At the high, high end of the market, the Jones family of Huron, Ohio, outruns the economics of modern farming.
On a blustery day last March, Ferran Adrià, who is often acclaimed as the most influential chef in the world, toured a vegetable farm in Ohio. In the warm months, Adrià can be found north of Barcelona on the Costa Brava, where his restaurant, El Bulli, is a culinary mecca for those seeking celery juice with the texture of bubble bath, rose petals fried tempura-style or freeze-dried and powdered foie gras. El Bulli is closed in the winter, and Adrià uses the time to travel and research new ideas. He was visiting the Midwest at the invitation of another renowned chef, Charlie Trotter of Chicago, who had hired a small plane to fly Adrià and his wife, Isabel, along with a few food fanatics, to this small agricultural operation in Huron, near the southwestern shore of Lake Erie. Trotter thought Adrià would be amazed by what he found there.
As its name implies, the Chef's Garden supplies vegetables and fruits directly to restaurants. "Every great chef says if he could, he would have a garden outside his door and cut what he needs when he needs it," says Bob Jones, 65, who runs the farm with his sons, Lee, 45, and Bob Jr., 41. If that fantasy planting included 80 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, salad greens available at eight different stages of maturity, and such oddities as garlic roots and popcorn shoots, it might resemble the Chef's Garden.
The private plane from Chicago was delayed by gusty winds, requiring the Joneses to accelerate the tour to accommodate the compressed schedule. Since winter still lingered over the Midwest, most of the crops were to be found in heated greenhouses or under cold frames. Adrià looked a little tired, but his face lit up as he walked down the rows of salad greens, tearing off small leaves and tossing them into his mouth. Although his English is limited, he made his views known.
"Fantastic," he said, as he bit into a green-and-white tendril that terminated in a couple of tiny leaves.
"These are popcorn shoots," Lee Jones said. Normally cultivated to provide popcorn kernels, the plant was being harvested shortly after its seed germinated. The Chef's Garden grows 75 varieties of microgreens, as they're called. It also offers 50 types of herbs that are plucked in a similar neonatal state.
"Chef Trotter's team was here on research," Lee continued, his words translated into Spanish by a member of Trotter's staff. "We grew them at only one length, and he said, 'What if they are smaller?' It's a little bitter, but also very sweet. You'll notice a very high sugar level in the aftertaste."
The Chef's Garden prides itself on its ability to satisfy a chef's wish list, no matter how outlandish a request might seem. "Early on, we crated and sent live turkeys to a chef," Bob Jones says. "We went out to the marshes and caught turtles and shipped them to a Columbus restaurant. We've dug cattail roots. Just last Monday, we sent someone out in the woods to find acorns. We'd do whatever we can to fulfill a chef's needs." But merely waiting for the chefs to suggest unusual products isn't enough to keep the business growing. The Joneses are always developing new or forgotten plant varieties that they will send out unsolicited in hope of capturing a chef's fancy. Garlic roots were introduced that way. "We were growing garlic shoots and we noticed we were throwing these roots away, and they were so beautiful and white," Bob recalls. "We tasted them and it was pure flavor. Lee would call the chefs and say, 'We got this item, you should give it a try."
Adrià tasted the garlic roots. He also sampled baby ruby amaranth, golden pea shoots, micro lemongrass, and black cumin shoots. Lee Jones handed him some leaves of ice lettuce, which is the name the Joneses give to lettuces grown in cold frames and repeatedly exposed to freezing temperatures. The cold weather concentrates the sugar content and amplifies the juiciness and thickness of the leaves. Ice lettuce was invented at the Chef's Garden.
"Muy bien," Adrià proclaimed.
The tour proceeded rapidly through a research facility, where a small staff under the direction of Bob Jr. studies ways to enrich the soil as a means of enhancing the flavor of the vegetables grown in it. In the packing room, crates were being filled for air freight delivery to restaurants across the country and as far away as Tokyo. Through a formula that takes into account the temperature at the Ohio farm, the destination city, and the transportation hub in between, the crew decides how much ice to include in the package.
Lee Jones, who was leading the tour, repeatedly apologized for the rushed pace. But lunch was waiting: A team of cooks under Trotter had assembled a 12-course meal, and there was no thought of abbreviating it. Each course featured a product of the farm, usually in combination with an organ meat: grilled turnips in a red wine reduction with rabbit kidneys, for example, and steamed garlic, garlic shoots, and bitter chocolate with duck liver. Research made way for repast. It was a reminder that, as Bob Jones repeatedly says, "we're absolutely nothing without the chefs."
Toward the end of the lunch, the guest of honor rose to express his appreciation and deliver a prophecy.
"The future of cuisine is vegetables," Adrià said. "They will be as expensive as caviar and foie gras. With fish and meat, we are already there. But there are 1,000 ideas in vegetables."
It was not only a culinary manifesto, it was an endorsement of the Joneses' business strategy--a plan that created the country's leading grower of specialty vegetables from the ashes of a bankrupt purveyor of commodity produce.
