2014-08-18 The New York Times

Celebrity Chefs Get a Chance to Play With Fire

FOOD By JEFF GORDINIER  AUGUST 18, 2014 7:00 PM

“Have some mushrooms,” said Zakary Pelaccio, one of the chefs behind Fish and Game, the laid-back gastro-pad in the blooming bohemian hamlet of Hudson, N.Y.

Who could resist? It was Sunday evening in the Hudson Valley, and a breeze was rippling through the Queen Anne’s lace. Pelaccio, the erstwhile Fatty Crab empire builder who has come to embody the dream of staging an exodus from Manhattan and getting back to the garden, had gathered a bunch of brand-name chefs, bartenders, farmers and power eaters to the rolling hills of Fish and Game Farm, a few miles from the restaurant.

He stood next to a long, hot tray of embers. There, Sean Brock — the revered chef from McCrady’s and Husk, based in Charleston and Nashville — shifted around a heap of chanterelles in a grill pan. The mushrooms had been foraged that morning in the forests of Montgomery County. Brock didn’t want to get in their way. He didn’t even want to sully them with a plate. After minimal interference — some salt and olive oil, with a sweet knob of butter as a final flourish — the chef beckoned a group huddled around the embers to start plucking the sizzling chanterelles straight from the heat. “That’s heaven, huh?” he said. “It’s like popcorn.”

Brock and Pelaccio, part of a loose confederation of American and Canadian kitchen rogues called the Northern Chefs Alliance, were brandishing their knives on this 175-acre expanse to raise money for the FarmOn! Foundation, a non-profit that seeks to support family farms by (in part) getting young people fired up about agriculture and getting shoppers fired up about local produce. Their strategy was to hand some of that local bounty over to chefs like April Bloomfield, Matt Jennings, Jamie Bissonnette, Jeremy Charles and Rob Gentile and see what happened.

Gentile, the chef at Buca in Toronto, could be found roasting a whole goat — provided by Glynwood, an organization that advocates for Hudson Valley farming — on a gleaming steel spit. (In true Hudson style, the spit had been designed by Kris Perry, a local sculptor.) Pelaccio and his comrades from Fish and Game, Jori Jayne Emde and Kevin Pomplun, teamed up with Matty Matheson, from a Toronto restaurant called Parts and Labour, to serve up a hog that had been smoked for 30 hours. The provenance of that pasture-grazing pig was Climbing Tree Farm in New Lebanon, N.Y., whose 30-something owners, a married duo named Schuyler and Colby Gail, were arguably the most stylish couple at the party.

“It feels good to have what we’re doing be appreciated,” Schuyler said. “Because a lot of it is being dirty and castrating pigs.”

“It’s not the most glamorous lifestyle,” Colby added.

Dubbed Play With Fire, it was a easygoing affair. (Any echoes of the Woodstock rock festival, another Hudson Valley hoedown whose 45th anniversary coincided with it, were totally intentional.) Nevertheless, glimmers of agro-chic glamour did surface here and there. Ruth Reichl, the author and former Gourmet editor-in-chief who has had a home in Columbia County for 20 years, purred over the leg of crustacean she had picked up at the tent shared by Bloomfield and Charles. “That snow crab — it was so delicate and lovely,” she said. John Medeski, the keyboardist from Medeski Martin and Wood, delivered a soundtrack of burbling organ grooves. The singer Amy Helm — daughter of Levon, of the Band — joined him and the musicians for a few songs. The men’s wear designer John Varvatos, who counts himself a fan of FarmOn! and has owned a place in the area for almost a decade, perched on a nearby hay bale to bask in the music. “I’m not a Hamptons guy,” he said with a relaxed smile. “To me this is a complete switch from what I do in the city. And we don’t talk about fashion.”

The festivities drew to a flickering climax when Pelaccio’s 10-year-old son, also named Hudson and freshly returned from summer camp, attempted to light a bonfire by shooting a series of flaming arrows toward it. (The mound of wood eventually ignited when someone lobbed in an ember.) Safely stationed yards away, Bloomfield watched the inferno while musing about someday buying a farm in the area.

“I haven’t seen a bonfire since I was a teenager, because in England they do it on Guy Fawkes Night,” she said. “It’s very primal, cooking on fire. It feels good. It ends up being instinctual, doesn’t it?”

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