As executive chef and co-owner of two ingredient-centric
Blue Hill restaurants in New York, Chef
Dan Barber is a leading figure in the nation's farm-to-table movement. In May, Barber's reputation was boosted when he was voted to the
Time 100 list of the World's Most Influential People, and by his James Beard Award win for the nation's top chef. Then of course, there was the highly publicized
Presidential date night, where Barack and Michelle Obama dined at Barber's New York City restaurant while all the world watched.
While
Blue Hill in Manhattan's Greenwich Village satisfies the urbanite's appetite for Barber's innovative cuisine,
Blue Hill at Stone Barns, 45 minutes north of the city, has become a destination for food lovers of all sizes and stripes. The restaurant shares 80 acres of Rockefeller family land with the
Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a diversified organic farm and educational center. The center's rich mix of programs and activities (cooking classes, tastings, farmer-in-training after-school activities) is complemented by the restaurant, which brings field to the plate by highlighting the pleasure of eating seasonal ingredients grown or raised just outside the door. Writer
Pat Tanumihardja caught up with Barber at the
Monterey Bay Aquarium's Sustainable Food Institute to chat.
Did you have an "aha" moment when you knew you wanted to be a chef? How did the sustainability factor come into play?I never had an "aha" moment. I wish I did. I'm still having a moment of figuring out what's the best place for me. The sustainability question happened kinda naturally over the course of my life. I grew up working on my family's farm where my grandmother was a proponent of open space and using farming to promote the natural beauty of the land. That's sort of what I became inculcated with. It informs the chef I became.
You are often called a celebrity chef and receive a lot of attention for the work you do to connect the farm to the kitchen, especially at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. How are you dealing with all this fame? I like celebrating food. I don't know if I like celebrating myself [laughs]. People always talk about Stone Barns and me like I'm this leader leading everyone to a new frontier. I consider myself to be the recipient of a lot of attention based on an issue that has been forced to the forefront, not because of me, but because of visionary people: farmers, writers and serious academics. [These people] have taken fringe ideas and made them more mainstream. So I look at it like crashing a party. I'm lucky to have this canvas of Stone Barns to work on where what I say or do gets the light shining on it. It otherwise wouldn't have happened with our other restaurant in midtown Manhattan.
Last week, National Geographic Traveler assistant editor Janelle Nanos got to chat with legendary actor and World War II enthusiast Tom Hanks, who has "perhaps done more than anyone in Hollywood today to help tell the stories of the war with the film Saving Private Ryan and HBO series Band of Brothers" and who just helped produce the interactive film Beyond All Boundaries for the World War II Museum in New Orleans. Hanks's goal of the film--which premiers on November 8--was to make an impression: to give the viewer a chance to
look beyond the familiar black-and-white portrayal of WWII and see that
these were real people, living their lives in a period that would
change them forever.
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