“In talking to farmers I always learn something about the food, about what it means to be a farmer,” said Peter Hoffman, chef/owner of Savoy. “There’s a wonderful sense of discovery. You get a visceral sense of the progression of the season, a palpable sense that you’re cooking the last tomato of the season. You’re much more involved with food when you’re buying direct.”

It is sometimes easy to forget in New York City that about a quarter of the state’s land is farmed, and that crops like apples place New York in the number two producing position in the country. Increasingly though, chefs are taking notice: according to Gabrielle Langholtz, spokesperson for the Council on the Environment of New York City’s Greenmarket, more than 100 restaurants around the city use one of the 33 markets (six more will open this year) as food sources. And this number does not account for the farmers who deliver directly to chefs, or use other organizations such as Farm to Chef Express. The relation between the farmers who grow the food and the chefs who cook it is becoming stronger every season.

Buying directly from farmers with whom they have developed relationships allows chefs to know exactly the quality of the products they are getting, as opposed to depending on choices made by distributors. Browsing around a greenmarket also allows them to choose from different producers exactly what is at its peak on any particular day. Not to mention the dialogue with the farmers, which can educate chefs in a way that makes them even better cooks.

Selecting ingredients that way impacts the way chefs are cooking. “Chefs’ cuisines and their menus are based on ‘what have you got,’” said Guy Jones, owner of Blooming Hill Farm. “They call and ask me what I have and devise their menu around that. David [Pasternak] does all the ordering for his restaurants. He and I have a conversation a couple of time a week. I tell him what’s ready, what’s going to be ready. David has a house outside of the city with a big garden and I supply him with plants. So he sees what’s ready in his garden and knows it’s going to be ready in the fields too.”

“Conversation” is also the word Barber, chef/owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, chooses to describe the way he works with farmers, which then becomes a story he tells his customers by serving them locally grown food.

“We’re able to tell the waiters, thus by extension our customers, our story,” Barber explained. “That’s the difference between getting products flown in from Mexico. Customers know where their food comes from.
“Along the food chain price precedes where something is grown, price is the determining factor. When you’re able to tell a story, then people eating have the impression that their food is fresher, that they contribute to the local economy. All that makes my food better. As a chef I can’t supply that with techniques alone.”

Quality is ultimately the decisive factor in the chef/farmer relation; a quality for which chefs are not afraid to pay perhaps a bit more than they would if they purchased produce flown-in from out of the state or even out of the country:

“ Chefs have kept us in business, to be quite frank,” said Jones. “We’re getting the same prices than 20 years ago on some of our stuff. And that’s why it is important to have these loyal chefs like David and Peter who are willing to pay perhaps a bit more. We’re not trying to screw them, they’re not trying to screw us. We’re not much more expensive; we try to be competitive.”

The quality of the products is reflected in the quality of the preparations, and Alex Dench-Layton, owner of Violet Hill Farm, expressed great pride at knowing what the chefs at the Tasting Room, Blue Hill or Lupa do with the pigs, chicken, goats and other animals they raise:

“ When we have eaten dishes [chefs] prepared with our products there’s a feeling of pride,” she said. “Some of these chefs are tops. It’s kind of an honor to have them prepare our stuff, that it’s good enough for them. They’re phenomenal. The problem is that it ruins you for anything else.”

While for some farmers, chefs are the most vital part of their consumer base, others have to rely more on direct sales to consumers shopping for small quantities. Jeff and Adina Bialas, of Bialas Farms, sell the produce they grow at the 97th Street market. “We sell well over 90 percent directly to consumers and some wholesale,” said Jeff Bialas. “But it’s possible that we sell to more chefs than we realize, because some chefs don’t announce it. We would have more chefs if more knew about the market.”

Jeff Bialas is the third generation to farm the property since 1939, when the focus was celery. After a bout with onions, the Bialases now farm over 100 vegetables on their 55 acres, including 20 varieties of greens. Consumer demand has changed what they grow:

“ We’ve definitely gone towards more specialty produce,” said Jeff Bialas. “We add more things than we take away from our list of available produce. If we do new things it attracts more people, because they might not want a certain vegetable one week but they’ll try something new [instead].”

Just as much as consumers, if not more, chefs also change what farmers grow. David Pasternak, chef of Esca and Bistro du Vent, said that he goes through a seed catalogue and then asks Paulette Satur, of Satur Farms, to grow certain varieties for him, for example. With another farm, he is growing a variety of squash that isn’t yet grown in the United States. “Being engaged in the growing process, you become a co-producer, not just a consumer,” said Barber. “You’re literally involved from seed to table.”

These requests must make sense for the farmers though, and they must like what they grow. Satur said that she started growing cauliflower romanesco for Pasternak in her own garden, as she always does when starting a new plant, which allows her to test it before making a final commitment.

“ We can’t grow certain things if we then only sell three pounds of it a year,” Satur said. “We must have demand. We have to have a reason also. We tasted the romanesco and loved it so it made sense.”

Dench-Layton said that what chefs have impacted the most is the type of pork she and her husband now raise: “We started out with the same conventional breed as everyone,” she explained. “But they’re breeding away from fat because fat is bad when the pigs are raised in confinement, and we raise all our pigs outside on 30 acres so that’s not an issue. So we went back to heritage breeds. They have fat, and chefs love fat. Chefs say they don’t want skinny pigs. It’s for the better all around.”

Gaining the respect that will allow for such relations does not come overnight. Many chefs have been doing business with the same farmers for 20 years. One final word of advice in that regard comes from Hoffman:

“You show up week after week, rain or shine,” he said. “When you show up on a crummy New York day, you start off with a couple of points.”

- Anne E. McBride

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