The Constant Gardeners

Eating local has never been more fashionable. While San Franciscans flock to farmers markets, commit to eating only food that has traveled less than 100 miles to their table and join CSAs to ensure that a box of fresh, local produce is never more than a phone call away, chefs are also looking for ways to get closer to their food. Behold, the rise of the kitchen gardens, modern-day potagers created by chefs to assure they’ll have easy access to super-fresh herbs and vegetables. Though not exactly a new idea (Greens, for instance, has had a dedicated garden, Muir Beach’s Green Gulch Farm, since opening 28 years ago), it’s one that seems to be picking up speed. In a region like the Bay Area, blessed as it is with both urban green space and ideal growing conditions, it’s no wonder that chefs at restaurants all over are claiming a garden of their own, be it a multi-acre plot overseen by a professional gardener or a rooftop crowded with herbs and tended by an impassioned chef.

A few years ago, Cynthia Sandberg had a dinner at Manresa Restaurant that changed her life—literally. At the time, she was growing tomatoes—and only tomatoes—on her farm in the Santa Cruz mountains, Love Apple Farm, and selling them at a stand on her property. She had all the customers she needed and had rejected the idea of supplying local restaurants. As she puts it, “I didn’t want to be driving my tomatoes all over town.” But the meal at Manresa, which she remembers as “very, very good,” coupled with chef David Kinch’s persistence, convinced her to try supplying the restaurant with tomatoes for a season. A year later, Kinch called her and asked if she knew anyone who might be interested in creating a kitchen garden exclusively for Manresa. Sandberg took the bait, embarking on a synergistic partnership with Kinch that is growing with each passing year.

She estimates that her farm now supplies Manresa’s kitchen with 70 to 80 percent of its annual produce needs—which represents all of Love Apple’s crops. Everything she grows for Kinch he will use, meaning that she doesn’t have to worry about satisfying several different clients, as a traditional market farmer would. The incredibly diverse crops on her farm—from her signature tomatoes to bok choy, kohlrabi and tender lettuces—all require special handling. It is, by Sandberg’s own admission, a tremendous amount of effort. “There are not too many people that I know who would spend 100 hours a week to make this work.”

When I ask Sidney Weinstein, owner of Pauline’s Pizza, in San Francisco’s Mission District, why she thinks most restaurants don’t have their own gardens, she echoes Sandberg’s statement. “It’s a big job,” she admits. Weinstein has tended a quarter-acre kitchen garden at her home in Berkeley since the late ’80s, with the majority of the vegetables going to the pizzeria (they sell the surplus to a few other restaurants). The garden supplies Pauline’s with spring lettuces, a bounty of Meyer lemons that get pickled and used as a pizza topping and in sorbet and tiny wild strawberries that make their way into a “berry sundae” and strawberry ice cream. Weinstein maintains a second organic garden near Angels Camp, in the heart of Wine Country that supplies the hot-weather crops: tomatoes, melons, squash, eggplant, chiles and more. The farm also grows grapes and produces, at the winery Calaveras Creek, a red wine called Pauline’s Pizza Red.

When Weinstein planted her Berkeley garden, back in 1985, the vegetable selection in San Francisco wasn’t encouraging—and the organic vegetable selection was even smaller and much less fresh. “I used to buy organic arugula, and it would last about one day. The stuff I pick from my garden lasts eight.” She planted fruits and vegetables that weren’t widely available at the time, and continues that practice to this day, choosing unusual and heirloom varietals for her plots. For those who think a restaurant garden might be an economical option for a restaurant, Weinstein is quick to dispel that myth. “It’s not economical, not at all …if you ask my husband, he’d tell you we spend more money [sourcing vegetables] this way.”

Even though it’s not necessarily a practical move, economically speaking, the idea has clearly been catching on, and more potagers are cropping up each year. For many chefs, the decision to plant a garden is less about economics and more about surrounding themselves with the fruits of their labor. Joe Boness, who recently became chef at the Alembic on Haight Street, spent the first several weeks of his tenure turning soil, building raised beds and generally transforming the abandoned lot that runs behind his restaurant, the pizza shop next door and the Red Vic theatre. “I see this garden as a community space,” says Boness, who has plans to plant herbs for the kitchen and the bar (including mint and hyssop), as well as a wall of hops. “Maybe we’ll give some to Magnolia [Brewery, Alembic’s sister restaurant down the block] so they can dry-hop a cask.”

Incanto also follows the small-is-beautiful formula with its petite rooftop plot of herbs, watered and weeded by cooks and waiters as part of their duties. Joseph Manzare’s SoMa restaurant, Zuppa, has a rooftop herb garden too; his is so prolific, it’s the impetus behind Zuppa’s “Rooftop Cocktail,” a refreshing summer cooler made from Square One vodka infused with 10 different herbs. Though many chefs in the city have access to exceptional products from small farms, these restaurants have raised the bar: The ingredients grow, quite literally, in their own backyard.