Doing less is a hallmark of Barber, 39, who's emerged as a leading figure in the farm-to-table movement, championing local, delicious ingredients and responsible agriculture.
His two New York restaurants - Blue Hill New York in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns some 30 miles north of the city in Pocantico Hills
- have become beacons for foodies eager to dig into his clean, often playful dishes, like a farm-fresh egg served over local mushrooms and greens, surrounded by caramelized pieces of gooey, crispy-skinned chicken wings.
This month, Barber is enjoying the kind of spotlight he usually reserves for his ingredients: He's won the James Beard Award as the nation's top chef and made his debut on Time magazine's 100 World's Most Influential People, alongside Ted Turner, George Clooney and Michelle Obama.
Such praise would surely make a chef's narcissism rise like a souffle. But while Barber confesses to a healthy ego, he feels he's merely become a figurehead for a movement that's become mainstream. Chefs, he insists, have been articulating his message for years.
"As a chef, if you are chasing after flavorful food, which is what chefs should be doing, you are by definition an environmentalist and you are by definition a nutritionist," he says. "And you are by definition a kind of activist."
The food-to-table philosophy traces its roots to pioneer chefs like Alice Waters in the 1970s and has been popularized by writers like Michael Pollan and chefs such as recent Beard winner Rick Bayless. Even the White House now has a vegetable garden.
"I'm just kind of riding the wave," Barber says. "You'd think, I've arrived. But, in fact, if anything, I feel like I've crashed a party."
To be sure, Barber has a unique platform. His Pocantico Hills restaurant is nestled in an 80-acre livestock farm that grows and raises much of the food served on the premises.
The Stone Barns land, donated by the Rockefeller family, includes a 23,000-square-foot greenhouse and 22 acres of pasture land where the animals graze on grass. The organic farm produces hundreds of varieties of vegetables
- 35 types of lettuce alone. It even has its own bee colony.
Barber's restaurants, which he co-owns with his brother, David, and David's wife, Laureen, are the largest customer of the farms' output. Even so, since he pays the farmers fair-market prices, Barber often must forage in greenmarkets for better deals and snag produce from his own family's Blue Hill Farm in Great Barrington, Mass.
He's known to forge tight bonds with his farm suppliers, visiting with them and asking about everything from the sprays used to the number of miles they drive to the market.
"I'm kind of the obsessional type," he admits.
Stone Barn's self-sufficiency varies by season, but by late summer it produces 80 percent of the menus at his restaurants. Exceptions are deliveries of fish, citrus that doesn't grow easily in the Northeast, and some crops that are hard to grow organically.
Barber makes sure to let his diners know how their meal began. His waitstaff
- who highlight the origins of a dish, often in excruciating detail - play a key link between the farmer and the customer.
"If people have not just great-tasting food, but great-tasting food with some type of connection
- who was growing it, how it was grown, where it came from - they end up tasting things they otherwise wouldn't taste," he says. "Even on my best nights as a chef, the stories provide a kind of seasoning that I can't provide."
