Food
The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants
introAs farm-to-table slowly but surely threatens to devolve into a meaningless hospitality buzzword, we highlight restaurants and culinary events that stay true to the ethos of the movement. Sure, most food comes from SOME farm to SOME table, but here, you can taste the quality of the produce and the reverence for its suppliers in every bite. [Photo: Lara Hata]
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
TokyoTokyo, Japan – Japan has long valued quality food made from seasonal and local produce, but the country’s culinary scene is only slowly warming to the farm-to-table concept. Tokyo restaurant chain We are the Farm doesn’t just purchase produce from trusted providers – much of that produce is grown on the owners’ farm. The menu of all three restaurants is very vegetable-heavy, and its star item is the daily platter made from organic vegetables, including heirloom varieties, picked that very day.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
SingaporeSingapore – Singapore’s Open Farm Community is likewise interested in farming first, food (a close) second. The project, a collaboration between hospitality group Spa Esprit and urban gardening initiative Edible Garden City, is designed to highlight the close ties between fresh produce and excellent cuisine. The Asian megalopolis is famously enamoured with the latter, yet produces very little of the former. This restaurant, set in a model working farm and – in using the fruit, veg and herbs grown there – showcases that food can be produced in under-utilised urban spaces.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
SydneySydney, Australia – In endearing Aussie style, farm-to-table restaurants are often referred to as paddock-to-plate Down Under. Despite the folksy label, these are often eye-wateringly expensive, especially in the city locations farthest from the nearest farm. Sydney’s Agapé, once Australia’s largest organic restaurant, set out to demonstrate that using local ingredients, in season, can actually be cost-effective. The restaurant recently closed, but the team hosts regular pop-ups and takes their affordable organic fare on the road in a big, red food truck.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
Byron BayByron Bay, Australia – North along the coast, Byron Bay is the chilled-out beach escape beloved by exactly the type of urban tastemakers and conscious consumers that appreciate an opportunity to wander the very paddock that supplies the food on their plate. Enter The Farm, a sprawling community of farmers and growers, artisans and educators, just minutes from the town. Several on-site eateries process the fruits of the farm’s labour, including Three Blue Ducks, an offshoot of a Sydney restaurant that shares the same name – and the same sustainable food philosophy. [Photo: Nikki To]
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
vancouverVancouver, Canada – Another notable variation on the farm-to-table buzzword is dock-to-dish. An initiative by that name is focused on the sadly neglected animal products that happen to come not from farms, but from our overfished oceans. Dock to Dish, a sustainable seafood network, connects small-scale fishermen directly to restaurants to bypass the traditional supply chains that lead to overfishing. Vancouver Aquarium and chef Ned Bell, who have also initiated their own sustainable seafood programme Ocean Wise, are partnered with the project. Sample Bell’s sustainable seafood dishes at the aquarium’s café in Stanley Park.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
BerkeleyBerkeley, California, USA – Northern California’s Bay Area is widely accepted as the birthplace of the farm-to-table movement as we know it. Most trace it back to the menu at Chez Panisse, where Alice Waters name-checked her suppliers as far back as the 1970s. The restaurant’s popularity endures, and over the years, many imitators have come and gone. Gather is perhaps the most accessible and consistently sustainable of the many restaurants following the path once blazed by Waters. Also located in Berkeley, it doesn’t just mention the provenance of all ingredients, but chronicles them in an infamous “Source Book,” available to diners on request. [Photo: Carmen Troesser]
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
San FranSan Francisco, California, USA – Across the bay, the team at über-sustainable San Francisco restaurant The Perennial do everything to minimise their environmental impact. They don’t just source all their produce from hyperlocal producers, they literally give back. The restaurant bakes bread daily using perennial grain Kernza, which replenishes the soil it is grown in, rather than stripping it of nutrients. Food scraps are fed to fish growing in tanks in the restaurant’s aquaponic greenhouse in nearby Oakland, where they fertilise the veggies and herbs, creating a closed-loop urban farm.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
PortlandPortland, Oregon, USA – The over-emphasis on provenance was skewered in an episode of hipster parody TV show Portlandia, so the mention of a farm-to-table restaurant in Portland may cause the odd eye-roll. At Tusk, it’s not just hipster baiting (even if “aggressively seasonal” sure sounds like something straight out of a Fred Armisen sketch). The Middle Eastern-inspired menu uses ingredients from farms with whom executive chef Sam Smith has cultivated long-standing relationships. Most importantly, producers are listed on the restaurant’s website, so diners can see for themselves where exactly their food came from. [Photo: AJ Meeker]
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
DCWashington, D.C., USA – The farm-to-table movement has contributed to an increased interest in traditional farming methods and encourages variety – both on menus, as well as on farms. Seasonality forces restaurants to change their menus in accordance with available produce, while producers are more likely to experiment with unusual crops when they know a chef who will buy them. Washington, D.C. restaurant Garrison works closely with One Acre Farm in Maryland to grow specific herbs and vegetables, including heirloom varieties. The restaurant has even co-hosted a farm brunch with the farmer to highlight the collaboration.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
VedgePhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, USA – As back-to-basics cooking, comfort food and vegetable-based dishes take centre-stage on menus around the world, it’s more important than ever that the quality of the veggies used is right, even more so in restaurants that serve only plant-based dishes. At Vedge Restaurant in Philadelphia, which is often touted as America’s best vegan eatery, the locally sourced and seasonal ingredients are the stars of dishes like Fancy Radishes, Campfire Cauliflower and Wood Roasted Carrot.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
LondonLondon, UK – At Craft London, it’s not just the food that’s locally sourced from trusted producers. The restaurant and café in Greenwich take the farm-to-table spirit to its logical conclusion by adding craft-to-table, if you will, to the mix. Everything used by designer Tom Dixon in the creation of the restaurant’s plush interior is British-sourced and London-designed. Add to that the in-house coffee roastery and butchery, as well as the adjacent kitchen garden, featuring beehives, a smoking hut and of course home-grown veggies, and Craft really earns its title.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
AmsterdamAmsterdam, Netherlands – Farm-to-table food doesn’t have to be local. But it doesn’t hurt either. The herbs and vegetables served at Dutch restaurant De Kas come from as far (about 30 kilometres) away as its own farm, and as near as the greenhouse that doubles as a dining room. Founder and owner Gert Jan Hageman tends to the adjacent nursery which guests can visit prior to tucking into the tasting menu of the day, determined solely by the morning harvest.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
BerlinBerlin, Germany – At the Good Bank, you may lose (a bit of) money, but you’ll earn excellent food karma! It may seem gimmicky, but this Berlin eatery’s eye-catching dining room, decorated with its very own vertical farm, has raised way more awareness for hydroponic farming than a mere menu mention ever could. After all, diners don’t just sample the lettuce grown in this innovative way, they see it growing and being freshly harvested right behind the counter.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
CopenhagenCopenhagen, Denmark – You can’t talk about the farm-to-table trend without mentioning New Nordic cuisine. After all, the aesthetic associated with the wider movement – communal tables, heavy earthenware, unfinished natural textures – were part and parcel of the rugged, pure, genuine image that the culinary style specifically evoked. Hyggelig interiors were designed to suggest the intrinsic authenticity of the food and its roots (often quite literally) in the Scandinavian soil. Now that the trend’s moment has passed, the restaurants good enough to survive the hype don’t need to cater to cliché – like Amass Restaurant, which serves sustainable, organic, locally sourced food in a thoroughly modern, airy industrial space in Copenhagen.
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The World’s Best Farm-To-Table Restaurants.
FranschhoekFranschhoek, South Africa – Naturally, the wine served at a wine farm is as farm-to-table as it gets, but at Solms Delta in South Africa’s Western Cape, the house wine is complemented with locally sourced food. In addition to produce from local farms, many ingredients come from the on-site Dik Delta Culinary Garden. This ambitious kitchen garden was set up to prevent the extinction of some of the edible plants known to the indigenous people of the region, which were long neglected and only recently rediscovered by modern chefs.
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