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Most back-to-the-land fantasies involve midlife crises, Birkenstocks, and romantic notions about the simple life. But when Dan Barber, the precocious chef behind Greenwich Village's Blue Hill restaurant, decided to play farmer, he joined up with David Rockefeller's $35 million plan to preserve an 80-acre parcel on what was once Grandpa John D.'s 3,500-acre estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, forming the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. The land, located near Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane's old stomping ground, included a barn complex (a meticulous 1920s replica of rustic life in Normandy) that produced the Rockefeller family's private milk supply during World War II. The only catch was that Barber and his co-owners (his brother David and his sister-in-law Laureen) actually had to put Hill at Stone Barns — the name he gave to the restaurant arm of this pastoral exercise — in the black: The restaurant, which opened in 2003, had two years' grace before it had to start paying its own way. So far, it has.
Barber grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and spent his summers at another Blue Hill — the farm his grandmother owned near Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which he is busy revitalizing as a dairy operation for an upcoming line of artisanal cheeses. As an undergrad at Tufts, he came across the books of Elliot Coleman, a Maine farmer who developed methods of farming twelve months a year, even in harsh New England. "He's the one who got me cooking," says Barber, who went on to apprentice with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse and to win the James Beard Foundation's Best New York City Chef nod this year.
Talking to him in the courtyard outside Blue Hill's kitchen, you don't really see his country-boy side. He's lanky, with curly hair and a little scruff on his chin, and he speaks like any connected, educated, lively New Yorker. Every night that he cooks at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, he packs provisions into his van, hauls them back to his restaurant in Greenwich Village, and sleeps at home a few blocks away.
At an outdoor staff meeting, half an hour before Blue Hill at Stone Barns' guests start arriving from the city in their Town Cars, Barber perches on a stone planter and calls out to the heads of staff. "What's the report on the animals?" he asks the assembled crowd. "I just came from castrating the pigs," the leathery Craig Haney, in charge of livestock, reports. Next is Farmer Jack's turn to chime in. "It's a wonderful time for foraging. We're getting great shiitakes out of the woodpile; we've got ramps and mustard garlic coming in. Look around you when you walk in the woods." Jack Algiere is 30 and grew up on a small farm in Rhode Island. For all his nature-walk talk, Algiere represents the most high-tech — and perhaps the most important — wing of Barber's operation.
He runs the Stone Barns greenhouse — a 22,000-square-foot monster with a retractable roof controlled by a Growmaster Growcom computer and solar-radiant sensors. It can shut out the elements when the wind kicks up to 35, so the rare greens — deer-tongue lettuce, red-stem Bordeaux spinach — don't take a beating. It might be the most minutely tuned, microscale crop-rotation system in the world, and it's immaculate and minimal, with a grid of exposed white pipe hanging from above, like some vast SoHo loft. Algiere pulls up a long, skinny D'Avignon breakfast radish and wipes the dirt off on his pants before offering a bite: It's incredibly crisp and deeply flavored. He explains that his greenhouse is one of the largest of its kind in that the plants, including eight varieties of watermelon, aren't sprouting from manufactured beds — it's real Westchester County earth he's tilling, and the quality of that soil is something he's deeply in tune with.
