YEAR: 2009
Meals made from the fresh, natural ingredients culled from the farm is what Barber remembers from summers spent on his grandparents’ 138-acre spread in the Berkshires. It was there that Barber absorbed important lessons about agriculture that seeded a passion for the farm-to-table practices, now the bedrock of his restaurant-agriculture project known as Blue Hill at Stone Barns. It’s no wonder, then, that even though he graduated with a degree in English and political science, it was with a smattering of agriculture classes thrown in. After supporting himself as a baker in Los Angeles, he could no longer ignore the draw of the kitchen, and found himself at the French Culinary Institute in New York. With like-minded partners, he then opened Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, which raises the livestock, poultry, vegetables and herbs that Barber uses at Blue Hill; anything that the Center doesn’t produce he sources from nearby farms. “Beautiful delicious leg of lamb — it’s not done by some kind of miracle. It’s done because the lamb ate good grass, and because it had the right breed, the right farmer, and the right decisions were made to get it to you that way.”
MOST MEMORABLE MEAL I’VE EATEN OR MADE: “I have two: my father’s scrambled eggs, and my aunt’s scrambled eggs. My fathers were rubbery, at best — but more often burnt, dry, and flakey. I ate them all the time as a kid (breakfast, lunch, dinner). And then one day, in the midst of a bout of strep throat, my aunt made me scrambled eggs — whisked over a double boiler, finished with pounds of butter and herbs. I still remember how they slid down my throat. But looking back on it now, I realize I couldn’t have had one without the other — my dad’s eggs made me appreciate my aunt’s.”