"Organic.""Grass-fed.""Hand-picked." Once considered rare, these markers of the farm-to-table trend have become so commonplace on restaurant menus that customers hardly notice them anymore.
The new frontier among top restaurants is "field-to-table," an extreme version of farm-to-table dining that was pioneered in Scandinavia and elevates ingredients found in the wild.
Some of the most highly rated restaurants in New York — Gramercy Tavern, The French Laundry, and Momofuku Ssäm Bar among them — have hired professional foragers to supply them with the freshest ingredients Mother Nature has to offer. This brings creativity, authenticity, and quality to the menu like never before.
Field-to-table is no gimmick, says Brandon Kida, head chef at The Peninsula New York hotel's Clement. He swears that once you eat foraged fare, you'll never go back. It's the future of high-end dining.
We traveled to rural Vermont with master forager Evan Strusinski and Chef Kida to look for fresh morel mushrooms that can go for $45 a pound and other secret ingredients.
Chef René Redzepi of Copenhagen's Noma is credited with elevating field-to-table fare and inspiring the foraging craze at restaurants around the world. The restaurant's foraged feasts, which feature ingredients like moss and pine, cost $300 a head.
Foraging, or the act of scavenging for food in the wild, minimizes the number of hands that touch ingredients before they land on a plate. Some say once you experience how food is "supposed to taste," you’ll never want to eat a cultivated mushroom or farmed strawberry again. It's that much better.
The “Noma-fication of things” is in full swing in New York City, where restaurateurs are clamoring to differentiate themselves from the slew of so-called farm-to-table eateries. Field-to-table is the new frontier.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider