The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (24 page)

I had to leave for Blue Hill in the city late that afternoon. Eduardo told me he was desperate to see New York and our sister restaurant, and though he would love to spend more time with Craig, he asked if he and Lisa could accompany me on the ride to the city. He shook Craig’s hand and wished him luck. “Remember,” he said gently, “we’re not raising geese. We’re not their caretakers. We
have
geese. They raise themselves.”

It was just before 4 p.m. when we arrived at Washington Place. We planned on a 5:30 p.m. dinner at the bar—allowing enough time for Lisa to show Eduardo around the West Village.

“Eduardo had his camera out, snapping pictures every few seconds of the ‘real New York policemen’ and the ‘real New York basketball players’ on the West Fourth Street courts,” she recounted later. When they finally returned to Blue Hill, Eduardo was still buzzing with excitement. They sat for a drink at the bar, and Lisa asked if he was ready to start the meal.

“Lisa,” he said to her gently, “right now all I want is a
real
American meal. I want a hamburger.”

They left a note for me—“Off for a walk,” it said—and crossed the street to the Waverly Diner. Eduardo ordered a hamburger, fries, and a Coke.

“He loved it,” Lisa told me after they’d both returned to Spain. “He loved everything about it. He loved the bad lighting and the loud music. He loved ordering at the counter and waiting for our number to be called. He loved having to fill his own paper cup from the soda dispenser. He loved the roasted peanuts, still in the shell. But mostly he loved his burger. He licked his fingers as he ate it. ‘The food Dan makes isn’t bad,’ he said. ‘But this is really
delicious.’”

It was the happiest she had ever seen him.

Craig slaughtered the geese the following December. José soaked the livers quickly in milk and salt to remove any trace of blood and brought them to the meat station for the evening’s service. The cooks gathered around, staring at the liver lineup as if they were artifacts from an archaeological dig. They were the size of Ping-Pong balls.

“Failed gras,” one of the cooks said, breaking the silence. José shook his head in disappointment as a line cook patted him on the back, a gesture that said,
We’ll get ’em next time, son.

Craig has been raising geese for several years since then, and, not sharing my Ahab-like obsession with natural foie gras, he’s been untroubled by the consistently small livers. He likes geese because they work well in his animal rotation on the pastures, and because they’re profitable. Having lost hundreds of chickens and turkeys to coyotes, he never adopted Eduardo’s advice to remove the electric fencing and activate their built-in ability to gorge in the fall. “It wouldn’t make them eat more,” he told me. “Around here, it will just get them killed.”

Meanwhile, back in Extremadura, Eduardo’s geese have faced tougher times over the years. Predation from wild animals has increased significantly,
wiping out larger percentages of the flock. And more recently, global climate change has meant milder winters. Without a jolt of cold to jump-start their natural instincts, the geese are less inclined to gorge during those critical weeks.

“It’s very strange, this laid-back attitude of theirs,” Eduardo told me. “It’s lazy. They sort of just sit around like—what’s the expression? American couch potato? Except they don’t really eat.”

Nonetheless, the last I heard from Eduardo, he was looking to sell his foie gras in South America, possibly even the United States. He’s also methodically downloading what he knows of natural livers to his two children.

“Every day,” he told me. “But no more than fifteen minutes. I tell them stories, mostly, about the geese, about the
dehesa
, about their grandparents. More than that, they will resent me for burdening them. The key, I think, is to tell them something new, and to do it every day.”

I have to admit that after five years of failed gras, I started to lose hope of ever carrying on Eduardo’s tradition. But then one afternoon I heard that Chris O’Blenness, Craig’s new assistant, was headed out to a farm in Kansas to investigate a heritage breed of goose called Toulouse. Less domesticated than the modern breed we had been raising, the geese were purportedly large and fiercely protective, their natural instincts more firmly intact. The first time I got a glimpse of them, in the back pastures at Stone Barns three months later, I thought there was a striking resemblance to Eduardo’s geese.

Still, it wasn’t until later that same year that my excitement returned in earnest. Chris approached me in September, just as the days turned cooler. What did I think of letting the geese out of their fences to roam the back pasture? Of course I thought it was a great idea. But Chris really wanted to know if I’d be willing to pay if the coyotes got to the flock.

“Pay in advance?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “Pay to play.” I said I would.

The next week, with no fence for protection, the geese roamed the back pasture. I don’t think I was reading into things when I observed a certain swagger I hadn’t noticed before. If freedom wasn’t making them hungry, it at least had kick-started a confidence gene.

Chris furtively spread some corn feed on the grass in random places around the field, to encourage their appetites. “They come on it suddenly,” he told me after a few days of trialing the new method, “and all hell breaks loose. They really believe that they’ve discovered spoils from a hunt.”

In early January, Chris picked three of the largest geese for the first slaughter of the year. They were enormous birds, to José’s delight. He went to work. Foie gras? No, not really. Instead of Ping-Pong balls, we got small lightbulbs. They were strikingly red and looked distinctive, almost regal compared with previous years, with streaks of yellow fat clinging to the liver. It wasn’t integrated, but the lobes appeared
fattier,
more in line with foie gras.

Izzy didn’t agree. After I described the livers to him on the phone, he said, “Let me tell you: it is not foie gras. Call it a nice liver. Call it a delicious, lovely liver. Call it anything you want, just don’t call it foie gras, because it’s not.”

Instead of our usual preparation—a quick sauté, which meant enough for only a few lucky diners—I decided we would stretch the livers by preparing them as pâtés. They were preserved in small glass jars and sealed, as hundreds of years of culinary tradition dictates, by melting some of the excess goose fat and pouring a thick layer of it over the pâté. A few days later, I dug my spoon deep into one of the jars and, without giving it any thought, spread the meat and the glistening fat onto a warm slice of bread.

Some of the most memorable moments as a chef—at once revelatory and revealing—are provoked by tasting something delicious. This was one of them. Though I want to say I was brought back to the tiny restaurant in Monesterio where I first tasted Eduardo’s foie gras, I wasn’t really. The liver
didn’t taste as sweet, nor did it benefit from Eduardo’s natural seasoning in the field (I admit to adding some salt and pepper).

But the flavor was nonetheless deep and pronounced, and the fat itself was unctuous and not the slightest bit greasy. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, it tasted more assertive, more sure of itself, than previous seasons’ livers. And more of its place, too.

Izzy was right after all. My blind pursuit of foie gras had ignored something fundamental in all of this: why had I insisted on calling it foie gras? I had, unwittingly but assuredly, set the geese up to disappoint us. It was me who had failed the geese, not the other way around. Demanding that the livers live up to the archetype, or to a standard based on the riches of the
dehesa
, was not only impossible, it was a fool’s errand. The ham we make from Craig’s pigs at Stone Barns is delicious. Is it
jamón ibérico
? No, it’s not, but we don’t call it
failed ham
because of it.

Looking at the pâté, I was reminded again of the brilliance of that well-marbled slice of ham Eduardo held up to the light. In a way, both represent what’s possible when gifts from nature become filtered through culinary tradition.
Jamón,
as with good pâté—as with almost anything produced by good cooking—relies on simple craft, attained and applied. And yet sometimes, with any luck, it transcends craft. It becomes more than the sum of its parts.

In the same way that Eduardo stimulated the geese’s consciousness, a recipe or a meal or even a single plate of food can stimulate our own consciousness—about the animals we eat, the system that supports their diet, and the kind of cuisine a chef needs to create to support it.

The Heart Is Not a
Pump

T
HERE
IS
A
PHENOMENON
in nature called the edge effect. The edge is where two distinct elements in nature meet and thrive. A continent’s coastlines are a good example. The most productive and diverse habitats for marine life are where the vast sea finally meets the shore. These edge zones are hotbeds of energy and material exchange, thriving with life in a way that makes the deep sea or a large stretch of land seem dull by comparison. “Fragile ecosystems,” as these areas are often called, is something of a misnomer. They are fragile because they’re so full of life.

Think of the area at the perimeter of an open field, just before the thick forest begins. There’s a flurry of extra activity and growth in that little bit of land. It’s not beautiful growth; bushes, brambles, and big, rough ferns are fixtures on the perimeters, and they stand in somewhat unflattering contrast to a picturesque field of tall grass. But these corridors, unsightly as they may be, are nonetheless highly diverse and productive.

I first noticed the edge effect as a young boy at Blue Hill Farm, observing the fields from my perch on the Massey Ferguson tractor. Beginning to mow a new field meant a tortuously long first loop around the perimeter, which also meant more time to study the edges, the demarcation between what was to be mowed for hay—sweet, supple grass, standing tall and neat at attention—and what was essentially wild: a stretch of not quite forest, a no-man’s-land of messy vines and wild berry plants. It was forest and field bumping into each other.

I’ve since learned from Klaas that this bicycle lane of semiwilderness,
where both ecosystems interact and flourish, is recognized in ecology as an ecotone. But back then, as we circled the field and I stared down from my perch on the tractor, I imagined grass and forest engaged in a heroic turf battle for continuity and control.

There is a restaurant equivalent of an ecotone. Known as the expediter’s table, or the pass, it’s a narrow landing pad between the dining room and the kitchen, the meeting place of two very different ecosystems. The pass is the demarcation line between the calm of the dining experience and the relative chaos of the kitchen.

The orders for your food arrive here first, and these orders are organized and then communicated to the kitchen. As such, the pass is often filled with tension, and, in a sense, it’s the site for that same kind of heroic battle for continuity and control I imagined as a kid—this time between the back of the house and the front of the house.

Several years ago, a group of writers and editors from
Gourmet
magazine booked a table for dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It is rare and exhilarating, and frightening, too, to cook for such a concentration of powerful food writers. I remember standing at the expediter’s table, waiting for their ticket and thinking about how badly I wanted to impress
Gourmet.
What chef didn’t? The editor, Ruth Reichl, was considered the high priestess of modern American cuisine, a woman whose critiques and observations helped mold a generation of chefs and food writers.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns, at that point, had not made much of an impression on Ruth. Though she had dined at Stone Barns soon after we opened—a little too soon, as we were unsure of ourselves, and the dishes lacked any kind of daring—we were never mentioned or reviewed in the magazine. I heard through a mutual acquaintance that Ruth had wished the meal had felt more farmlike—less in the mold of high-end city restaurants and more celebratory
of what was harvested around us. Having met her in the kitchen after the meal, I didn’t need to hear it secondhand: we had underwhelmed her. Here, two years later, through her surrogates, was a second chance.

Philippe Gouze, the general manager of Stone Barns since our opening, chose table 45, a freestanding table with an unobstructed view of the main vegetable field. And he assigned Bob, a wild card of a waiter—personal and engaging, but also erratic and, from time to time, inexplicably odd. One night, he alternately charmed and offended two tables right next to each other. One was a small group of older Westchester women. For that evening, Bob became a young southern gentleman with a drawl (he was from Teaneck, New Jersey) who had the women so enamored, they left a large tip and asked Philippe if he could be hired out for parties. At the next table, he enraged a couple of young Brooklyn hipsters—the table complained to Philippe that he wouldn’t stop interrupting their meal with stories of his work as a conceptual artist in Williamsburg and asked to be left alone to finish their meal in peace. Bob obliged, and then, when he delivered the check, challenged one of them to a fistfight in the courtyard.

But we were so short-staffed the evening of the
Gourmet
editors’ visit that Bob was the best choice. He knew the food and seemed to be gaining confidence, becoming less erratic, more even-keeled. Philippe promised me he would be at Bob’s side the entire evening to make sure everything went smoothly. When Bob followed the ticket into the kitchen to meet me at the expediter’s table, Philippe was behind him, an arm’s length away, like a secret service detail.

“Okay, they’re already thrilled,” Bob said, bouncing up and down at the other side of the table. “Love the view, love that they don’t have to choose from a menu. Blown away. They want it all.”

Eating at Blue Hill at Stone Barns means giving up the freedom to choose your food. We don’t offer menus, at least not the traditional kind. We
abandoned them out of frustration, soon after that night when Craig Haney’s grass-fed lamb chops sold out just as the dinner service had begun.

In place of an à la carte system, we started serving only multicourse menus, in the style of a Japanese
omakase
sushi bar: it’s the chef’s choice, built around the day’s harvest, and you don’t know what you’ll be getting until it arrives at the table. If you think that sounds a little precious and high-handed, you are not alone. Many guests felt that way, and still do. It’s one thing for a master sushi chef to pick the day’s best catch. It’s another to have the day’s best vegetables and cuts of meat picked for you.

Or is it? The sushi chef is not just picking the freshest catch. He’s in a conversation with you, often literally, analyzing what you’d most enjoy (and sizing up what he deems you’re worthy of enjoying). If you’ve ever visited a sushi bar and sat near a group of Japanese aficionados, you’ve likely seen the yawning divide between your offerings and theirs.

At Blue Hill at Stone Barns, captains like Bob perform this kind of detective work with each table. They ask questions about restrictions and allergies, and then about preferences and aversions. A conversation begins, and with any luck the captain will get a sense of the table—whether they’re adventurous and, if so, how adventurous. Are they Level I adventurous, which for the kitchen means they would enjoy something like braised lamb belly? Or are they Level III adventurous, which means they’ll not only try anything—like lamb brains—but they expect it to be a part of their meal? Would they prefer a menu heavy on farm offerings, or are they looking for what are considered luxury items (foie gras, lobster, and caviar, which get written on their ticket in the kitchen as “FLC”)? Given the choice, is it the kind of table that would prefer a just-dug carrot from the farm or a filet mignon?

There have been questions about the fairness of such a quixotic approach. A blogger once called it “gastronomic profiling”—making assumptions about what people want to eat based on a captain’s drive-by impression—and there’s merit to the accusation. But overall, we’re more successful than we
were under the old system. Freed of responsibility, diners are spared the anxiety of making a potentially bad menu selection. (Why did I have the salmon when I knew I should have ordered the lamb?) If a course falls short of their expectations, there’s no guilt, no self-flagellation at having picked the wrong thing. I swear it makes our diners less critical.

More relaxing for the diner; mayhem for the kitchen. A party of four might have one Level III diner and one conservative diner. The other two might be allergic to shellfish, and one of the two might want no meat at all (but only one fish course, salmon preferred). The ticket arrives at the expediter’s table—that edge between calm and chaos—and sometimes, in the course of trying to predict what the diner most wants, you write a menu with new dishes and spontaneous combinations of flavors that seem to flourish in the inspiration and tension of the moment. David Bouley, a chef who often prepares impromptu menus for special guests, calls this “kicking the ball around.” He claims his most lasting dishes come out of the moments when his back is up against a wall.

Other times, in the pressure-filled seconds you have to decide a table’s menu, you choose a dish that feels right in the moment but ends up proving disastrously wrong.

We hadn’t yet abandoned the printed menu the night of
Gourmet
’s visit, but we were leaning that way—more gastronomic profiling, where the waiter would ask if the table wouldn’t prefer putting aside their personal selections and “let the chef cook for you.”

Which is why the
Gourmet
table’s ticket arrived at the pass with six blank lines for me to fill in their six savory courses. Below this, Bob typed the notes. “Adventurous, Level III. Love vegetables. Love anything from the farm. No allergies. Want to be wowed.”

It was the “Want to be wowed” flourish that reminded me to worry about
Bob. I looked up at him. “Bob,” I said, “no bullshit, right? We’re playing this straight.”

“Hell, yes,” he said, standing tall and squinting his eyes. “Straight like an arrow.” He chopped his right hand through the air and disappeared into the dining room. I swore I’d heard him say “like an arrow” in a southern accent.

I began writing their succession of courses on the ticket. It was a muggy early July evening, so I started with a green gazpacho made from all the green farm vegetables. I listed the vegetables for Bob, who dutifully recorded them on his notepad. “Jade cucumbers, Zephyr zucchini, Malabar spinach . . .” I wanted to nail the theme from the first course, which was, back then, really the theme of Blue Hill at Stone Barns—resurrecting lost varieties and flavors and incorporating them into a new kind of modern cuisine.

“We’re all about the farm,” I said to Bob, my voice straining like a television evangelist. “But more than just a farm-to-table restaurant, we’re committed to celebrating ignored varieties of vegetables, the ones that have been saved for generations, the kinds that were bred for flavor; the ones that have been all but lost to our big food chain.” Bob scribbled furiously as I ladled the gazpacho into the bowls. Philippe, just behind him, raised an eyebrow but said nothing as Bob excitedly counted out loud the number of farm vegetables in the soup.

One of the longtime senior writers at the table, Caroline Bates, would report to Ruth on Monday morning—I was sure of it. The farm, and our message, would be infused into every course. And I would not be accused of underplaying my hand.

“Soup equals home run,” Bob announced, proudly showing me the empty bowls. “The woman at the head of the table said she would just love it if the whole meal were made with farm stuff.”