A Garden of Eating
Bringing the food world to its next level of culinary obsession is the “chef garden”—a patch of earth, sometimes outside the back door of a restaurant, sometimes on a hillside nearby—where organic fruits and vegetables swell under a chef’s watchful eye. Chantenay carrots, white eggplants, peppery watercress, bitter chicory, English peas, and Meyer lemons are just a few of the “boutique” ingredients premiering in a chef garden near you.

The concept stems from Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant lauded as the birthplace of California cuisine. Chef and owner Alice Waters was so passionate about fresh, locally grown foods that she contracted with organic growers who gave her complete control. A country full of chefs started planting and has transformed the restaurant experience for many diners.

Instead of listing such classic dishes as chicken Marsala or boeuf Bourguignon, for which the name stands alone, today’s restaurant menus list the ingredients of dishes right down to the last leaf, and often the grower that produced them: Full Belly Farm spring peas or Green Gulch mâche, Niman Ranch beef or Sonoma duck. The ingredients, it would seem, have become the stars.

Thus, the chef garden was born. Between raised beds or double-dug rows, chefs have replaced their toques with wide-brimmed straw hats as they search for color and texture, seasonality and freshness.

When it comes to the chef garden, the San Francisco Bay Area has impressive bragging rights because of its year-round growing season and organic fanaticism. And as the trend continues to grow like tomatoes on a hot summer day, more are springing up all the time, here and across the U.S.

Poggio / If the best wine is made from the most difficult soil (an old Italian proverb), then perhaps the best food is grown on land with the most spectacular view. Or something like that. This seems to be the case at Poggio, an Italian-style trattoria spilling out onto the sidewalks at Sausalito’s landmark Casa Madrona Hotel. On the hillside above, Poggio’s organic garden is a steeply terraced plot overlooking the San Francisco skyline. (Poggio means “hill” in Italian.) It teems with watercress and peppercress, radicchio and Tuscan black kale, and a host of other Italian herbs and vegetables fed by sluices of cascading water.

Tended by chef Peter McNee and a full-time gardener, Poggio’s garden prospers in Sausalito’s cool coastal weather, supplying the restaurant with authentic Italian vegetables unavailable elsewhere. Under the hand of owner Larry Mindel, Poggio is nothing if not authentic. Walking in from the busy center of Sausalito is like entering a cantina in Florence. Marble detailing, dark wooden paneling, and terra-cotta tile floors transport diners the moment they enter. Mindel has a genuine love of Italy that is evident in Poggio’s organic produce and an undeniable neighborhood soul.

Rustic wood-roasted meats and blistering thin pizzas emerge from the wood oven, alive with flavor. Creamy polenta is flecked with garden sage. Local endive is layered with Gorgonzola, grilled spring onions, and arugula. But it’s the house-made pasta that steals the show. Enjoy a plate sprinkled with shaved white truffles from Italy’s Piedmont.

777 Bridgeway, Sausalito. Tel: 415-332-7771 or poggiotrattoria.com