With his blue denim overalls, short-sleeve white shirt and red bow tie, Lee Jones looks the part of an old-fashioned farmer. But the produce he grows is nothing less than cutting-edge: green and red frilled mustard greens, tri-color celery, watermelon radishes, Okinawa purple sweet potatoes … and popcorn shoots, yellow leaves on a long stem that sprout from a corn kernel, grow in a darkened room and taste just like popcorn (without the butter and salt, of course).
“A lot of what we harvest is with a pair of scissors,” he says, which is easy to believe when sampling the slender threads of micro chives or a tiny sprig of micro parsley.
Jones’ farm, The Chef’s Garden, is is tucked near Lake Erie in Huron, Ohio, but his customer list includes some of the world’s best-known chefs. Thomas Keller, of the French Laundry in Napa Valley, Calif., and Per Se in New York? He’s a customer. Charlie Trotter, famed for his Chicago restaurant? Yep. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, whose restaurant empire extends to Tokyo? Him, too.
On Saturday, Jones brought some of his staffers and lots of his produce to St. Louis, then set up a display in a ballroom of the Hyatt Regency. Some of the best chefs in town stopped by for tastes, among them Larry Forgione of An American Place, Marc Felix, late of Red Moon, who hinted at a big new project in the works, and Cary McDowell of the new restaurant Revival, who dazzled with a cooking demo of sauteed scallops with a fricasse of fingerling potatoes and shiitake mushrooms. Hyatt executive chef Patrick McElroy also cooked for the crowd, composing a salad plate from an innovative quintet of beet dishes that included a frothy, lemony emulsion designed as a salad dressing but delicious enough to be a cold soup. For a seasoning, he used his flavorful beet salt, made from dehydrated golden beets ground with sea salt.
Jones’s farm also is home to the Culinary Vegetable Institute, where visiting chefs can experiment with what he grows. The Institute has a nonprofit arm, Veggie U, which sends vegetable-growing kits to elementary schools. An annual food and wine extravagranza, set this year for July 19, helps support Veggie U. For more information, visit www.veggieu.org or www.chefs-garden.com.