Locavore makes good

This is great news - we've enjoyed Dan Barber's two NYC-area restaurants immensely:

Dan Barber, a pioneer of the so-called farm-to-table restaurant movement, was named the nation's top chef Monday by the James Beard Foundation.

Dan Barber was lauded for using his New York restaurants — Blue Hill New York and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills — to highlight the difference seasonal and sustainable agriculture can make on the plate.

Barber sees his cooking — which he calls American seasonal — as an effort to raise awareness about everyday food choices. At Stone Barns, which is set on a working farm, the menu is a simple list of fresh ingredients.

Dan Barber named top chef in US at "food Oscars" (AP via Yahoo! News)

Related: Blue Hill Farm

Thought for the day

Parisian food critic François Regis Gaudry, writing in L’Express: “Americans in a bistro are like ladybugs in a garden, a sign of its rude good health.”

(cited in Alexander Lobrano's fantastic recent series of NYT blog posts on dining out in New York and Paris)

North Carolina Goober Alles

Fry some more goobers, Bubba; the truck's leaving for Manhattan in the morning:

For years, aficionados who liked their peanuts fried in small batches by septuagenarian hobbyists who gather in church rec rooms had but one option: the peanuts prepared by the First Methodist Church Men’s Club in Mount Olive, North Carolina. As you may have read in these pages, Danny Meyer’s business partner Richard Coraine discovered these extra-crunchy, super-salty specimens—which are to other peanuts what Belgian frites are to Munchos—on a reconnaissance trip prior to opening Blue Smoke in 2002. Hopelessly smitten, he’s been buying as many cases as the First Methodist peanut men can produce ever since...

Battle of the North Carolina Church Club Peanuts (New York magazine, October 8, 2007 issue)

New York City just got a little bit hipper.

The North Carolina Barbecue Society

North Carolina is the “Cradle of Cue™.” It all started on our shores. The North Carolina Barbecue Society invites you to join “The Fun Tribe™” and help preserve the history, culture and uniqueness that sets North Carolina barbecue apart from all others. Come visit the Old North State and experience the barbecue diversity that makes North Carolina the Barbecue Capital of the World.

The North Carolina Barbecue Society

Needless to say, I immediately made a healthy contribution to the cause and joined up.

They've got a pretty damned fine idea for a road trip, too.

Hat tip: Greg.

Shockingly, LA Times gets barbecue

This reverent appreciation of Allen and Son, one of the absolute temples of Eastern North Carolina barbecue gastronomy, was sent to me today by *three* different enrevanche readers, only two of whom have websites. ;-)

Blackwood Station, N.C. — The moon was high over the loblolly pines when Keith Allen arrived for work at 2 a.m. He built a fire of hickory logs, and a plume of rich blue smoke creased the black night sky.

When the fire had produced glowing red coals, Allen shoveled them into a pit below two dozen hog shoulders on a metal rack. For the next nine hours, he shoveled more coals, stoked the fire, and turned the shoulders as they cooked a ruddy, smoky brown.

Long after first light, he was still at it. With a cleaver in one hand and a knife in the other, he chopped the pork with a rhythmic whump, whump, whump. Then he plunged two gloved hands into the steaming meat to mix in a homemade sauce of vinegar, salt and red pepper.

And that, for purists, is the long, hard, wearying way of making genuine pit-cooked Eastern North Carolina chopped barbecue.

Barbecue done in rare form (Los Angeles Times, Jan 31, 2007)

A tip of the enrevanche John Deere cap to John, Greg, and anonymous.