America’s philosopher chef won over a president to his vision of sustainability. And now he’s bringing it to Britain
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Four or five mornings a week Dan Barber drives out from his home in Manhattan to Blue Hill at Stone Barns, his celebrated restaurant in the Pocatino Hills, north of New York. On a good day the journey takes just under an hour. Barber, 47, is America’s pre-eminent philosopher chef. He has the reed-thin rigour of a stoic and the endlessly curious palate of a hedonist. He is on a cheerfully insane, one-man mission not only to serve some of the best-tasting food in America, but also to change the way America farms and eats for ever. It would be fair to say this mission is much more than a full-time job.
I’d said good night to Barber late the previous evening in the tiny galley kitchen of his Manhattan restaurant – also called Blue Hill – where he had laboured to create one of the most innovative and memorable meals I’d ever eaten and from which he was heading home to the apartment a couple of blocks away where he lives with his wife and two daughters, aged three and one. I’d caught up with him again at 7am at the Green Market at Union Square where he was eagle-eyeing what was new, chatting with old-friend farmers and buying carefully selected boxes of red, yellow and sour cherries and baby fava beans and bunches of the coveted salty Italian herb agretti. Some of that produce was now in the back of his car.
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