Portfolio at NYU

Posted 01.05.08
Chow the Fields
Family-style meals on the farm, bickering and all.

By Freda Moon

Published in the New Haven Advocate on August 08, 2007

Dinners at the Farm
Various farm locations through October 5.
For reservations call River Tavern, (860) 526-9417,
dinnersatthefarm.com

Ashlawn Farm
78 Bill Hill Road, Lyme, (860) 434-3636, farmcoffee.com

Early Friday night, sitting on an old stone wall and sipping a cold drink while watching the sky change and the horses feed, "Dinners at the Farm" felt like an inspired idea-the product of an artist's mind.

The food we would soon eat was cooking on the back of a cherry red 1953 Ford flatbed truck alongside a busy crew at work preparing the multi-course, local-food meal: squid pizza, peperonata bruschetta, scallop ceviche, monkfish nicoise salad, grilled scallops and peaches, roasted fluke and zucchini with tomato-basil cream, grilled pork with a hot pepper vinaigrette, ratatouille with corn on the cob, berries and honey cream. It was one of those perfect, warm New England nights at Ashlawn Farm in Old Lyme and, for a while at least, my favorite restaurant around wasn't a restaurant at all.

The idea behind Dinners at the Farm is at once down-home and highbrow. Down-home because, lest we forget, farm dinners are not the invention of a couple of renown Connecticut chefs but a part of day-to-day life in large swaths of the United States, where people still live and eat on the land. But here in Connecticut, each in this series of 10 dinners on 10 different farms comes with an $85-a-head price tag (20 percent goes to a local nonprofit), elegant, inventive dishes and a guest list comprised of people of wealth, privilege and excessive plastic surgery.

Dinners at the Farm is about as far as one can get from the Midwestern farm dinner experience while still sitting in an open field, watching the clouds move across the horizon. And the inspiration for it comes from another, even more far-off, far-out place: Alice Water's Berkeley restaurant-the birthplace of the local, seasonal food fashion-Chez Panisse. The California cuisine-Dinners at the Farm link is not lost on Jonathan Rapp of River Tavern in Cheshire and Drew McLachlan of Feast Gourmet Market in Deep River, the minds behind the back-to-the-earth banquets. On their website they write, "California may have the remarkable Alice Waters...but Connecticut has Jonathan Rapp." Indeed, we do.

But the farm dinners may be a victim of their success. As we sat for hour after hour beside an elderly couple who seemed to hate not only each other, but everyone else, the wisdom of the event disappeared into family-sized vats of farm-fresh produce and straight-from-the-Sound seafood. The courses kept coming-each as delicious as the last-while, the old shrew at the next plate down made Tim and I her business.

Over the course of the five-hour fine-dining marathon, we were subject to the sort of abuse usually reserved for family get-togethers. Not once, but several times, the old lady shrieked, pounded the table and begged, "Why, why, why?" as she pointed to Tim's full sleeves of colorful tattoos. Those nearby strained to see what the commotion was about.

She grilled us, with lawyer-like precision, on what we were doing there: how we'd heard about the dinner, where we live. And, in case we were too daft to get the "you don't belong" message, she spoke across the table, to another old resident of greater Old Lyme (who'd seen our pain and befriended us), "Everybody belongs to the Garden Club."

When her equally charming but less talkative husband scolded us for the third time for taking too much food from the communal serving dishes as we carefully-fearfully-measured out mini-portions of each course onto our plates, I pushed mine forward and asked: "Do you want it back?"

The first farm dinner was conceived as an auction prize: a private, 12-person meal, catered by River Tavern and served at Ashlawn Farm. But they've grown from 12 guests to 120, requiring assigned seating and offering 11 courses. In the spirit of seasonal food, each menu is different-giving the event an element of unpredictability that's not to everyone's tastes. "That's one of the reasons that we have so many courses," says Rapp. "If [someone doesn't] like something, there's always something else.

"That format is sort of the whole point," Rapp adds. "It's about the food-whatever food is available-and keeping the menu absolutely current and seasonal." People have to get into the spirit of it, says Rapp.

Thankfully, most of the guests were. Even those who left early-simply unable to sit for five hours on benches, waiting for the next round of grub-left with a smile on their face. While our neighbors were displeased with everything, from the menu ("What is that?! Raw scallops?" the old lady whined at the remarkable scallop ceviche) to the not-sufficiently well-healed guest-list (us), to the size of the portions (plenty for anyone who's not sharing the meal with an intestinal parasite), the spirit of the event, as imaged by Rapp and McLachlan, remained intact, brilliant and delicious.

"The only sane response to the modern global economy, with its frantic pace and its ever-increasing diminishments of the sense of place, is to eat locally and eat well," writes Waters in her essay, "The Farm-Restaurant Connection," which is included in the wonderful new American Food Writing anthology. Still, Waters might have added, "Eating with sane people doesn't hurt."