Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/112444
F A R M T O T A B L E A T ANIMAL F ARM One afternoon in 1971 ��� the year I published my first restaurant review ��� I was taken by my girlfriend���s future brother-inlaw to a house in Berkeley, California. In the kitchen, the wall above the stove was lined with silvery pots and pans, a fairly complete batterie de cuisine from the illustrious Parisian cookware shop E. Dehillerin. I recall being only mildly impressed, as the cookware was aluminum rather then the tin-lined copper I associated with really serious cooking. Uchi���s Philip Spear Gislaine Williams, Alex Carlseen Claudia Solis, Stuart Rosenberg taking the tour Kaz Edwards Gita Van Woerden Brian Bush Page Pressley, Uchiko executive sous chef Hosts Dutch Small and Crystal Lee Casey Lebwohl Michelle Avi��a Stuart Rosenberg ���The woman who lives here just returned from France. She is going to start a restaurant,��� I remember being told. The woman, whom I did not meet that day, turned out to be Alice Waters, and the restaurant she opened later that year, Chez Panisse, went on to profoundly change the way Americans cook. If I knew then what would come out of those vessels, I should have knelt before them and kissed the scuffed linoleum floor. Waters had gone to France in the late 1960s to continue her work towards an undergraduate degree in French Cultural Studies. While there, she became enamored of the small, mostly rural restaurants that produced meals based on the local, seasonally available ingredients. There was nothing like that in the United States at the time, so she and her partner began to search out local producers of fruit, vegetables, meats and seafood. This approach, rooted in French practicality, was developed by Waters over several years into an entire philosophy, stressing the pleasures not just of the table but of responsible stewardship of the land and waters, of public health and of creating systems of agriculture that could be sustained for many generations into the future. In 1998, once again in California, a now-popular culinary event was invented when two brothers, Jim and Bill Deneven, staged a dinner in Jim���s restaurant, the Gabriella Caf��, in the seaside town of Santa Cruz, featuring not just locally grown produce, but also the presence of the farmers who had grown it. Bill was one of the farmers who rose during the dinner to talk about his produce. Fifteen years later, the brothers��� company, Outstanding In The Field, has a full-time staff and organizes dinners at farms and wineries around the United States. Usually held outdoors, the dinners pair a local producer with a local chef of repute, allowing diners to see, touch and smell the ingredients where they are grown and to see how creative chefs utilize them, often in novel ways. Outstanding In The Field organized the first such al fresco dinner at Animal Farm in Cat Spring, Texas, a couple of years ago. Now the idea has caught on,and Animal Farm and local chefs have independently organized meals in the manner pioneered by the Denevens. This past Thanksgiving weekend, some 50 dedicated gastronauts traveled the 65 miles or so that lie between Houston and the tiny unincorporated town of Cat Spring (population 766) in southern Austin County for the latest outdoor dinner at Animal Farm, a specialty grower of vegetables. Animal Farm began as a weekend getaway retreat for the Van Woerden family: parents Cas and Gita and their three children, Dana, Adon and Salome. Cas and Gita had BY GEORGE ALEXANDER. PHOTOGRAPHY ERIC HESTER. ART DIRECTION MICHELLE AVI��A.