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06/22/2007 Archived Entry: "Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Plus Amusing Other Web Sites"

These days, chefs like to say their food is “market-driven,” or “ingredient-driven,” and that their goal is to let these seasonal, local ingredients “express” themselves.

It’s all lip service, to put it very politely. On the plate, what you find are fourteen ingredients manipulated into three bites. Not one ingredient is distinguishable. Nothing “expresses itself” except the chef’s overblown ego. This food is all about chef’s showing off, not chef’s showing off gorgeous, seasonal ingredients.

Daniel Barber is that very rare chef who does what the other ones say they are doing but don’t. And to laud him even more highly, he is modest about it.

I know Daniel since before he became a restaurant chef. Courtesy of Joan Hamburg, my former “radio wife,” whose son John is a childhood friend of Daniel, I got a glimpse of his genius when he was just starting out and his goal was to be a private chef catering small dinner parties. He was aiming for less stressful life than restaurant chefs generally have. That’s not what he got. It takes Herculean effort to make things look simple, and he now operates two restaurants.

Soon enough, he opened Blue Hill, a small place at 75 Washington Place, just off Washington Square in Greenwich Village. It was an immediate sensation. The revelatory dish I will never forget (I have no idea if it is on the menu anymore) is poached duck. Who’d ever heard of such a thing?! He turned duck flesh into a velvety, almost custard intensity of duck. It was a new expression of duck, but only duck. It wasn’t about sauce or spice or bouncing it off a dozen other ingredients.

Now, in addition to the original Blue Hill, named for his grandmother’s farm in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, he has earned acclaim at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant on the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, near Tarrytown, up the Hudson River, about 40 minutes (without traffic) north of Times Square.

The Stone Barns are gorgeous Normandy (France)-style constructions built in the 1930s. According to the official Rockefeller line, they were built to teach Rockefeller children about agriculture and where their food comes from. That is exactly their mission today, but you don’t have to be a Rockefeller heir to enjoy the property. On the other hand, come with a well-stuffed wallet or good line of credit.

For the most part, Dan Barber’s cuisine starts on this farm. David Rockefeller has made a $30 million investment to make it an extraordinary farm. There are pigs and chickens and sheep. There are gardens and greenhouses, although Dan does fill in with produce from farmers as far away as south Jersey. It’s obvious that tropical fruits and citrus must be grown even further south, like Florida or the Caribbean.

Dan takes simplicity to an extreme, which isn’t to everyone’s taste. One of my friends thought I might find the food “too minimalist.” As someone who enjoys asparagus best standing in an asparagus patch with a pen knife, cutting them out of the ground and munching on them raw, it is hard to get too minimal for me.

Speaking of raw vegetables, one course we had, just a nibble, an amuse bouche if you will, consisted only of the tiniest shoots of bulb fennel and marble-sized white turnips. They were raw and served impaled on pins sticking out from a block of wood. I didn’t ask, so this may not be true, but my sense was that they were washed in salt water and allowed to air dry. I could faintly taste salt. I could strongly taste the power of these tiny vegetables. They were proof that good agriculture is the beginning of good eating.

Salt for its own sake was actually one of the other teaser courses – a small dish of orange carrot-flavored salt and another of green spinach-flavored salt. The dishes came out with whole grain bread that we were instructed by our captain to season with the salt. Both salts tasted like seaweed to me, but they certainly were interesting to try, and a provocation to table conversation. I thought, for the fun of it, it was a good idea, even if I didn’t enjoy eating it as much as, for instance, the strawberry parfait dessert.

I would like to say Barber is best on vegetables. Another course introduced us to a vegetable that we’d never even heard of, the stem of a lettuce relative. It is called celtuse, and we each got half of a stem, cut the long way and about six inches long, first poached then put on the grill. It had grill marks to prove it. Served on a slab of slate with a smear of toasted pine nut paste, strained yogurt (from milk produced at Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires), and a yogurt foam, the stem was sweet and nutty, a flavor that was heightened by pairing it with the sweet and nutty pine nut paste, and counter-pointed by the slightly acid yogurt. Our captain paired it with a sweet Hungarian Tokay, a startling play of flavors that elicited a “Who would have thought?” from all of us.

As amazing and revelatory as the vegetable dishes were, I left the table with two indelible meat-based memories. If you told me I was going to love paper thin, crackling crisp chocolate wafers sandwiching a pork liver mousse (not, by the way, foie gras, as has been reported elsewhere), I would have told you that you don’t know my taste. And Dan turned out the most astonishing pork chop I have ever eaten. It was from the Blue Hill pigs, which are much better fatted than American pork is today, and it showcased Dan’s precision cooking. In this case, that means it was cooked sous vide which is French for under vacuum, in a plastic bag at very low temperature. Like the duck I remember from his Greenwich Village restaurant, it was moist and velvety. It came with a slice of guanciale, Italian for pork cheek, a gelatinous cut of which you want only a few bites. Dan provided just enough.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns is that rare restaurant I can’t wait to return to. (I am way too jaded for my own good.) Not only was the food sensational, but the service, although formal and correct, is not at all stuffy or pretentious. Our captain treated us like we were guests in his home, and he was wonderfully knowledgeable about all the food. And you willhave questions.

The tasting menu is $110. I don’t usually care to order tasting menus, preferring instead normally portioned three or four course menus, but we did in this case so we could experience as much of Dan’s magic as possible. Wine pairings for each course, which I strongly suggest you take, is an additional $65.
Blue Hill at Stone Barns, 630 Bedford Road, Pocantico Hills, N.Y.; 914-366-9600

Depression Cooking
For a little joy and hope, not to mention a recipe you might want to make, watch Clara, a 91-year-old Italian-American woman, cook dishes that her family ate during the Great Depression.

Depression Cooking, Episode 1

Depression Cooking, Episode 2

Depression Cooking, Episode 3

Not Eating Out in NYC
As I myself am not eating out in New York City very much, I was thrilled to find a blog that is all about not eating out. Cathy Erway mounts very simple recipes on her website, quick and easy delicious things you would really make for dinner. I am an admirer of such work, good work, worthy food writing, as opposed to the know-nothing opinionated verbiage of most food bloggers who are eating out in NYC. I enjoy Cathy’s website so much that I wanted to meet her. It delights me to see a young person who understands home cooking and the continuity of the home kitchen.

To that end, I invited her out to dinner. I thought it might be a treat. She refused. She reminded me that she is “not eating out in NYC.” She says she drinks out because if you are young and social in New York you have to at least go to a lounge, but she doesn’t go to restaurants. So I invited her to my house for dinner. However, I couldn’t cook a real dinner because I am busy testing and retesting recipes for the two books I am working on. Cathy got stuck (okay, maybe not so stuck) with the cheese blintzes that I was playing with that day, some reject chocolate rugulach, and some excellent (if I say so myself) hamantaschen with a chocolate filling that I have developed.. It wasn’t a menu, but it was something to eat. She understood, or at least politely said she did.

We enjoyed each other’s company. My only regret about the evening was that she took a hideous picture of me that is now on her website. She also took a nice picture of my blintzes. Later, through email, she interviewed me

Click on www.noteatingoutinny.com for her site.

Click on Here’s Lookin at You for the Arthur Schwartz interview with the horrible candid picture of me in my kitchen.