Blue Hill at Stone Barns
The first time I was ever called a foodie I didn't know how to react. I had never heard of the term, and to me, it rang with some mockery. Maybe because it sounds like doodie. I was dining at the now-defunct Opus Restaurant in L.A., ordering up a storm of wine and appetizers and entrees. And as the waiter scribbled furiously to get it all down, he broke into a wide grin and said, "I love you foodies! You guys know how to eat!!"
Today, I still don't know what a foodie is. I do not embrace nor abhor the label. I'm just a guy who eats a lot of Chipotle and cheap chinese food but every now and then like to patronize the very upper reaches of gourmet-dom where course after course comes on bizarre, oversized plates, wine is described as "complex, with a notes of citrus and earth", and the size of the final bill equally preposterous. Thus, I submit to you that, for $8, there is no burrito bowl in the galaxy that is tastier and more fulfilling than a Chipotle, and for $300, there is no five hour culinary experience more unique, imaginative, and exciting than Thomas Keller's Per Se overlooking Columbus Circle in New York's upper west side. It's all about adjusting for value.
It's probably been six or seven years since I've started eating at the latter type of restaurants. I've had more foie gras, truffles, caviar, foam, toro, and kobe than I can recall. Dare I say, some jadedness is creeping in. But I experienced something remarkable last week, a restaurant... no, a holistic establishment rather, that reminded me why I am occasionally willing to spend hundreds of dollars per meal and withstand the baffled mockery of those who cannot understand why.
It couldn't have been the first time I've been on a farm... it couldn't have... but I honestly cannot remember the last time (if ever?) I set foot on one. And so, armed with the essence of a brand new experience along with a foodie's inculcated obsession of all things food-related, we set about Stone Barns, across its vegetable fields, its pig pens, its mobile henhouse, its greenhouse, and its sheep pastures patrolled by a snowy white sheepdog named Stella.
"This place is disgustingly natural," I said to my fellow foodie friends. Under the awnings of a perfect baby blue sky, billowy strands of clouds, and 80 degrees worth of sunlit warmth lie the exact opposite of the dirty, noisy, smoggy, concrete infested city of Manhattan we just came from. Everywhere we looked were bright palettes of green and brown, the various shades of mother earth across different fields. The air smelled fresh and leafy, except near the pig pen where it smelled like total shit. And I mean that in the best way possible, because it smelled like organic shit, not Saturday-afternoon-Chinatown shit.
At the vegetable fields, our guide, Adriana, flagged down a nearby farmer, Zach, who had inadvertently walked into our group. Or more likely, our group was obnoxiously getting in the way of doing his job. "Zach, why don't you tell us what you're up to today," Adriana said. She looked at him with doe eyes and a big smile and if he said jump she'd probably ask how high. Clearly, farmers are a big deal at Stone Barns. They are like the Managing Directors of an investment bank or the Dons of a mafia. In one of the handouts, there is a donor list, since they are a non-profit organization. And at the very top, where the most generous donors doled out over $100,000 last year, is the category: Farmer.
Zach, bearded, rail thin, and wearing baggy overalls and a trucker hat, looked young, maybe late 20's. He speaks in a laid-back drawl, like a San Diego surfer. Something's wrong with his peas, he said. By this time in the season, they should be ye high, but right now they're only halfway there. He's concerned that the soil nutrients might not be making it into their roots, so he's now dumping a nutrient-rich layer directly on top of the peas and hoping that'll do the trick. "See? I told you soil was important," Adriana beamed.
When the idea to do this Insider's Tour was initially broached, I was skeptical. I envisioned a petting zoo, with knee-high kids running around making animal noises. C'mon, I'm too old for that, I whined. As it turns out, I had a delicious dose of irony awaiting me at the sheep pasture. There may be something carnal about it, but when one hears the baa-ing of sheep, there is an utterly uncontrollable urge to mimic it. As a result, our tour group, which contained zero children, by the way, were soon going "baaaa!!" and "meeeehhhhh!" so often that they blended in perfectly with the actual animals, present party included. Some of the sheep had colored markings that looked like Mayan symbols drawn on their backs, and Adriana explained those were marked to keep track of which ones have mated and which ones have not. It turns out that the rams are kept apart from the ewes and lambs for tight population control purposes, and the ones in front of us were all ewes and their young. I was shocked at the deep baritone of some of their cries. Imagine a stout 40 year old Army Sergeant making sheep noises, and that was roughly what a lot of them sounded like.
I think as an adult, and especially as a so-called foodie, I have a much greater capacity to appreciate what I experienced that day on the farm than when I was young. 10-year-old me would have held his nose, complained about having to walk so much, and been thinking about the Nintendo waiting at home rather than the glorious ecosystem in front of him. The Berkshire pigs, for example, besides tasting hella good, are excellent for tilling soil and rooting out weeds in preparation for new plantings. The Finn-Dorset sheep, when set upon a full blown meadow, will graze down the tall leafy grass, and then the farmers will rotate in Rhode Island red hens who like to peck at the shorter stuff as well as the grass worms that writhe around in the sheep dung.
This whole circle-of-life stuff is kind of mind blowing, especially after you learn that 90% of all the crap in supermarkets come from a handful of multi-national corporations that run industrial "farms" where cows and chicken are locked in dark, steel pens their entire lives, side by claustrophobic side, getting plumped with processed grain and standing knee-deep in their own feces until one day they can't anymore and collapse under their own weight, and are then slaughtered. Food, Inc, a recent documentary, really exposed the monster machine that modern day mass consumption has created. While it's easy to rail against those evil, greedy corporations and feel genuine concern about the treatment of those animals, the truth is we as the wealthiest generation to ever live on this planet has demanded its end product. We want ever plumper chicken breasts, ever plentiful cuts of beef, ever juicier red tomatoes all year long. We want to be able to walk into Wendy's and order a #6 combo, a spicy chicken sandwich with white breast meat and lettuce and tomatoes, literally 24/7/365. And their enduring profitability is the black and white proof that this is true.
Fighting this impossible fight against trillions of dollars of consumer demand is Dan Barber, Blue Hill, and Stone Barns's mission. It has been his life's work, as he puts it, to put culture back into agriculture. At Stone Barns, I finally made the connection between lip-service organic and what real organic means. I connected with the source, I saw the effort, the passion of the farmers that care for their livestock and crop as if they're their children, like Zach's furrowed brows as he tries to rehabilitate his stunted peas. The chicken cluck about, the sheep bleat loudly, and the pigs snort happily in the mud, all under the watchful eyes of farmers. Indeed, what is produced by Stone Barns is capital-O Organic. So much so that they don't even bother wasting money trying to certify themselves with whatever board that provides that organic-label rubber stamp.
Barber may be spearheading the most understated revolution of all time, a revolution without torches, coups, or beheaded kings. Of all the problems in this world, food probably does not register in the top 10 for most people. In New York City, every block has a restaurant or a pastry shop or a coffee spot. We're swamped with food. On Seamless Web, I have a virtual menu with hundreds of choices to pick from, all at my fingertips and can be delivered to my doorstep within 45 minutes. It's an absolute embarrassment of riches, something that my mother who grew up in a poor household in Taiwan in the '60s, who very rarely ate meat at all as a child because it was such an expensive treat, could not have imagined was possible in her wildest dreams.
But Barber correctly diagnoses this as a tragedy of the commons. We have taken science and used it to mutate nature, bio-transforming seeds to yield crops under any circumstance, genetically breeding obese animals, and applying operations management and economies of scale to create a soulless assembly line that disgorges food. And now we are fat, we are pale, and more often than anything else, we die of heart disease. What if we lived sustainable lives, starting with what we eat? Maybe we wouldn't eat so much of it, and what we do eat will actually taste better and treat our bodies better. We wouldn't need so many drugs to stay alive, we wouldn't need so much care to live longer lives, and we wouldn't need so much oil to crank all those machines. Good food, then, can actually alleviate our major problems in Medicare and peak oil and climate change in one fell swoop.
Blue Hill's main dining room is large and generously spaced, with a vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by exposed steel beams. In the center is a long-table showcasing the season's harvests, and sunlight splashed the room from the rustic windows all around. Just outside is a patio area and next to it is a small herb garden where the chefs are known to pop into to pluck what they need for the night's dinner service. In the distance is the vegetable field, a little harder to see, but as I sat down I wondered if farmer Zach's nitrogen-infused soil medicine was working to strengthen his peas. The whole affair felt a little like a fantasy, where the real world's troubles are far away and will never disrupt this agri-utopian bubble.
Ever since I was a child, I have abhorred vegetables. There were a few exceptions--spinach, Chinese water-cress, broccoli, pea shoots--but by and large, I am a card carrying meat-a-saurus. My parents would sometimes keep me at the dinner table until I finished my allotted vegetables, but I almost always won the waiting game and struck a deal ("Okay, fine, just eat two." / "One." / "One and a half." / "Deal. Let's get on with our lives.") or paid off my brother to eat them or shoveled them back onto the serving plate surreptitiously. If I had a dog growing up as yet another outlet, I would probably have succumbed to scurvy by now.
I'm not terribly proud of that, although you should give me some credit for my will. I bring it up because I try very hard to squash that feeling of impending vomit when I see nasty vegetables on my plate and eat every morsel during my high-end multi-course tasting extravaganzas. At Blue Hill, one of the very first amuse-bouche was "Vegetables From The Garden". Raw, inordinately fresh, glistening baby carrots, cucumbers, asparagus, and radishes were mounted on a row of nails and placed in front of us. I polished my share off without even a wince and licked my chops.
And that was merely the beginning. The veggies came, course after course. Raw asparagus. Fried asparagus. Steamed asparagus. Raw rhubarb. Pureed rhubarb. Rhubarb shooters. Greens from the greenhouse. I wolfed all of it down and am even salivating a little as I write this very paragraph. Who am I? My vegetarian grandmother? Is it because they are so organic, so pure that their flavors resembled nothing like the traditional pesticide drenched fare at the local supermarket, or is it because I bought into Dan Barber's unshakable belief that when one connects with their food, knows the story, sees it growing outside the window of the restaurant for Pete's sake, it just tastes so much better?
So yes. The vegetables were delicious--words never before uttered by my lips. But the highlight of the meal was the veal marrow sprinkled with crispy pancetta bits and shreds of some herb or another. A bone, cross-sectioned in half, was mounted on a torture-device-like contraption, yearning for our consumption. Provided along with the dish was a specialized spork, one side an ultra thin spoon that for digging into the marrow, and the other side a long two-pronged fork used to dislodge the more stubborn bits of bone that blocked access to the creamy, juicy fat within. Each mouthful was an orgy of marbleized texture, crunchy saltiness, and aromatic spices. Plus, it was a ton of fun to literally play with the food, stabbing at it with the spork, coaxing out the hidden juices, and eventually just taking the entire bone and slurping from it like a Neanderthal.
By the time I was struggling to finish dessert, it was 10:30pm. Five hours had vanished into thin air. Nominally, there were seven courses, but if you count all the amuse-bouches, the extra cheese course, and the bonus violet-themed cupcakes that the staff so generously provided after we told them we were celebrating our commencement from NYU Stern, it was probably double that figure. A bottle of blanc de noir Champagne, a crisp white Bordeux, and a velvety Beaujolais waltzed with our palates for the duration of the tasting. So supremely satisfied with the meal were we that when we got the bill, we noticed they actually undercharged us... and we pointed it out to them!
"Best meal of all time," someone declared. I don't know. It's not that I agree or disagree, but I believe trying to rank these experiences in an ordinal manner is like trying to shoehorn a square into a round peg. How do I compare this with my first gourmet meal at Gramercy Tavern where I was awed simply by the fact that they brushed the breadcrumbs off the table linen between courses and that the entire service staff knew a member of my party was a vegetarian and customized her experience for her taste? How do I compare this with a 30 course kaiseki-omakase at Urasawa, a tour de force that has permanently annihilated my ability to eat ordinary sushi because it gave me a taste of perfection? The underlying similarity between all the restaurants in my pantheon is that they all changed my life. They taught me new ways to look at the world, expanded not just my palate but my ken of what food can be and how it gets to the plate.
Blue Hill at Stone Barns does not serve bleeding edge molecular gastronomy like WD~50. It doesn't dazzle with the sheer opulence of a classic French cuisine like Daniel. It's not hip or fusion-y like David Chang's Momofuku empire. It is remarkably plain in this era of flashy celebrity kitchens and bad-boy chefs. Actually, 'plain' is a poor word. 'Pure' is better. "These are culinary preparations that retain the soul of the food," writes Ferran Adria, arguably the greatest living chef today, about Dan Barber, one of 2009 TIME magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. It may be that no restaurant on this planet, with the possible exception of Noma, uses fresher, more honest, and more sustainable ingredients, and furthermore retains and enhances their purity and locality, than Blue Hill. The star is not the chef, it is the farm, and the Hudson Valley that gives it life.
Welcome to the pantheon.
Today, I still don't know what a foodie is. I do not embrace nor abhor the label. I'm just a guy who eats a lot of Chipotle and cheap chinese food but every now and then like to patronize the very upper reaches of gourmet-dom where course after course comes on bizarre, oversized plates, wine is described as "complex, with a notes of citrus and earth", and the size of the final bill equally preposterous. Thus, I submit to you that, for $8, there is no burrito bowl in the galaxy that is tastier and more fulfilling than a Chipotle, and for $300, there is no five hour culinary experience more unique, imaginative, and exciting than Thomas Keller's Per Se overlooking Columbus Circle in New York's upper west side. It's all about adjusting for value.
It's probably been six or seven years since I've started eating at the latter type of restaurants. I've had more foie gras, truffles, caviar, foam, toro, and kobe than I can recall. Dare I say, some jadedness is creeping in. But I experienced something remarkable last week, a restaurant... no, a holistic establishment rather, that reminded me why I am occasionally willing to spend hundreds of dollars per meal and withstand the baffled mockery of those who cannot understand why.
***
In Westchester County, just 20 miles north of Manhattan, is an estate originally commissioned by the Rockefellers to be a dairy farm. In 2004, it was transformed into a non-profit agriculture center called Stone Barns, and its crown jewel/sugar daddy is Dan Barber's on-site restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns, which comprises of over 60% of the farm's revenues. I learned all of this during an Insider's Tour. For $15, you can be regaled with stories about the farm while being led around its 80 acre estate by a member of its staff for an hour and a half.It couldn't have been the first time I've been on a farm... it couldn't have... but I honestly cannot remember the last time (if ever?) I set foot on one. And so, armed with the essence of a brand new experience along with a foodie's inculcated obsession of all things food-related, we set about Stone Barns, across its vegetable fields, its pig pens, its mobile henhouse, its greenhouse, and its sheep pastures patrolled by a snowy white sheepdog named Stella.
"This place is disgustingly natural," I said to my fellow foodie friends. Under the awnings of a perfect baby blue sky, billowy strands of clouds, and 80 degrees worth of sunlit warmth lie the exact opposite of the dirty, noisy, smoggy, concrete infested city of Manhattan we just came from. Everywhere we looked were bright palettes of green and brown, the various shades of mother earth across different fields. The air smelled fresh and leafy, except near the pig pen where it smelled like total shit. And I mean that in the best way possible, because it smelled like organic shit, not Saturday-afternoon-Chinatown shit.
At the vegetable fields, our guide, Adriana, flagged down a nearby farmer, Zach, who had inadvertently walked into our group. Or more likely, our group was obnoxiously getting in the way of doing his job. "Zach, why don't you tell us what you're up to today," Adriana said. She looked at him with doe eyes and a big smile and if he said jump she'd probably ask how high. Clearly, farmers are a big deal at Stone Barns. They are like the Managing Directors of an investment bank or the Dons of a mafia. In one of the handouts, there is a donor list, since they are a non-profit organization. And at the very top, where the most generous donors doled out over $100,000 last year, is the category: Farmer.
Zach, bearded, rail thin, and wearing baggy overalls and a trucker hat, looked young, maybe late 20's. He speaks in a laid-back drawl, like a San Diego surfer. Something's wrong with his peas, he said. By this time in the season, they should be ye high, but right now they're only halfway there. He's concerned that the soil nutrients might not be making it into their roots, so he's now dumping a nutrient-rich layer directly on top of the peas and hoping that'll do the trick. "See? I told you soil was important," Adriana beamed.
When the idea to do this Insider's Tour was initially broached, I was skeptical. I envisioned a petting zoo, with knee-high kids running around making animal noises. C'mon, I'm too old for that, I whined. As it turns out, I had a delicious dose of irony awaiting me at the sheep pasture. There may be something carnal about it, but when one hears the baa-ing of sheep, there is an utterly uncontrollable urge to mimic it. As a result, our tour group, which contained zero children, by the way, were soon going "baaaa!!" and "meeeehhhhh!" so often that they blended in perfectly with the actual animals, present party included. Some of the sheep had colored markings that looked like Mayan symbols drawn on their backs, and Adriana explained those were marked to keep track of which ones have mated and which ones have not. It turns out that the rams are kept apart from the ewes and lambs for tight population control purposes, and the ones in front of us were all ewes and their young. I was shocked at the deep baritone of some of their cries. Imagine a stout 40 year old Army Sergeant making sheep noises, and that was roughly what a lot of them sounded like.
I think as an adult, and especially as a so-called foodie, I have a much greater capacity to appreciate what I experienced that day on the farm than when I was young. 10-year-old me would have held his nose, complained about having to walk so much, and been thinking about the Nintendo waiting at home rather than the glorious ecosystem in front of him. The Berkshire pigs, for example, besides tasting hella good, are excellent for tilling soil and rooting out weeds in preparation for new plantings. The Finn-Dorset sheep, when set upon a full blown meadow, will graze down the tall leafy grass, and then the farmers will rotate in Rhode Island red hens who like to peck at the shorter stuff as well as the grass worms that writhe around in the sheep dung.
This whole circle-of-life stuff is kind of mind blowing, especially after you learn that 90% of all the crap in supermarkets come from a handful of multi-national corporations that run industrial "farms" where cows and chicken are locked in dark, steel pens their entire lives, side by claustrophobic side, getting plumped with processed grain and standing knee-deep in their own feces until one day they can't anymore and collapse under their own weight, and are then slaughtered. Food, Inc, a recent documentary, really exposed the monster machine that modern day mass consumption has created. While it's easy to rail against those evil, greedy corporations and feel genuine concern about the treatment of those animals, the truth is we as the wealthiest generation to ever live on this planet has demanded its end product. We want ever plumper chicken breasts, ever plentiful cuts of beef, ever juicier red tomatoes all year long. We want to be able to walk into Wendy's and order a #6 combo, a spicy chicken sandwich with white breast meat and lettuce and tomatoes, literally 24/7/365. And their enduring profitability is the black and white proof that this is true.
Fighting this impossible fight against trillions of dollars of consumer demand is Dan Barber, Blue Hill, and Stone Barns's mission. It has been his life's work, as he puts it, to put culture back into agriculture. At Stone Barns, I finally made the connection between lip-service organic and what real organic means. I connected with the source, I saw the effort, the passion of the farmers that care for their livestock and crop as if they're their children, like Zach's furrowed brows as he tries to rehabilitate his stunted peas. The chicken cluck about, the sheep bleat loudly, and the pigs snort happily in the mud, all under the watchful eyes of farmers. Indeed, what is produced by Stone Barns is capital-O Organic. So much so that they don't even bother wasting money trying to certify themselves with whatever board that provides that organic-label rubber stamp.
Barber may be spearheading the most understated revolution of all time, a revolution without torches, coups, or beheaded kings. Of all the problems in this world, food probably does not register in the top 10 for most people. In New York City, every block has a restaurant or a pastry shop or a coffee spot. We're swamped with food. On Seamless Web, I have a virtual menu with hundreds of choices to pick from, all at my fingertips and can be delivered to my doorstep within 45 minutes. It's an absolute embarrassment of riches, something that my mother who grew up in a poor household in Taiwan in the '60s, who very rarely ate meat at all as a child because it was such an expensive treat, could not have imagined was possible in her wildest dreams.
But Barber correctly diagnoses this as a tragedy of the commons. We have taken science and used it to mutate nature, bio-transforming seeds to yield crops under any circumstance, genetically breeding obese animals, and applying operations management and economies of scale to create a soulless assembly line that disgorges food. And now we are fat, we are pale, and more often than anything else, we die of heart disease. What if we lived sustainable lives, starting with what we eat? Maybe we wouldn't eat so much of it, and what we do eat will actually taste better and treat our bodies better. We wouldn't need so many drugs to stay alive, we wouldn't need so much care to live longer lives, and we wouldn't need so much oil to crank all those machines. Good food, then, can actually alleviate our major problems in Medicare and peak oil and climate change in one fell swoop.
***
Codifying the above is the second half of this story. Dinner at Blue Hill was slated at 5:30pm, and by the time it rolled around, we were all pretty much whipped into a lather of anticipation. After changing out of our farm-romping garb and into formal dinner-attire, we gathered in the middle of the Stone Barns courtyard, and with the restaurant sitting quaintly beneath a setting countryside sun behind us, snapped a group photo. "Say, Farm Fresh!" the randomly recruited photographer said.Blue Hill's main dining room is large and generously spaced, with a vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by exposed steel beams. In the center is a long-table showcasing the season's harvests, and sunlight splashed the room from the rustic windows all around. Just outside is a patio area and next to it is a small herb garden where the chefs are known to pop into to pluck what they need for the night's dinner service. In the distance is the vegetable field, a little harder to see, but as I sat down I wondered if farmer Zach's nitrogen-infused soil medicine was working to strengthen his peas. The whole affair felt a little like a fantasy, where the real world's troubles are far away and will never disrupt this agri-utopian bubble.
Ever since I was a child, I have abhorred vegetables. There were a few exceptions--spinach, Chinese water-cress, broccoli, pea shoots--but by and large, I am a card carrying meat-a-saurus. My parents would sometimes keep me at the dinner table until I finished my allotted vegetables, but I almost always won the waiting game and struck a deal ("Okay, fine, just eat two." / "One." / "One and a half." / "Deal. Let's get on with our lives.") or paid off my brother to eat them or shoveled them back onto the serving plate surreptitiously. If I had a dog growing up as yet another outlet, I would probably have succumbed to scurvy by now.
I'm not terribly proud of that, although you should give me some credit for my will. I bring it up because I try very hard to squash that feeling of impending vomit when I see nasty vegetables on my plate and eat every morsel during my high-end multi-course tasting extravaganzas. At Blue Hill, one of the very first amuse-bouche was "Vegetables From The Garden". Raw, inordinately fresh, glistening baby carrots, cucumbers, asparagus, and radishes were mounted on a row of nails and placed in front of us. I polished my share off without even a wince and licked my chops.
And that was merely the beginning. The veggies came, course after course. Raw asparagus. Fried asparagus. Steamed asparagus. Raw rhubarb. Pureed rhubarb. Rhubarb shooters. Greens from the greenhouse. I wolfed all of it down and am even salivating a little as I write this very paragraph. Who am I? My vegetarian grandmother? Is it because they are so organic, so pure that their flavors resembled nothing like the traditional pesticide drenched fare at the local supermarket, or is it because I bought into Dan Barber's unshakable belief that when one connects with their food, knows the story, sees it growing outside the window of the restaurant for Pete's sake, it just tastes so much better?
So yes. The vegetables were delicious--words never before uttered by my lips. But the highlight of the meal was the veal marrow sprinkled with crispy pancetta bits and shreds of some herb or another. A bone, cross-sectioned in half, was mounted on a torture-device-like contraption, yearning for our consumption. Provided along with the dish was a specialized spork, one side an ultra thin spoon that for digging into the marrow, and the other side a long two-pronged fork used to dislodge the more stubborn bits of bone that blocked access to the creamy, juicy fat within. Each mouthful was an orgy of marbleized texture, crunchy saltiness, and aromatic spices. Plus, it was a ton of fun to literally play with the food, stabbing at it with the spork, coaxing out the hidden juices, and eventually just taking the entire bone and slurping from it like a Neanderthal.
By the time I was struggling to finish dessert, it was 10:30pm. Five hours had vanished into thin air. Nominally, there were seven courses, but if you count all the amuse-bouches, the extra cheese course, and the bonus violet-themed cupcakes that the staff so generously provided after we told them we were celebrating our commencement from NYU Stern, it was probably double that figure. A bottle of blanc de noir Champagne, a crisp white Bordeux, and a velvety Beaujolais waltzed with our palates for the duration of the tasting. So supremely satisfied with the meal were we that when we got the bill, we noticed they actually undercharged us... and we pointed it out to them!
"Best meal of all time," someone declared. I don't know. It's not that I agree or disagree, but I believe trying to rank these experiences in an ordinal manner is like trying to shoehorn a square into a round peg. How do I compare this with my first gourmet meal at Gramercy Tavern where I was awed simply by the fact that they brushed the breadcrumbs off the table linen between courses and that the entire service staff knew a member of my party was a vegetarian and customized her experience for her taste? How do I compare this with a 30 course kaiseki-omakase at Urasawa, a tour de force that has permanently annihilated my ability to eat ordinary sushi because it gave me a taste of perfection? The underlying similarity between all the restaurants in my pantheon is that they all changed my life. They taught me new ways to look at the world, expanded not just my palate but my ken of what food can be and how it gets to the plate.
Blue Hill at Stone Barns does not serve bleeding edge molecular gastronomy like WD~50. It doesn't dazzle with the sheer opulence of a classic French cuisine like Daniel. It's not hip or fusion-y like David Chang's Momofuku empire. It is remarkably plain in this era of flashy celebrity kitchens and bad-boy chefs. Actually, 'plain' is a poor word. 'Pure' is better. "These are culinary preparations that retain the soul of the food," writes Ferran Adria, arguably the greatest living chef today, about Dan Barber, one of 2009 TIME magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. It may be that no restaurant on this planet, with the possible exception of Noma, uses fresher, more honest, and more sustainable ingredients, and furthermore retains and enhances their purity and locality, than Blue Hill. The star is not the chef, it is the farm, and the Hudson Valley that gives it life.
Welcome to the pantheon.
