I recently found myself in Pocantico Hills, NY. Not in the
this-is-where-I-happen to be-on-planet-earth-right-now sort of way.
Rather, I found myself in the sense that I was reminded what it is that
makes food such a passion for me. More than just a restaurant ~ and more
than just a farm ~ Blue Hill at Stone Barns is a place that nourishes
both body and soul as it shows you, if not what the link between farm and
table should be, at least what it can be.
When I first took the short train ride up from the city last
spring, I was there for the restaurant. I was there for food. But a
walk around the grounds before dinner left me with a feeling I could not
easily pin down. Something about the place just clicked for me on a
fundamental level. Maybe it was the fresh, quiet air or the
pink-and-purple paint in the sky as the sun set. Maybe I had eased
right in to the slow pace of the ducks and cows I saw roaming the
grounds. Or maybe, always my mother’s son, my green thumb was just
coming out amidst this beautiful agricultural backdrop.
That first dinner was great, but I knew I would have to return for
more—literally. My trip back would be about more than just food, and I
would make that trip with, or more accurately for, my mom. Far too
modest to admit it, she is a veritable encyclopedia of gardening. She’s
also always quick to point out when what I think is new is actually just
old again. The exchanges go like this: I come home, the prodigal
son-gourmand, having squandered all my money in far-away lands. I tell
her about the latest trendy, “cheffy” ingredients I’ve seen popping up
on menus. She nods as she considers this thoughtfully. Then she smiles
and informs me that she is growing those very things in our back yard
and has been doing so since long before I was born. And didn’t I
realize that? Needless to say, even before she saw the pictures from my
first trip or an episode of Oprah that featured Stone Barns, it was
clear that this particular farm-restaurant duo was the ideal place for
this particular mother-son duo to celebrate her birthday this year.
We pulled up to Stone Barns around 10:30am. We were eight hours
early for dinner. The Insider’s Tour — a backstage pass to the farm and
restaurant led by the very capable Ellen Baum — would start at 11, but
first we had breakfast from the Blue Hill Café. Pain au chocolat
for the lady; a cheddar-and-chive scone and cherry focaccia for me. My
kind of energy snacks before a guided hike around the farm. I can’t
condense this incredibly cool, several-hour experience into one line,
but I can tell you a bit about what we saw. I can also tell you how
very highly I would recommend it to others. We saw animals — sheep,
turkeys, chickens, pigs, and cows — making their happy homes in the
pastures and barns. We saw fields and gardens and green houses with
plants and flowers too numerous to name. In short we saw what makes
this nearly self-sustaining, almost utopian place tick.
Lunch would also come from the café and would be eaten, fittingly, on
the same ground from which it was harvested. The mid-day menu had
heirloom tomatoes layered with local goat cheese on focaccia, chilled
corn soup, and several other tempting items I would have happily ordered
had dinner not been a few short hours away. Instead we got a few things
— okay, everything — on their pay-by-weight buffet. Roasted beets lent
their crimson hue to a tangy local goat cheese spiked with fresh dill.
Blanched shell beans were tossed with shallots, scallions and a
pistachio vinaigrette. Farro came dressed with a fruity olive oil and
corn so fresh it was milky. And how could I forget the roasted carrot
and potato salad, or the egg salad that came to us courtesy of the
chickens we had just seen clucking around the coop? A single chocolate
chip cookie and a cold glass of
Ronnybrook milk put a cap on this simple but satisfying lunch. We
spent a while longer there on the farm, sometimes exploring, sometimes
doing nothing at all, but all the time realizing what a great day it had
been and what a great evening it would be.
Later we stepped back into the restaurant, now dressed in our Sunday
best. The hostess led us into the beautiful dining room we had seen
empty that very morning, now full of smiling faces. We got a glass of
Lieb Family Cellars Blanc de Blancs from Long Island to kick things
off with some celebratory bubbles. Choosing what to eat was easy since
during the summer about 80% of what the restaurant uses comes directly
from the farm, eliminating the need for a traditional menu of composed
dishes. Instead, you see a list of the incredible bounty of ingredients
that chef Dan Barber and his crew have gathered on that particular day.
Then you simply choose the number of course you want, sit back and
enjoy. But while I love such surprises, my mom sometimes does not.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that she’s not such a fan of some of
the strange things I eat. Imagine our delight when the staff listened
so closely to each of our likes and dislikes that it would turn out to
be as if the kitchen was cooking a meal customized just for us.
Not listed as part of the eight-course Farmer’s Feast ($125) were a
slew of amuses-bouche that would soon flood our table. At times the
staff could scarcely find room to put the plates down — a very good
problem to have — so we just had to keep eating. Such is life. The
first few bites included a melon slushie with coppa; and small tomatoes
and yellow squash skewered on a wiry “fence”. And any drink goes down
smoother with a pork chaser, I think, so the melon slush was a nice
start. And the tomatoes and squash were the first of many fruits and
vegetables we would have that night that had scarcely been manipulated
by the kitchen. Clearly, they had confidence in the natural flavors
that were coming out of the ground there.
Next we had little melon and watermelon balls dusted with black
pepper. Then came some warm bread and butter, a crusty, country-style sourdough
and a puck of soft, unsalted, respectively. Apparently Blue Hill’s
resident charcutier Adam Kaye had been MIA for a little while,
but they still scrounged up a nice selection of cured and smoked
Berkshire pig for us, much to my delight. We had
saucisson sec,
mortadella,
lonza, and a cute little block of heart and liver terrine sandwiched
between chocolate wafers. All were quite good, but the terrine was
especially memorable for its strong, unadulterated liver flavor. When I
gave this description to my mom, she noted that she was not suffering
from an iron deficiency on that particular evening and she politely
pushed hers my way. The tomato “burger”, though, was far too good for
my mom to sacrifice. In fact, that tiny sweet bun holding a mound of
tomato confit made her smile so big I was worried she might trick me —
“Hey, look over there! A relatively obscure chef nobody in the room
besides you would recognize!” ~ and steal mine as well.
A skewer of eggplant wrapped with pancetta, rolled in sesame seeds,
and fried was proof that even in fancy restaurants, there’s something
satisfying about food on a stick. The inside was warm and creamy while
the meaty exterior provided a bit of crunch. That was followed by “face
bacon”, their poetic name for rounds of crispy cured and smoked pig head
meat. And the last (but not least) of the fruits of the
Fry-o-lator were some potato chips threaded with sage, and
deep-fried chard leaves. These all tasted so good that I momentarily
considered asking if they could just deep-fry the rest of our dinner.
Sticks of warm flat bread came with salted butter and fresh ricotta
(each from the chef’s family’s farm in the
Berkshires), and an amazingly smooth eggplant purée. To season any
of the above there were tomato and arugula “salts” (dehydrated tomatoes
and arugula each ground to a fine powder and mixed with salt). We
dabbed at the somewhat bland ricotta, then quickly dispatched the very
good butter, only to find we had actually saved the best thing for
last. The eggplant purée, especially with a touch of tomato salt, stole
the show for me.
Our first actual courses arrived and my mother had the Tomato,
watermelon, mozzarella “cloud”, bacon, while I had just a touch of
Plate Envy. Her dish had fat wedges of both wonderfully ripe fruits, a
warm piece of fresh mozzarella with bits of basil in it, and a cool,
thick blob of mozzarella-flavored foam she dubbed the “cloud”. A
basil-spiked vinaigrette tied it together and a crown of bacon topped it
off. Under normal circumstances, my mom is a generous woman. With this
plate in front of her, alas, she did not share.
I don’t mean to imply that my dish — Bluefish with paddlefish
caviar, tomato, pig’s ear vinaigrette — left me unsatisfied by
comparison. Far from it. A small block of raw fish sat on slice of
heirloom tomato so thin it was translucent. The briny
paddlefish caviar provided the salt and the vinaigrette gave these
fresh and light flavors a bit of depth. Diced bits of pig ear added
to an otherwise traditional vinaigrette were responsible for the
unctuous, gelatinous texture in my mouth.
A younger guy came by with a large wooden tray full of heirloom
tomatoes. More than a dozen kinds, many of which I had never heard of
before, save the green zebra, pineapple, and persimmon varieties. My
mom’s eyes lit up and I was pretty sure she was thinking the same thing
I was — perhaps we should pry the tray out of this guy’s kung fu grip
and run for the hills. Oh, wait. These are the tomatoes we’ll be eating
in a just a few minutes, you say? Well, in that case…
Pretty soon that tray was replaced with Tomatoes, grilled stone
fruit, tomato sorbet, purslane, stracciatella. This seemed a
perfectly fair trade to me, since this dish was wonderful. The sweet
grilled nectarine and peach segments accented the slight tartness of the
tomatoes, and those warm fruits served on top of the cold sorbet made
for some really enjoyable temperature contrast. (I’m also pretty sure
my mom asked me twice: “Did you taste that sorbet yet? Wow!”)
And see, I haven’t even mentioned the creamy strands of torn mozzarella
yet. Yeah, I think you could say this was a good dish.
You could also say the next one — Celtuse with yogurt, pine nut
butter, yogurt foam — was the standout course of the meal. Who
would’ve thought I would be so enthusiastic about a variety of lettuce,
especially one that exhibits characteristics of that other oft-maligned
vegetable, celery? The knobby root of the vegetable was served raw,
simply shaved into ribbons that had a refreshing, almost watery crunch
reminiscent of celery. The leaves, meanwhile, were wilted and served
warm on a slate tile smeared with a thick, Greek-style yogurt and a
salted pine nut butter. Each component on the plate sang a nice tune of
its own, but the combination of them all was truly symphonic.
Next my mom had the Corn ravioli with tomato and basil sauce.
She didn’t say a word for the next several minutes — the woman was
focused — but “summertime on a plate” was how she eventually summarized
it. I quietly wondered if autumn were already on its way, as she had
used a piece of bread to dispose of every last morsel of whatever season
had been set in front of her.
Meanwhile, I had a glass of riesling (Weingut
Günther Steinmetz 1994 Mülheimer Sonnenlay Spätlese) that proved an
exceptional match for the Hudson Valley foie gras, roasted peach.
This was a simple ode to the Moulard duck, a species whose highest
calling is achieved in a few ounces of its buttery liver. The warm
chunk of roasted peach here was sweet, but not overwhelmingly so. The
wine, fruit, and foie made for a very happy combination.
The next edible show-and-tell brought eight different types of
heirloom beans, one of which my mom immediately identified as
Cherokee Trail of Tears beans (she’s grown them before, of course)
and all of which came with enthusiastic explanations. Enthusiasm about
beans — these guys clearly like working here, I thought to myself. As a
diner, you definitely feel that. And I, for one, really appreciate it.
In any case, the dish that featured those beans — Soft-cooked Blue
Hill farm egg with heirloom beans, chorizo broth — was quite good.
The runny yolk added viscosity to the thin but flavorful broth. And the
beans, cooked until tender but not mushy, were delicious.
A very close contender for the savory highlight of the meal was the
Blue Hill Berkshire pork chop, belly and boudin blanc, eggplant
puree. The Berkshire breed is, simply put, a pig that is raised to
taste like a pig. It bears practically no resemblance to the
plastic-wrapped “other white meat” at the local grocery. This pork chop
was cooked to a rosy pink on the inside and it was certainly the most
tender and flavorful such cut I’ve ever eaten. The belly had a crispy
top layer of skin that gave way to thin layers of meat and fat stacked
on one another like playing cards. And the
boudin blanc was nothing short of incredible. The texture was
almost like custard, and it had an intoxicating mélange of spices I
later found out included nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, coriander and white
pepper. I wondered who was happier — those pigs feasting outside or the
diners feasting inside? I think we were both winning.
My mom’s first stomach (i.e. the non-dessert one) was getting full,
but we only had one savory course left: “New World, Old World”
cheeses, some classic French cheeses paired up against their
artisanal American counterparts. That night’s match-ups were
Sainte-Maure vs.
Hoja Santa and
Brillat-Savarin vs. Andante Dairy
Minuet. Unlike the Beijing olympic games, America won both events
here. I generally prefer cheese unadorned, but the accompaniments —
Blue Hill honey comb and pickled ramps — were tasty even if the stale,
lifeless walnut bread was not.
The first dessert was a knockout — Roasted apricot, blackberries,
lemon verbena ice cream, elderflower gelee. The apricot in
particular almost defied description. It was hot, sweet, soft, and sour
all at once. The stewed blackberries were also warm, in contrast to the
cool backdrop provided by the ice cream and gelee. This dish was also
the first indication that pastry chef Alex Grunert makes a mean batch of
ice cream.
Then came the Yogurt mousse, corn ice cream, huckleberries, corn
sabayon, corn pâte de fruit. Corn hadn’t popped up in the savory
side of the meal for me, so I was happy to see it here. I was starting
to see that you don’t simply eat this guy’s ice cream, you luxuriate in
it . It is intensely creamy but immensely flavorful at the same time.
Here was a cob’s worth of fresh corn flavor condensed into a cold
mouthful. The mousse, the huckleberries, and the rest of the
accompaniments were all a great supporting cast, but this dish was, to
me, ultimately about the ice cream.
My mom is a chocolate fiend, but I had not clued the restaurant into
her mania. So I was thrilled to see our waiter emerge from the kitchen
with a candle in the Flourless chocolate cake, gooseberries,
strawberries, ginger ice cream. She quietly made a birthday wish
before blowing out the candle. I made a wish too, hoping the desserts
would just keep coming. But alas, this brownie-like cake was to be the
last dessert. It was rich and fudgy, and the tart gooseberries and the
incredibly sweet little strawberries were delicious. But again, I
couldn’t look past the great ice cream. I considered buying Chef
Grunert a drink, and perhaps inquiring as to whether or not he has any
unmarried daughters my age. But in the end I only asked for another
round of corn ice cream, which was happily provided. With corn flakes,
no less. I love that guy.
Floating around the room like a mobile garden, we had seen the
tisane cart go by a few times, so we co
l, eucalyptus, and probably twenty others I am
forgetting — for us to smell before picking the combination we wanted
for the infusion. I went with anise hyssop, fennel pollen, and lemon
verbena. And I really enjoyed it, especially with a touch of Stone
Barns honey melted in.
My mom had long since reached critical mass, so we asked for the
mignardises to be boxed up. In addition to the plums, watermelon
marshmallows, and passion fruit chocolate bon bons that were presented
on the slate, they packed a few strawberry macarons with chocolate
ganache, and they even gave us a jar of their strawberry preserves to
take home. (I’m eating them on warm buttered toast as I type. I am
happy.)
A cab was now on its way, but in the meantime our wonderful waiter
Adam chatted with us in the entryway. We talked of local goat cheese,
composting methods, and the ways in which Stone Barns continues to
become more and more self-sustaining. He was smiling, we were smiling,
and something struck me. An intangible Blue Hill ethos was everywhere
here. In the fields, the barns, and the kitchen, in the dining room and
ultimately on the plate, you could feel it even if you couldn’t pinpoint
it. To source ingredients here, the chef needs only to look out his
window. It’s so simple.
Why, then, is this symbiosis of farm and table so rare? I wanted to
ask Dan Barber this very question, but he was out of town that night
(kudos to chef de cuisine Josh Lawler, by the way, for holding down the
fort gracefully in his absence). Was Barber on vacation, you might
ask? Nope. He was at
Slow Food Nation in San Francisco, of course, doing his part to
counter those trends that champion technology over taste. Rebellious in
their simplicity, people like Chef Barber and places like Stone Barns
help ensure that ~ with any luck ~ the movement to lessen the distance
between farm and table will continue to not only survive, but flourish.
