By Susan Langenhennig, The Times-Picayune
November 02, 2012
http://www.nola.com/dining/index.ssf/2012/11/covey_rise_farms_brings_the_fi.html
Sandy Sharp’s pickup truck bounced along the dirt road near the vegetable plots at Covey Rise Farms. It was a Saturday afternoon, just after 5 p.m., in late August, the weekend before Hurricane Isaac, and the rolling acreage was damp from a recent rain.
As he piloted around the farm’s perimeter, twin tire marks formed in a wake of wet earth. Behind the wheel, windows rolled up, air conditioner cranking, Sharp swung the vehicle around, giving me the drive-by tour of the vegetables and herbs.
Through the frame of the passenger window, I could see baby lettuces poking out from a long curving row. Forest green arugula. Curly topped red oak. Lacy fronds of mizuna.
After the rain, the broiler-like heat of the afternoon began to slowly abate, like a dialed down oven temp, and rain drops speckled the leaves of the lettuces, typically a cooler weather crop in South Louisiana.
The lettuces drew me up to Covey Rise. The lettuces and the corn and the purple-hull peas and the small, round heirloom eggplants.
If you’ve dined in an upscale New Orleans restaurant recently, you’ve eaten something grown at Covey Rise, a 400-acre piece of property about 30 miles northwest of Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore. The land is home to a working farm, pen-raised bird-shooting preserve, corporate retreat facility and a cypress lodge set among tall pines in a part of the state where the red-dirt terrain begins to swell into low, rounded hills.
Covey Rise picked its first vegetables in May 2010. Since then, it’s become the common denominator of New Orleans fine dining.
The farm sells its produce – and the ducks, eggs and hogs raised at its sister company, Chappapeela Farms – to more than 50 New Orleans area restaurants, driving its refrigerated truck down from Tangipahoa Parish and up to commercial kitchen doors throughout the city several times a week.
Farm names have become like designer labels on local menus. The frequency with which the name Covey Rise – and those of other regional farms and orchards – appears these days signals a total entrenchment of the farm-to-table trend.
In the past week, Restaurant August featured a salad of roasted Covey Rise baby carrots. Le Foret restaurant was serving Peking duck with sweet potatoes, haricot vert and preserved cherries, all from the farm. At Red Fish Grill, one of the specials was a whole speckled trout with Covey Rise fingerling potatoes, squash, cherry tomatoes and a roasted tomato sauce.
Such frequency gives the impression that the farm is some sprawling complex, with miles of beds and fleets of tractors. It’s a little surprising to see that it’s actually a fairly compact operation of 35 acres of vegetable production.
From farm to table at Covey Rise Farms From farm to table at Covey Rise Farms Locally grown food goes straight from the field and to the table as Executive Chef Michael Gulotta of Restaurant August explains how he and other restaurants in town use the northshore farm for fresh ingredients. Watch video
It’s not the scale but the scope that impresses.
At any given time, there could as many as 150 varieties of vegetables, fruits, herbs and greens in the fields. At least five types of eggplants were in the ground in late August, along with squash, corn and a fall crop of heirloom tomatoes.
What’s picked is sold directly to chefs, to subscribers in the farm’s north shore Community Supported Agriculture program or Hollygrove Market in New Orleans.
“We push either sides of the recommended growing season,” Sharp said, explaining the early lettuce crop, “and we plant a little bit of a lot of different things on a steady basis.”
Sharp glanced at the time, mindful that he was running a bit late. In a few minutes, he needed to be back at the lodge greeting guests for the evening’s field-to-table dinner, a regular event featuring a visiting chef, often one from one of John Besh’s restaurants.
On the drive back, we come across Michael Gulotta, executive chef of Besh’s Restaurant August, standing by the side of the road, hands on his hips, eyeing the fields. He’s a trim guy wearing a white t-shirt, black chef’s pants and a serious expression.
Sharp rolled down the window, and Gulotta stuck his head inside the truck cab.
“Figs, you didn’t tell me you had figs?” Gulotta said. “I got some for tonight.”
Tourists come to the farm
The figs weren’t the only unknowns. Before arriving at the farm on Saturday afternoon, Gulotta, the evening’s chef, had only roughly scripted the meal, preferring to approach the dinner almost as an improv act.
“I basically built a really ambiguous menu until I came out here and picked a bunch of stuff that I saw was fresh,” he said. “Usually I bring a lot of my cooks with me and just go out into the fields.”
Gulotta has been involved with Covey Rise since before the farm became a farm.
Covey Rise started as a bird-shooting preserve owned by Jimbo Geisler on land owned by Sharp and his partners. The lodge and corporate retreat facilities, with swimming pool and tennis court, were designed to offer mallard, quail, pheasant and sporting clay shoots between board meetings.
But as the economy slagged, Sharp and Geisler started to brainstorm new ways to use the land. Agri-tourism – the idea of inviting visitors up to spend a day on the farm, spend a night in a cabin, and in between sit down to a star-chef dinner – seemed like a perfect dovetail to the existing business.
The problem was, neither Geisler, who has a graduate degree in wildlife management, nor Sharp, a land developer involved in heavy construction and real estate investment, were farmers.
Sharp is a genial, barrel-chested guy, who speaks with a faint Southern drawl and the calm, measured cadence of a country lawyer. After spending a few hours with him, you get the sense he always has a new business venture percolating in the back on his brain.
“People have romantic ideas about farming,” Sharp said. “But this whole process involves huge amounts of work, both in the field and selling. There are a lot of easier and more profitable ways to make a living.
“But I’ve never had as much fun in any business, as I’ve had raising vegetables. It involves the three things I really love: land, equipment and good food. And a fourth thing: really appreciative customers. I never expected that.”
The farm’s first customer was Besh, whose wife, Jennifer, went to Loyola University law school with Sharp.
Besh and Gulotta helped Sharp whittle down a list of vegetables that would be useful to local restaurants. Sharp then turned to Jimmy Boudreaux, a retired LSUAg Center vegetable expert, to figure out how to grow the list in Louisiana.
“Most farmers grow one or two crops in large acreage,” Sharp said. “Citrus, strawberries, tomatoes. Those are the three crops you can get in abundance in Louisiana, but you can’t make an entire menu out of them.”
As the produce sales side grew, Covey Rise launched the field-to-table dinners.
Gulotta has cooked for several of the events, as have chefs from other local restaurants. The lodge also has an in-house chef, Mark Lyons, previously of Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.
On the Saturday night in August, 50 people were gathered in the dining room of the lodge, a cypress paneled hall, with a stone fireplace and six basic bedrooms.
Bouquets of field-picked flowers and aromatic herbs – basil, mint, rosemary -- sat on the tables, and taxidermied deer heads and ducks peered down from their wall mounts.
The only other decoration in the room was a sideboard cabinet filled with vintage boxes of buckshot and the Saints preseason game playing on a flat-screen, with the volume off. The setting – rustic, masculine, upscale agrarian – made the event feel like a photo shoot for a glossy food magazine.
Before the meal began, Sharp gave the guests a tour of the farm, hay-ride style, on the back of a flat-bed trailer pulled by a green John Deere.
Gulotta sat in the middle of the group, the sleeves of his chef’s coat rolled up to his biceps, pointing out stalks of lemongrass and vines of squash.
Back at the lodge, he jumped off the trailer, waved goodbye, with an offhand, “I gotta go cook.”
From field to plate
Each table was set with small, white menus printed on Restaurant August letterhead and propped on the plates.
The evening’s meal would feature Chappapeela Farms duck and pork dumplings with okra and okra blossoms in a light corn, coconut soup; Gulf snapper with eggplant and peppers; lamb roast with purple-hull peas and grilled mustard greens; and, for an appropriately produce-driven dessert, a sweet tomato sponge cake with sautéed plums and basil ice cream.
Gulotta introduced the courses, providing a little background about the ingredients, like a tour guide pointing out landmarks. “We’re having a whole roast lamb saddle of blackbellies. That’s a type of sheep that has short hair,” he said.
“Sandy kept dropping off all this beautiful corn, so we made stock out of the cobs. And then we turned it into a Vietnamese style corn-coconut milk soup.”
Everything I sell is from within 100 miles of the city." -- Michael Gulotta, executive chef of Restaurant August
The unplanned figs showed up, roasted, alongside slow-cooked duck gizzards.
Gulotta has become accustomed to a level of spontaneity that comes with the surprise of unplanned ingredients. “In the restaurant, depending on what they’ve got, my sous chef and I will change our entire lunch menu just by walking on the (Covey Rise) truck,” he said. “It’s the way people used to cook.
Besh’s and Gulotta’s relationship with the farm grew as Restaurant August was shifting toward almost exclusive local sourcing for ingredients. Before Hurricane Katrina, the restaurant’s menu featured about 30 percent regionally grown produce and proteins. Today, it’s close to 90 percent, at times even reaching 100.
“Chef Besh and myself, we both spent time in Europe, so we used to ship in everything that we fell in love with cooking over there. It was just what you did in those days,” Gulotta said. “But after Katrina, we decided to start finding local producers, and use the attention to detail we had in Europe, but apply it to local products.”
August now gets its ducks and hogs from Chappapeela Farms, its chickens from Briarhill Farms in north Louisiana and its beef from Two Run Farm in Vaughan, Miss.
“Everything I sell is from within 100 miles of the city,” Gulotta said, “and the majority comes from this one place.”
After the meal, guests were hovering around the television, watching the end of the Saints game, as Gulotta and his staff packed up the kitchen.
Sam Scelfo, owner of Gambino’s Bakery, stood by the table, chatting with other guests. Scelfo had previously hunted in the area but this was his first dinner at the lodge. “It’s impressive,” he said. “I didn’t expect to come up here and get a gourmet meal.”
Geisler gets that reaction a lot. The tower in the middle of the vegetable field is used for pheasant hunts. “When guys are out walking around, they’ll look down and say, ‘Hey, is that what we were eating in the salad last night?”
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