The Epic Fifth Anniversary Dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns

July 24, 2009, was our fifth wedding anniversary! DMR and I contemplated a number of plans before settling on a day in upstate New York. We dropped off the boys at my parents' house and headed up to Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, about an hour's drive north. It was the first time since leaving the hospital that the twins had been separated from the both of us for more than an hour or two and it felt very weird. Storm King was serene (and very gnatty) and the tram ride around the grounds was a wonderfully, lazy way to take in the sculptures.

We then drove to Tarrytown to meet up with Nena at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, where we would be having dinner at Blue Hill. Not only did she help us get a reservation (our plans were very last minute and who knew a 5PM seating would be so in-demand?) but also took some time from her afternoon to give us a tour of the grounds. The Center is a really lovely place, as I first discovered during one of their annual Harvest Festivals. It sits on 80 acres of land donated by David Rockefeller, who still has a residence up the road. At 90ish, his favorite mode of transportation is apparently a carriage.

Dan and I went all out and opted for the Farmer's Feast, a tasting menu created around the day's harvest. The server presents you with a list of ingredients that the kitchen will use to craft your meal. If you have any aversions (DMR: large chunks of tomatoes) or allergies (SHR: stone fruit, sigh), the kitchen will work around them. Here, DMR double checks the list to make sure mushrooms are also not on tap.


Round 1 of drinks: my strawberry sangria + his purple basil mojito, as recommended by Nena. Just an hour earlier we had tried one of these strawberries straight from the plant and walked by the basil!

Thoroughly enjoying my refreshing sangria. Or should I say savoring. I made that thing last as long as I could. It came garnished with a cherry which I probably could have eaten and probably should have eaten.

Holy cow, it's veggies on the fence! Our first amuse bouche was one of Blue Hill's signature presentations. We got lettuce, fennel, succulent and carrots that were lightly kissed with citrus and salt. The big surprise here was the succulent, which was so bright in flavor. It provided a really satisfying slight crunch that I wasn't expecting either. I spied another table's fence and it looks like we got fennel in place of a Sun Gold tomato.

Holy cow, it's baby zucchini encrusted in sesame on a stick! Round two of our amuses really evoked memories of childhood for me. The first bite reminded me of the hobak jun my mother would make for me as a kid. Well, ok, she continues to make it for me when we visit. I felt like the food critic guy in Ratatouille when he takes his first bite of the dish. So simple and so perfect.

Another amuse! On top of a beautiful piece of slate, we were given a plain white bowl that had another dish on top acting as its cover. The server removed the top and set it next to the bowl. The dish held a homemade emmer wheat cracker with fava beans.

And below that was my favorite dish of the night, a green gazpacho. Words can't really do any justice to the joy I felt after the first spoonful. It was magic. I am not sure how such a little bowl held that much flavor.

Homemade whole wheat flat bread, mild padron peppers, fava beans in the shell, all grilled over housemade coals. This was amuse round four, by the way.

A sampling of the house made salumi: salami in the front, Berkshire pork chorizo in the back. We met some of the farm's Berkshire piggies on the tour, including a set of very new piglets (48 hours old! They looked like Boston Terrier pups!) and 440lb behemoths. As I type this I'm beginning to feel weird about it.

And then we were presented with bread (warm slices of Balthazar's potato and caramelized onion sourdough) and these accompaniments: Blue Hill Farm butter, Blue Hill Farm ricotta, arugula salt, Sun Gold tomato salt. The butter and ricotta were both made with milk from Blue Hill Farm, the family farm of the Barber brothers, located in Massachusetts.

Finally it was time for our first official course! Beet salad was beautifully presented with strawberries, purslane, sorrel and homemade yogurt. I love beets with yogurt and I love the shades of fuscia that get created from the juices melding. And speaking of purslane, I guess this is what I was expecting the succulent to taste like, flavor and texture-wise. Coming into this meal I wasn't the biggest fan of purslane but the gumminess that I found off-putting in previous tastings wasn't there.

Perfectly cooked Maine lobster in a mustard sauce with artichoke and corn. Each plate had a full claw and tail. Preceding this was a server who showed us a basket with some of the artichokes that would be used in the dish.

The morning's farm egg in a vibrant green broth of peas and pine nuts. Dan hates peas (a result of growing up eating mushy, canned ones) but he gobbled these up. I had one very teeny issue with this dish. The bowl was too deep! It was very difficult to spoon out all the broth, but don't you worry, I managed to get every drop.

Morning farm egg inside view. Delicious oozing yolk.

Gnocchi dough agnolotti filled with cheese and served with green and purple basil, corn and peas. Yummy, yummy, yummy, I love fresh, simple pastas. At this point, I was getting very full.

DMR can not believe he's going to eat peas two dishes in a row and enjoy both!

Our final savory course was a lamb chop with zucchini, wilted lettuce and a single strand of long, wide ribbon pasta, paired with pork loin medallions and braised pork belly. I'm not the biggest fan of lamb, but this marked the 2nd time in a week that I ate it. The first being a expertly grilled chop (thanks, Ezra!) the previous weekend up in the Catskills.

Dessert #1 - I forgot to take a picture, but it was red gooseberries and tapioca with a goat cheese sorbet. I didn't love it. The sorbet's flavor was eye-squinting tart and overwhelmed everything else.

Dessert #2 for me: cheesecake ice cream with blueberries and dehydrated yogurt matchsticks.

Dessert #2 for Dan: Basil ice cream on shortbread with stone fruit. They stuck little candles into squares of fruit paste to celebrate our anniversary. A cute touch. The desserts were my least favorite part of this epic meal, though. I thought the flavors were too similar. While I love fresh fruit and tartness, I would have loved some additional textures and flavors, like, well, chocolate!
We also had a cheese plate featuring two raw cow milk cheeses from The Dancing Cow Farm in Vermont. These were paired with a cashew caramel and cherry chutney and served with slices of brioche. I don't remember much about the cheeses because I was in a food coma. We did not need a cheese course, even if we were sharing, but Dan was quite insistent. I think we surprised each other because it's usually the other way around with us. I always over order and think we need more food when we don't and he's always trying to rein me in.

Along with our bill we received two little chocolate whiskey truffle squares and an equally petite bowl of fruit (blueberries, strawberries, currants, etc...) to nibble on.

The service was impeccable although with so many servers it was a little confusing who to order drinks from. But used plates were always cleared immediately, our bread basket refilled and water glasses replenished without skipping a beat. A truly special dining experience that I hope to have again one day.

Forgot to mention, dinner took over three and a half hours!

First time for Babbo

DMR and I recently celebrated our wedding anniversary with a dinner at Babbo. Exactly one month out at 10 AM, I began calling their notorious reservation line. After about 50 redials, I got through! The only seatings available were for 5:45 and 10:30 PM, neither of which perfect but at least we got through. I opted for the early reservation.

We were seated upstairs, where everything was oxy-clean white. The brightness was enhanced by the light coming through the skylight. Early on, there were more servers and employees than diners which made me nervous at first, but they were hardly obtrusive. I had been waiting for this day for a long time. I studied the menu, read post after post on Chowhound and asked questions of friends who had eaten there.

Soon after being seated at our table, our server presented us with an amuse bouche of chickpea tapenade crostini. Yum, although there was a bit of pit on my piece. As Dan popped the last piece of bread into his mouth, a server appeared and placed a new piece on his plate.



While I drink wine, I really don't know anything about it. The wine list at Babbo is massive, but the sommelier did a nice job of guiding us through it and pointing out various options at different price points. We got a very modest bottle that was about $30 and turned out to be perfectly fine. It didn't hurt that the label had a cute little red dog on it! I swear I had no idea. I love that they decanted it and also put a little metal tray under the bottle to prevent drips from hitting the tablecloth.



To begin with, we ordered the grilled octopus and Armandino’s Salumi. The octopus was super tender with bits of char marks that offered up some additional smokiness. It was served atop borlotti (similar to kidney beans) and basil, with a garnish of watermelon radish, chive and drizzling of limoncello vinaigrette. The plate was also a knockout visually. The salumi platter consisted of lamb proscuitto and hot sopressata, and two hunks of grilled bread. The lamb proscuitto was interesting, but not my favorite as it was a little gamey and I'm not the biggest lamb fan. But I really wanted to try Armandino's wares. The sopressata, on the other hand, I could have eaten all day long. Sopressata is such a magical meat!




Here's where all my research came in handy. Most everyone will agree that the secondis are very good. However, the consensus seemed to be that if you were going to get one thing, you get the pasta. So that's what we did. I had also read that if you tell your server you're sharing, they'll actually bring the meal out in two portions, which is what they did. Funny, I'm not a lamb person at all, but we opted for another lamb dish, the Mint Love Letters as well as the Beef Cheek Ravioli, which made Dan scrunch up his face even though he had no idea what a beef cheek is and even though I told him the meat would not be recognizable at all and that it would be delicious.




The love letters were rectangular packets of al dente pasta filled with a pea puree and topped with tomato based sauce and spicy lamb sausage. The ravioli followed and it was as rich and decadent a pasta dish you could get. The sauce, made of the liver, was flecked with bits of black truffle. I haven't had truffles much, but each time I can't get over their texture, which I love. It's dense and soft and hard and delicate all at once. We also ordered a side of Babbo Greens, which turned out to be escarole that day. There was a lot of escarole on that plate.



How do people eat appetizers and primis and secondis? Before our pastas arrived, I wondered out loud if we had ordered enough food. By beef cheek ravioli time, I was really getting stuffed! Even at half a portion each, it was a lot of food. Still, we ordered two desserts, the ricotta cheesecake with strawberries and balsamic vinegar and the pistachio and chocolate semifreddo.




The cheesecake was yummy - creamy but light and I've never come across a plate of strawberries, balsamic and fresh whipped cream that I did not like. The semifreddo, which had a similar texture, only cold, was dynamite, worthy of plate-licking, which we did not do. But something tells me the folks at Babbo would be ok with it.