Billionaire’s Farmhouse
Scarpetta
There’s a review of chef Scott Conant’s new Italian restaurant in this week’s New Yorker and what caught my eye—in addition to the $24 price tag for a plate of SPAGHETTI WITH TOMATO SAUCE—was the description of the interior: “Conant has now relocated, jettisoning the stuffy drapes-and-sconce trappings of his previous restaurants for Scarpetta, a streamlined space on the border of the meatpacking district. Think billionaire’s farmhouse: high rafters; a peaked, retractable roof; mirrors tilting from the walls, strapped in place with giant leather belts.”
If I had to pick one interior trend that I see peaking (and quickly) it’s the restaurant-cum-rustic farmhouse.
In the last few months, I’ve been in several farm-to-table bistros across the country. There’s my local spot, Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore, which is fitted snugly into the skeleton of an old mill. There’s Flatbush Farm in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, described as a “haute barnyard restaurant with rural connections and rustic promise.” There’s Clyde Common, the restaurant located in Portland’s Ace Hotel, with its decorative Mason jars of produce gleaming from clean, white shelves.
I have to admit a love for the cuisine, the connection to local ingredients, the attention to seasonality. I enjoy the backlash to American Frankenfood and a return to what the French lovingly term terroir. I also enjoy the rustic-inspired yet cleanly modern interiors. But I think I’ve hit overload. It’s starting to feel formulaic, like one big variation on a theme(park). Each place has a similar aesthetic: stripped-down elements set against a backdrop of exposed beams and knotty woods; chandeliers of denuded lightbulbs exposing their spindly innards; the long community table, often accompanied by the story of how it was fashioned from the sustainably reclaimed floorboards of an actual farmhouse. There are the menus with the requisite mission statements about using only the freshest ingredients from local vendors, embracing the tenets of Slow Food, and returning to a time of honest purity. The fonts are often inked in letterpress; the graphics usually include animals or farm equipment. Suddenly our menus are footnoted with food sources and littered with adjectives assuring us of the timeliness of our fare (August Tomato Salad with Local, Artisanal Goat Cheese). It’s all so very earnest and if you don’t believe me, just click on this article about the Slow Food Movement and read the comments from readers.
Above and below: The exterior and interior of Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore. Photos from their Web site.
Above: Letterpress logo
Below: A screen grab of Clyde Commons’ homepage
Above: A screen grab of the Flatbush Farm Web site. They describe their interior this way: “The spacious Farm interior holds yarns of rustic dining space and is adorned in unique and well-crafted furniture and artworks from mid-century (19th!) modern movements. A gorgeous outdoor patio features tables outfitted with individual wood-burning ovens.”
The other commonality is the price of all this rural purity. Expensive—Exorbitant. This food and aesthetic trend highlights what I find so fascinating about American culture: our ability to hold two completely contradictory ideas at once. Other than a supper at Blue Hill at Stone Barns (arguably the genesis of this trend, the place where the table comes to the barn, not the other way around) show me a “haute barnyard.” Show me the billionaire farmer. And show me the guy in Iowa who can pay $24 for a plate of spaghetti after the corn crop this season.
So what is it that we ache for? What is this desire for the “rural connection” this “rustic promise” served up in the city center? We want the best of both worlds. We want the clamor and din of the city mixed with the perceived peace and authenticity of the farm. On a commute up to New York this summer I saw an ad in Amtrak’s magazine that summed it up nicely. It was a tourism plug for Ontario, and it showed a happy couple engaged in gleaming urban activity and sharing colorful meals of fresh produce. The tagline: “Ontario: Urban, yet Unspoiled.”
The spirit of slow food, the goal of eating and buying local is, of course, an admirable ambition. But $24 spaghetti? That is decidedly urban and spoiled.
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Ah, thank you SO much for this. Having recently returned from a few weeks on the west coast that included visits to SF and Portland, I’m a bit od’d on the whole smug-sustainable thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love the values. I just hate the tight-lipped smile and unwitting snobbery that often accompanies it.
I had more than one really frustrating conversation about the poor slobs in the middle of the country who are so unenlightened about the long term benefits of eating organic, etc and so on.
Unenlightened? How about broke? How about deciding between buying food and buying gas money so that they can get to work. (And no, there’s not great public transpo in most of the nation and your bike’s not welcome on the freeway that gets you to the Walmart where you’re making minimum wage.)
So much of this is a privilege, not a choice, making your post’s title particularly fitting.
Comment by Jen Bekman — August 21, 2008, @ 10:02 am
Thanks, folks. I love a fresh husk cherry or serving of turnip greens as much as anybody- probably more- but the idea that we gorge our way to salvation has always given me heartburn. Dan Barber and Alice Waters are the only haute barnyard chefs I know who have set up programs to help disadvantaged kids get and enjoy fresh produce. I sort of hope the expense-account-rustic trend fades to yield more popularity for farmer’s markets. Unlike CSA shares, which can feel as routine as getting mail, farmer’s markets are buzzy and intriguing public spaces. They also deliver a more efficient eating model- instead of ordering what the chef “created” (to the degree that anyone creates spaghetti and tomato sauce) or taking a monthly crate, you buy exactly as much as you think your family will eat in a week. And if you miscalculate, you pay the price in soggy peaches. So the farmhouse menu has reached a risible stage. I hope the farm-fed city succeeds it with more dignity and access for everyone.
Comment by Alec Appelbaum — August 21, 2008, @ 11:56 am
Jen,
It’s easy to be enlightened when you have the bank account, right?
I agree with you that a lot of this is about privilege and not real choice. Eve Dilworth, one of the staffers at Metropolis, introduced me to an interesting book called Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves.
The book talks about the rise in all this consumptive “sustainability” and the unintended consequences of the specialty markets and restaurants, the bottled water and organic sheets, the green products and furniture. Here’s a blurb about it from Amazon:
“[The author] argues that when consumers believe that they are indeed buying a defense from environmental hazards, they feel less urgency to actually do something to fix them. To achieve real protection, real security, he concludes, we must give up the illusion of individual solutions and together seek substantive reform.”
Comment by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson — August 21, 2008, @ 2:42 pm
Ah, America, where a petite suburban woman with small bones and a charm bracelet goes to the coat closet on a winter’s day and dons a North Face down parka capable of handling anything short of an actual assault on Everest. She laces up Gore-tex hiking boots that would take her up the Appalachian Trail and back again. Walking to the attached three-car garage, she climbs into the heated leather driver’s seat of an SUV with capacity, power, and off-road capability she will never need or use. Thus accoutered and equipped she heads off to join friends for lunch over a $24 plate of artisanal spaghetti.
The restaurant may well be of the billionaire’s barn ersatz-rural variety, for we have never really embraced the city. From Jefferson onward through the Transcendentalists to modern city planners who try to design away the annoying city-ness of urban living, we have expected cities to be sinks of crime and decay and lo, expecting little we have not done well with, or by, our cities. We effectively have no urban policy in America, and still cling to the idea that virtuous life is found close to nature, with Jefferson’s yeoman farmer. There are a few wonderful exceptions, of course; look up H. L. Mencken’s hyperbolic essay, “The Husbandman” for a riotous two-fisted attack on rural living and values. But Mencken is the oddity in America, Jefferson the norm. For a more longwinded development of this theme, see http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/sub.cfm?ArticleID=189&IssueID=21&SectionID=4
Comment by Bill Evitts — August 21, 2008, @ 5:37 pm
My God, it’s hopeless. Up against writing like this… The band leader is superb, but you are surprised at the quality of those who riff against her notes.
Rural cities? I approve. Gardens on rooftops, green chanels for safe animal migration, self-sufficiency in food, clean air. All good. But so is the urban form, which, through the miracle of design, must also be preserved.
Comment by Trevor Burrowes — December 30, 2008, @ 12:27 am