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Tyler's Refresher When a Food Network celebrity uproots himself from NYC and plants himself in Marin, he discovers the back-to-the-lander within. Run, little rabbit, run. |
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posted on July 19, 2007 |
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If the Food Network decided to launch a version of The Surreal Life, it might look something like this: A camera zooms in on Tyler Florence—host of the network’s Tyler’s Ultimate and the new spokesperson for Applebee’s. Dressed in his signature army jacket, ripped jeans and Paul Smith shades, he’s being given a tour of Gospel Flat Farm in Bolinas, CA, by farmer Mickey Murch, an earnest, bearded and barefoot 23-year-old Reed graduate—who’s either a back-to-the-land visionary or a hippie, depending on how you look at it. The video crew—two very uncountrified guys who just drove up from San Francisco—are talking alternately about Paris Hilton’s prison sentence and the drama that ensued when they locked their keys in the car at Subway on the way up. They focus their lens on Florence crossing over a pond via a small, arched bridge, which leads to a tiny hillock of land: Bunny Island, to be exact. With a tree in the middle of it, it’s the home of 20 healthy rabbits, lazily hopping about in the shade. Depending on how you look at it, they’re either trapped by a moat or blissfully cage-free. Murch, who has been practicing living off his land completely , has “harvested” one “batch” of rabbits already for eating purposes. A year ago, he started taking a bigger part in the workings of his father’s beautiful 25-year-old farm, and is now raising—in addition to the herd of rabbits—chickens and growing everything from chard to squash. Florence pets a rabbit or two and inquires as to how Murch would prepare them. “Would you fry them in lard?” Murch smiles. The two have bonded. “Absolutely.” Back on the “mainland” is a funky, portable wood-burning oven on wheels, which Murch has built using a cheap, old stainless-steel sink and Pabst Blue Ribbon cans. Sitting out in the field, it’s been fired up in order to bake some focaccia. No one’s requesting that Florence cook today, but he can’t help himself. He steps up to the stove with as much confidence as if it were a six-burner Wolf range, while Murch and his buddies grab their fiddles and guitars for an impromptu bluegrass jam. As they launch into a toe-tapping tune, Florence starts whipping up something to eat with what’s at hand: squash blossoms stuffed with Mt. Tam cheese, from Cowgirl Creamery down the road, dipped into a makeshift batter (rice flour and homebrewed beer from a jug) and fried. Murch’s friend Jeremiah, a guy for whom showers are obviously not routine, good-naturedly plays assistant. Florence asks for tongs. Jeremiah looks at him and shrugs sheepishly, “Uh, that might be a struggle.” A fork is proffered, and Florence uses it to gingerly lift a squash blossom out oil. He blows on it a few times and takes a bite, steam pouring out. With everyone watching, there is a dramatic beat. He gives a moan of pleasure and looks straight at the camera: Delicious! I couldn’t have scripted that moment if I had tried. Gospel Flat Farm was the last stop on a rather organic road trip I’d organized in order to give Florence—who recently gave up his “groovy bachelor pad” in New York to move out here with his wife, Tolan—a taste of Marin, the county he now calls home. The camera crew had met us there to shoot a few minutes of footage for 7x7’s website. Check out exclusive video of chef Florence's visit to Gospel Flat Farm in Bolinas, CA. Earlier that morning, I picked Florence up from the beautiful 1920s Mill Valley cabin he and Tolan, a Marin native, had moved into last February. Tolan greeted me at the door with their two-week-old son, Hayden, in her arms (Florence also has a 10-year-old son, Miles, from a previous marriage, and takes every summer off to be with him), and sent Florence off with a kiss. Despite his Southern good-old-boy qualities (being from South Carolina, he’s the kind of guy who calls other guys “buddy”), Florence has evidently started to come along as an evolved Marin man. Shortly after getting in the car, he excitedly offered to show me the video of Hayden’s birth. My guess is that there are some fans of his who would not have declined. He’s been cultivating them now for 11 years. After graduating in 1992 from the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University in South Carolina, he did his time in the kitchens of New York—including his last restaurant gig, as the executive chef of Cafeteria in 1998—but true fame didn’t come to him until he began his Food Network career. His first show, Food 911, aired in 1999, around the same time Brit boy Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef show launched to much acclaim. I think it’s safe to say that Florence was America’s answer to the insanely popular Oliver: a good-looking guy who appeals to both women and men and can talk the talk while cooking appealingly unpretentious food. Now 36, Florence is recognized just about everywhere he goes. He’s still a particular favorite of the ladies (even in the boonies of Marin, there were a few near-swoons), and a lot of information about his personal life is accessible, should you want to imagine you’re the lucky girl. He’s got a new blog on AOL, where he documents his comings and goings, including his move out to the Bay Area. (For one entry, he wrote, “I threw together a small dinner party … I can’t tell you how much fun it was to create an amazing meal almost exclusively from local Bay Area products, from the veal chops to the white peaches to the Syrah.… I felt very lucky to live where I do, in what is essentially a food utopia”). AOL also features his cooking videos. His December wedding to Tolan was covered in a nine-page spread in InStyle’s spring wedding issue, and then there’s tylerflorence.com, which—while you view snapshots of his new house, his new Vespa, a very pregnant Tolan and Florence holding baby Hayden—you can listen to the Raconteurs’ “Steady, as She Goes.” Headed out of Mill Valley, we made a pit stop so Florence could grab an iced coffee from his neighborhood cafe. Caffeine in hand, he was raring to go. The day was almost strangely idyllic. After a week of fog, it had opened up to warm sun and light breezes, the kind of day that makes Marin’s real-estate prices seem justified. While we wound our way up Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and through the redwoods of Samuel P. Taylor State Park, Florence answered my questions with the rapid-fire pace of an auctioneer, tempered only by his slight drawl. On living in New York City: “After doing that for 13 years, it’s like I made it up-the-waterfall kind of thing. But you have to shift gears. Life goes so fast. You got to get healthy. For me, that’s tasting tomatoes and shaking the hand of the guy that grew them.” On meeting Tolan: “At Sundance, she was in charge of ChefDance. They were bringing in big chefs and she was working the room and she caught my eye and that was kind of it.” On quick and easy cooking: “There’s the reality of what people cook, and then there’s the Slow Food movement, which is kind of dreamy and poetic. You can’t make delicious, simple food without the artisanal guy behind it…. But you also can’t ask people to make chicken stock from scratch. They’ll turn off your show and never watch again.” On developing recipes for Applebee’s: “I love the artisanal, but sometimes you’ve got to be able to bring food to honest, hardworking people. There’s a lot more of that than there is of this.” On moving: “I was ready for some California sunshine and some fresh food. It’s a whole different take on being a chef. This is the place to do it. It’s the American Provence. Everything about this area is right for me.” The rare moments of silence were filled as Florence cranked my stereo, uninhibitedly singing along to Adam and the Ants, until we pulled up at our first stop in Point Reyes Station: Cowgirl Creamery, at Tomales Bay Foods. Inside the retail shop, owner and cheese maker Sue Conley greeted us with big chunks of young, velvety Mt. Tam cheese, only two weeks old, so we could compare it to the four-week-old version of the cheese, which had a much nuttier flavor. Florence ate half of a round, raving that it tasted “like butterfat suspended in time.” Florence has embraced the Bay Area foodie party line. “I think California food is American food,” he said. “Those messages that people were hitting hard in the ’70s, you know, about sustainability, are just kind of catching on. People are starting to look into their own backyard and discover what makes the food from their region tick.” Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Florence speaks in hyperbole, but I couldn’t help but think that the day was starting to manifest itself as an actual visit to the “American Provence.” Even beyond the bright blue sky, everything felt amplified: Although we were only at Cowgirl Creamery for maybe 20 minutes, while we were there in walked Albert Straus, the owner of Straus Family Creamery, and Marianna Weiner, the baker and owner of Anna’s Daughter’s Rye Bread, who handed us each one of her loaves to bring home. (You would be excused for suspecting that Conley had set it all up, but it was apparent that this was just another day at the ranch.) Loaded up with fare from Tomales Bay Foods’ deli, including a mixed-beet salad, duck pâté and a beautiful baguette from Brickmaiden Bakery, we headed to Tomales Bay Oyster Company to have a picnic, stopping along the way at Point Reyes Vineyards to try some of the winery’s very nice Blanc de Blancs. Arriving at the oyster farm, Florence fired up the grill. The male half of a young couple, out on a romantic weekday getaway, came over to compliment him (“fucking awesome”) on his show Tyler’s Ultimate, of which Florence just finished shooting 13 more episodes. An older guy from the Napa Valley offered Florence a plastic cup filled with some of his homemade wine—a mix of Cabernet, Malbec and Merlot. Soon, Florence was serving grilled oysters all around. Picnic over, we drove back through Point Reyes Station to make a quick stop at Marin Sun Farms’ butcher shop. Florence picked up four of the most gorgeous (and expensive) cowboy steaks I’d ever seen—each was about two inches thick with a swirl of fat and a frenched bone. One hundred dollars later, we were back on the road and headed to Bolinas to visit a few farms, inhaling the scent of eucalyptus. At Paradise Valley Produce, a farm that’s been owned by Dennis and Sandra Dierks since 1976, a pack of dogs greeted us. We were given the royal tour (thought not quite as royal as that received by Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who visited two years ago). Not one to linger, Florence was off every few minutes, picking a spicy mustard flower for me to taste, handing everyone some bergamot to smell, taking a stroll through the Red Russian kale, talking about what he’d do with it all when he got home (duck eggs, potato pancakes, a dash of this, a dash of that). The last leg of the trip was a five-minute jaunt over to Gospel Flat. I asked Florence to choose his favorite Food Network star, but instead he picked Anthony Bourdain’s show, No Reservations, on the Travel Channel, where Bourdain clearly gets to be a man’s man: drinking, smoking, swearing, getting tattooed and spearing pigs through the heart. “It’s just such cutting-edge television—it’s about food, but it’s really about a slice of life,” he said admiringly. “No one can touch his experiences.” Florence also told me a story from one of his early shows on the Food Network: “I wanted to show everyone how to butcher a leg of lamb. You know, you get 100 percent utilization. You cut it open, season it with lemon, smashed garlic and green onions, roll it up and grill it and it just melts in your mouth and it’s fantastic. So we took this bachelor guy who didn’t know how to cook. He had one leg of lamb and I had the other.” He paused and laughed at the memory. “And it was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen. It was like TLC open-heart-surgery hour. … I got a phone call from one of the executives at the Food Network, and he said, ‘I don’t think we really want to see you cut up an animal anymore.’” Florence, clearly a professional, cheerfully assured me he’s come to terms with the fact that the people of America want nice and neat little chops—not legs. “My recipes have never been more dialed in.” Nevertheless, when we finally arrived at Gospel Flat in the late afternoon, it was he who eagerly made the suggestion that his cover shot be a photograph of him holding some farm-fresh vegetables—and maybe a fresh-from-the-hunt dead animal, like a pheasant. When he was told it wasn’t pheasant season, he looked wolfishly over at Bunny Island. Apparently, even for the most seasoned Food Network celeb, lamb chops are not always enough. Try your hand at Tyler's Farm-Fresh Dinner Menu created exclusively for 7x7.
If the Food Network decided to launch a version of The Surreal Life, it might look something like this: A camera zooms in on Tyler Florence—host of the network’s Tyler’s Ultimate and the new spokesperson for Applebee’s. Dressed in his signature army jacket, ripped jeans and Paul Smith shades, he’s being given a tour of Gospel Flat Farm in Bolinas, CA, by farmer Mickey Murch, an earnest, bearded and barefoot 23-year-old Reed graduate—who’s either a back-to-the-land visionary or a hippie, depending on how you look at it. |
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