Written in 2003
Trying to keep up with Dan Barber at the Union Square Farmer’s Market in Manhattan is like trying to bob for apples—once you think you’re in step with him, he suddenly pops up tables away. Everything about him—from his intent eyes and three-day shadow, to his lean and nimble frame—seem in perpetual motion. With his baggy corduroy pants and scuffed brown shoes, he looks more like a professor than one of the country’s top ten chefs, recently named by Food and Wine magazine.
Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday morning Barber is busy foraging for the best local ingredients he can find for his restaurant, Blue Hill. An old speak-easy obscurely tucked away off of Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park, Blue Hill’s menu is dedicated to serving seasonal American food that celebrates the produce of the Hudson Valley.
There are much easier ways for Barber to acquire the produce he needs. He could simply pick up the phone to any one of many major distributors, place his order, and have it delivered by the next day. But he doesn’t. As much as possible, he buys local— even on blustery fall days when many of the farmers are hanging from the supporting bars of their tents to keep them from blowing away.
Tightly wrapped in a scarf and wool blazer, he clutches his shopping list scribbled on scrap paper—zucchini, green apples, parsley root, swiss chard. He is never quite sure what he will find at the market, often leaving him to plan the menu on the fly. His dedication to seasonal, local produce requires an enormous amount of flexibility, time and resources that sometimes lead him to question why he bothers. But it doesn’t take him very long to come up with his reasons.
“I love the exchange and the connection,” he explains. “You go to the market in the morning at the beginning of this hectic, ridiculously service oriented day and you meet these people who are salt of the earth, who love to complain about what they’re doing, but they do an honest days work and I love to be a part of that.”
“Hey Dan, where’s the film crew?” Alex Paffenroth, a third generation farmer who one year lost his onion crop in fourteen minutes during a hailstorm, playfully taunts him. Barber grins and picks his way through the parsley root. “You got any spaghetti squash? Where’s the spaghetti squash?” Paffenroth points him to the far side of the tent. “Chefs these days, they’re like movie stars, ya know,” he muses aloud. “Hey Dan, you’re spending an awful lot of time over there with the squash. There’s a recipe on that card, isn’t there. You stealing my recipes again?” Barber laughs, sustaining the friendly the jabs. They’ve known each other for the many years that Barber has been frequenting the market and poke fun at each other with the familiarity of family.
“He’s definitely one of my favorites.” Barber confides, making a beeline through the dense mass of shoppers. “Coming here, I feel like I’m more in touch with my surroundings. It’s great to learn about the weather patterns, how the drought in the spring is effecting what’s going on now with the apples and the vegetables. In this business and in this city you tend to just drift away from reality.”
Barber slips behind the tables at the Cherry Hills Farm stand, peeking his head into the truck to see what might be hidden in there. The next moment he’s sorting through a basket of zucchini, pulling a few of the long squash from the pile.
“Hey Tina, how many more zucchini do you have?” he calls out.
“That’s it,” she yells back, handing change back to another customer.
“For today?”
“No, for the season.”
“For the season? Wow. The last of the zucchini. This is a moment.” He takes a deep breath, piles the few he separated back into the basket and buys the whole thing.
As a native Manhattanite, at first it’s hard to understand how Barber acquired his sensibility for seasonal produce. That is, until you hear him reminisce about his grandmother’s farm and the restaurant’s namesake, Blue Hill. Growing up, he spent every summer on the three hundred acre farm that still functions in the Berkshires. “I really loved it,” he recalls. “The work was very physical and exhausting. As a kid, I was really overweight, but I worked so hard. I loved those days, walking back from the fields, taking a shower and feeling like I’d put in an honest days work and I could just relax with my grandmother. There was something about it that was glorious. Those summers had a big influence on my life.”
So big, actually, that Barber feels that it has unconsciously driven him to where he is today, a position he takes very seriously. “Chefs in New York and other parts of the country have a voice today through the mainstream media that is very powerful and exciting. The responsibility of that is enormous,” he explains. “As purchasers we have a collective responsibility to our surroundings. It goes very deeply into the decisions I make about where we get our produce and how that affects the way the world is used. I make sure I take advantage of that position.”
Our next stop is a stand of plump, red tomatoes, piled proudly, looking like tourists among the fall produce. “It’s a little disturbing to see tomatoes in October.” He explains that they’ve been grown in greenhouses to be ready for late fall harvest, when the regular season is over. Barber is filling a box when a man in overalls and a canvas coat sneaks up behind him.
“I can’t believe you’re at the tomato stand, Dan.” It is chef and restrateur Wiley Dufresne of New York’s popular WD-50.
Dan jumps. “Wiley, man, you’re like my conscience.”
“Whatcha doing at the tomato stand, Dan?” he chides.
“I don’t know. I need some tomatoes.”
“Dan, what about that recipe, huh?
“You know I don’t give out my recipes, Wiley.”
“C’mon.”
“I keep them safe in here.” He grins, pointing to his heart.
Barber prepares his bags to leave and explains, almost in defense of his being caught at the tomato stand, the true cost of ensuring that everything has a sustainable focus. “I would have to have a full time forager, really. How do I pass along the cost of that?” he explains . “Would people pay for it? Most people probably wouldn’t. And, so, you have to have your balance. But I can always do more and I feel like I’m headed in that direction.”
Hauling big, blue plastic bags heavy with his finds, Barber shuffles through the market back to his van.
