I once had a plot in a community garden in Seattle, one of maybe a hundred in a fertile swale that had once been part of a farm. It was a big field, green and inviting, and it drew in neighborhood families out on their evening strolls. Some evenings my fellow gardeners and I would bring bread and cheese and have a picnic dinner sprawled on the grass next to our plots, cutting slices of tomatoes with a penknife and wandering over to the hose to wash off some carrots. But my fondest memory is of the couple who brought a folding table one night, and some chairs, and a white tablecloth and silverware and wine glasses and china plates and candles and a big cooler full of food and wine, and had what looked like an impossibly romantic evening beside their vegetables.
I thought of that couple the other night when I ate on a tomato farm at a table set for 140. The occasion was the 104th dinner in the Outstanding in the Field series run by surfer-artist-chef Jim Denevan, who travels around North America in a retrofitted bus arranging for local chefs to come out and cook for large numbers of people on the farms from which the chefs buy their produce. Nice work if you can get it.
The night I went Jim had persuaded Bill Telepan to come out and cook on Tim Stark’s farm in eastern Pennsylvania. Tim mowed a field next to his barn so Jim and his crew could set up their table in a long crescent that hugged the curve of a small hill. Bill and his cooks gathered around the grills and prep tables, joking and working companionably. (Someone should record Bill Telepan’s laugh and sell it as a ringtone.) Guests started trickling down from the parking lot past the fields around five; more than a few took a detour to gawp at Tim’s astonishing tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants before making a beeline for the canapés and aperitifs. Around six Jim gathered everyone around and spoke for a few minutes about the Outstanding dinners. Tim perched on the seat of his tractor and read aloud from his book. And then we walked up across the farm to supper.
Almost everything we ate came from Tim’s farm or from within shouting distance—the chard and cardoons and shell beans, the pigs raised on goats’ milk, the peaches for the streusel tarts and the honey in the ice cream. I’m a big fan of Bill Telepan’s food even on a normal day, but I don’t think it’s ever been better or more fun. What’s not to like, after all, about chard pierogi with salty feta cheese and sweet onions, or roasted pork served with grilled Jimmy Nardello peppers stuffed with chorizo-seasoned rice?
These dinners also build a community among the producers, cooks, and chefs, and I suspect this is part of the plan. It helps that the food was served family-style at a table so big that everyone was bound to meet new people, and that the cooking took place in plain view of the dinner table. But Bill Telepan put his finger on something more subtle. “People come into my restaurant for all kinds of reasons,” he told me. “This table wants to celebrate a birthday, this table wants to grab dinner before the theatre, and this one wants a great food experience I hope I can give them. But at this meal, everyone was there for the same reason, which is to spend time eating at the source, and that was really cool. It’s much more of an experience than just eating dinner.”
It must be said that there’s a certain amount of preaching to choir going on here, since the cost of admission was $200, far more than even the most indulgent food-and-wine tasting menu at Telepan. It doesn’t look like anyone’s making a mint here, but that’s the kind of price that’ll stop dead in their tracks anyone not already super-interested in food and farming, and I couldn’t help thinking that the experience might be more powerful if it were somehow less exclusive.
As the evening lengthened and the air got chilly I watched Jim Denevan roam around the edges of the party and wondered if he doesn’t quietly view the events as part of a decade-long piece of performance art. I do know that I’ll remember the experience when I next cook with Tim’s food.
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