The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food Page 21

  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.

  A GOURMET DISASTER

  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 tha
t 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.”

  I prepared a salad next, with Regina dei Ghiacci, one of the oldest varieties of iceberg lettuce that Jack had been able to secure the seeds for. “This is what iceberg should taste like,” I said, handing a leaf of the dark green lettuce to Bob. “It’s been dumbed down to white, tasteless nothing—but this is what it used to be.”

  Bob smelled the lettuce as if it were a fine wine, and then chewed it thoughtfully. “A little bitter,” he said.

  “That’s right—tell them that. Tell them this is the mother of iceberg, full of flavor, bitter and sweet, and the kind of variety we’re really excited about reintroducing.”

  I sent Bob out to the table with the salads and looked down at the order, tapping my pencil against my forehead. I saw I needed four more courses to complete the meal. I had planned on serving an egg from the farm, followed by Craig’s chicken and a taste of his Berkshire pork. I was still missing a fish course.

  Our fish supplier had phoned the day before, excited by a particular piece of bluefin tuna belly he was holding—if I was interested. A highly migratory fish, bluefin run in local waters near Long Island just once a year. On a whim, I convinced myself it was worth the expense to show off this magnificent fish to our diners. It had arrived that morning.

  Bob appeared with the clean salad plates and a boastful smile. “You’re killing them, chef,” he said. “Killing.” We were busy now, backed up with orders from the dining room. Captains lined the expediter’s pass to discuss their tables. I needed to decide on a fish course and move on, so I committed to the tuna belly.

  The belly cut was from the midsection (the toro), one grade removed from the area closer to the head, the o toro, or great toro, which is the most expensive piece of fish in the world. You wouldn’t be blamed for comparing it to the finest jamón ibérico: densely rich, with an equally stupefying penetration of sweet fat. Laying the belly across the cutting board, I sliced off a small piece and popped it in my mouth.

  I’ve often described toro as buttery rich, a description I considered apt until I read Jeffrey Steingarten’s much more evocative account of eating bluefin belly: “At first it was like having a second tongue in my mouth, a cooler one, and then the taste asserted itself, rich and delicately meaty, not fishy at all. The texture is easier to describe—so meltingly tender as to be nearly insubstantial, moist and cool, not buttery or velvety as people sometimes say. Have you ever tasted a piece of velvet?”

  I cut into a small, well-marbled section of the belly that had a deep, almost purple-red color. As I portioned it into long strips, the fat melted on my fingers. I seared the tuna quickly in a pan, plating it on a simple stew of spring onions and peas. The fish was the star, but I wanted the farm on the plate, too. I brought it to the expediting table. “Bob, this is local bluefin toro,” I said.

  “Hell, yes, it is!” he yelled, his face pink with excitement.

  I looked Bob in the eye. “Local bluefin,” I repeated, “with early summer vegetables from the farm.”

  Bob departed with the dishes. He returned several minutes later, sullen and confused, but feigning an air of nonchalance. “They’re deep in conversation,” he offered, and then abruptly left the kitchen. By the time he reappeared, with six tuna plates—the vegetables were picked at around the fish and mostly eaten, accentuating the untouched tuna—I knew what was wrong.

  There are times when a plate of food is allowed to leave the kitchen that should never have even been plated. A terribly overcooked steak, a congealed sauce, a mess of wilted greens—these slips happen in the rush of service, and although (or maybe because) the offending plates are rarely returned, chefs sleep a little less soundly. Call this slip an error of judgment rather than an error in execution. Or just call it moronic. Even though I tried to blame Bob—had he said anything strange or offensive to make them lose their appetite? “Like what?” he asked me innocently—I knew I had been the lone architect of this little disaster. You don’t wear the high ideals of sustainability on your sleeve—you don’t gloat about saving old, forgotten seeds of lettuce—and then serve a plate of bluefin.

  Because, like beluga sturgeon and Chinook salmon, bluefin tuna are going extinct.

  In the mid-1990s, ocean conservationist Carl Safina wrote an epic ode to the bluefin, following it throughout the world’s oceans and documenting its demise. It was a landmark book, hailed as a call to action on par with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the transformational exposé about the effects of pesticides on the environment.

  I read Song for the Blue Ocean as a line cook at David Bouley’s eponymous restaurant in New York City. I didn’t read it because I was a burgeoning environmentalist; I read it because I was working under Bouley. Along with a loose tribe of other chefs like Jean-Louis Palladin, Gilbert Le Coze, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Bouley is credited not just with reimagining fish cookery, which had remained classic and tired even among nouvelle cuisine chefs, but, more important, actually reinventing how fresh fish was handled, from the moment it was caught to the time it was delivered to the restaurant. Inspired by his obsession, I began reading cookbooks devoted to seafood, and then books about fishing and the oceans. Song for the Blue Ocean was the most memorable because it presented convincing evidence of the wholesale destruction of an entire species, one that was largely avoidable. The destruction had come about for many reasons, but none was more critical than the demand for tuna—especially the demand for toro—created by chefs.

  Not so long ago, the bluefin’s story was one of unfathomable abundance. That changed
with the international trade in seafood, made possible by advances in refrigerated air cargo. Once the Japanese (with the support of their booming 1980s economy) could reach across the world to satisfy their insatiable appetite for tuna, a fishing bonanza followed. The American sushi craze brought even greater demand, abetted by advances in fishing and distribution. Atlantic tuna populations dropped by up to 90 percent. Safina’s evidence was overwhelming: if we continued plundering the ocean for bluefin tuna, there would be nothing left within a generation. I knew all of that—or at least enough to know better—and yet I had gone ahead and served it in my kitchen.

  I rushed through the final courses as Bob relayed their waning enthusiasm (“I’m not going to lie to you, Chef: cat’s got their tongue”), and when it was finally over I invited the table back to see the kitchen. The only one to accept was Caroline Bates. She had barely arrived at the expediting table when she said, “I’m shocked you serve bluefin.”

  I had anticipated the charge and planned on simply apologizing, explaining the phone call from my supplier, the craziness of the service, and my lapse in judgment. I planned on being overly contrite.

  “It was local tuna,” I blurted out instead. Odd as it was to justify serving a fish that was near extinction, I dug in. “Off Long Island,” I said, with an air of You know, Caroline, I’m not sure you’re aware . . .

  She looked at me, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Bluefin are headed south down the Atlantic,” I said. (Which was true.) “These large schools become available for local fishermen.” (Which was mostly true.) “See, there are certain times of the year, when large schools are running, when it’s acceptable to catch them.” (Mostly not true.)

  “Really?” She looked skeptical now. “I don’t think that’s true.”