This might not fit into the rest of my posts on this blog, but I had this amazing experience last night, so I feel like I need to share it. I went to eat at Blue Hill at Stone Barns near Tarrytown, NY. This place is absolutely astounding. The restaurant is in the middle of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a small farm where they raise almost all the animals and grow almost all the vegetables that are served in the restaurant. They don't even have a real menu, just a list of potential ingredients the cooks can use to make your meal. But I don't really need to write a full review of the experience there, that's been done already. Here's a really good review, for starters.

What caught my attention was this moment when our waiter brought out a rather large tray of about a dozen different tomatoes, which he referred to as "varietals." As a wine person, that caught my ear. To me, a varietal starts with a plant carefully cloned in a lab to match the terroir. The process of growing and harvesting a varietal is a combination of art and science, and it's the only way to make really amazing wine. But tomatoes? Ok, now I was listening! He proceeded to name each varietal, and let me tell you, there were some crazy ones, including accordion tomatoes like these:

He went on to explain that the farm had planted about 80 different varietals of tomatoes, and then subsequently narrowed them down to 35 that they liked, and were presenting about 11 or so to us for our viewing pleasure.

This sparked a question that had occurred to me recently when I was in the South of France. My wife and I went on a market tour and kitchen tasting with a Michelin starred chef in Cannes. The vegetables I saw there were like nothing I had ever seen before. And I grew up near farms where we'd often stop by little roadside stands to buy freshly picked produce.  That farm produce was great, but the produce they had in the Cannes market was an entirely different animal, bursting with flavors that made you weak in the knees. Every bite made you feel blessed to be alive. Obviously they understand something different about growing vegetables in France. I found myself wondering what they did differently, and whether or not it had anything in common with the way they grow grapes. As I've written here before, wine makers in France (as well as everywhere else good wine is made) know that stressing the vine and reducing yields makes the flavor of the grapes more concentrated. The vine thinks it is dying, so it pours all its energy in to making its fruit, resulting in higher sugar levels and flavors.

So, my question for the waiter was, are there similarities between growing good wine grapes and growing great tomatoes? Does reducing yields make for more flavorful tomatoes? His answer-- Yes. He said apparently there is a lot in common, and they have discovered that reduced yields do make for better tomatoes. I had so many more questions, but there really wasn't time to go into it all in the middle of dinner. Do farmers know that reducing yields makes better vegetables? Do our farmers over-irrigate their crops to increase yields so they can make more money? Do they do that because they're afraid Americans won't buy them because we don't know what we're missing? Do vegetable plants need to be as stressed and starved for water and good soil as vines do, or is it just a question of pruning at a certain point during the growing cycle to reduce the yields? My questions go on and on.

I've perused the Stone Barns website, but it doesn't seem to have much information readily accessible about this sort of thing. Places like UC Davis have made great efforts to bring French wine making techniques to the United States, and we're all the benefactors of their work. Hopefully that's what Stone Barns is trying to do now. This is important to me, because when I tasted that produce in Cannes, my immediate thought was that I need more of this, and how much can real estate really cost on the Riviera? It was astounding to me that people who live there can eat like that every day. This market wasn't some special secret place hidden away like Stone Barns. It was right in the middle of town, and it was open every day except monday! The food and wine movement in this country is moving along quite well, but it's clear to me that we have a very long way to go and a lot of education to do.

So I put it to the community. Who knows about this stuff? Are there websites that talk about this? What if I want to grow my own amazing tomatoes? How do I do it? There are a lot of resources on the Stone Barns website, but on a casual perusual it doesn't appear to me that any of them talk about something as simple as how to grow amazing fruits and vegetables. It seems to me that it's a lot easier to find out how to make amazing wine than to grow this quality of produce, but maybe I'm just ignorant. What do you think?