he’d told me that sometimes he thinks he’d like to cook this way.
“But if I did this,” he says, his voice seasoned with urgency, “we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.”
Still, the very next night, at his restaurant on the farm, a waiter brings me a salad of radishes, greens and peaches. In Barber’s version there is a touch of flare, a tomato foam, a gastronomic signature you won’t find in Brooklyn. It dazzles. The waiter also brings me a message: “Chef said to tell you this was inspired by your dinner last night.”
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| Dining room at Blue Hill at Stone Barns |
In fact, no one has stepped with greater confidence into the farmer-controlled future than Dan Barber. No one has committed with more fury to serving local ingredients in their proper season, no matter the season. No asparagus in the fall. No corn or tomatoes in late winter. But then comes renewal, the spring, new lambs, artichokes, johnny jump-ups, a dozen sweet greens, appetites made fonder by a season of absence, after the poetry of a frost that brings sweetness, there’s the fucking total blowout celebration of it all.
Images courtesy of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture
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