Charity Robey

Andrew Porzio: Finding his place on the Manor Farm

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Andrew Porzio started growing food in his backyard when he was a kid. He’s scaled up a bit.

When Andrew Porzio came to Sylvester Manor Educational Farm in the spring of 2016 as a farm apprentice, he’d already been growing food for a decade.

At 13, he walked into the backyard of his family’s home near Buffalo, picked a spot and started fencing it in with sticks. He was undeterred when his dad said his garden site was, “a little shady.”

“My dad had raised beds, but I wanted to do my own thing,” Andrew said.

By his fifth season of backyard farming he had a 3,000-square foot garden, was feeding his family as well as the neighbors, and the rest of his crop was out on the street next to a tip jar, earning hundreds of dollars a season.

Andrew is the oldest of four siblings — Katrina, Daniel, Meghan, and Makayla — in a house, “on the edge of urban sprawl,” he said. He gravitated away from the sprawl, spending as much time as possible fishing and exploring outdoors.

When it came time to pick a college, he headed for Paul Smith’s College in the Adirondacks, despite never having been to that part of New York State. Paul Smith’s has a policy of allowing students to bring a boat to school, and soon Andrew was exploring the Adirondack waterways in his skiff, The General. “Small but mighty,” the skipper said.

The summer before college graduation, Andrew was a commercial salmon fisherman in Alaska on a remote island off Kodiak. He worked with a crew that used set nets, lower risk than “Deadliest Catch,” but more hazardous than the Snapper Derby.

The salmon migrate along the shoreline and get stuck in nets that extend from the shore out into deeper water.  “We stayed in a cabin at night and went out three times a day for a few hours to bring in the fish,” Andrew said. “At one point, a humpback whale got caught in our nets, but we rescued it.”

Anticipating graduation made 2015 a time of  self-appraisal. Three years earlier, Andrew had started an annual list of goals as a way of planning and tracking his progress. His first list had owning a pickup truck as a goal and by the year he graduated, the top of his list was to write a book.

“I wanted that first step to be in the right direction and not have to take a step back,” he said. “I had all the pieces but wasn’t sure I had them in the right place.”

His journey downstate to check out the position at Sylvester Manor was also his first trip through New York City, followed by his arrival on the Island on a January day so quiet that STARs Cafe was the only sign of life.

On April 4, he started as a farm apprentice, growing vegetables in a place where the growing season extends much longer into the fall months than he was used to. “Broccoli, collards and carrots taste much sweeter when they are exposed to all that cold in the ground,” he said.

He also found a much different kind of customer base, coming from a place with little tourism. “The mix of summer and year-round people, I’d never experienced that before,” he said.

When two key members of the Sylvester Manor farm team left in the middle of his first full growing season, Andrew and colleague Jocelyn Craig had to step up and fill the gap.

“It was a super smooth transition. I was ready to grow things,” Andrew said. “I changed all the landscaping, redid our cover crop and our soil fertility plan.”

This year, Andrew and Jocelyn share the farm management, with Jocelyn in charge of vegetable growing in the Windmill Field and Andrew doing livestock and resource management.

“I’m comfortable working with manure,” Andrew said, and in his new role it seems every resource decision takes manure into account, from the siting of the chickens at the Windmill Field to managing the transition of the crew from use of sanitary and water facilities in the Manor House to use of the new, nitrate-reducing sanitation facility.

Andrew said he’s met a lot of young people with romantic ideas about farming, ideas that usually come from never having done it before. “I don’t want to be on the end of a hoe forever,” he noted. “Making goals is part of that. Going forward, I want my own business, under my control. My Eden.”

He said that working at Sylvester Manor has helped him move forward with his plan.

“Living in a place like this makes me think differently. It makes me relax, focus on free time, read, take walks,” he said. “It was a perfect fit, and I stumbled upon it.”

Lightning Round with Andrew Porzio

What do you always have with you?  I always have a notebook with a postage stamp on it. Right now, it’s the international stamp, The Moon.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  I really like the beach at Section 9. Great spot for watching the full moon rise at sunset.

Favorite place not on the Island?  My grandparent’s house in Erie, Pennsylvania. The basement was finished, and my grandpa had a bar built down there. It was a magical place.

Last time you were elated?  Sundays, waking up at the Manor, walking out on the back lawn.

What exasperates you?  When people don’t collaborate and work together.

Last time you were afraid?  In Alaska, standing in a stream watching grizzly bears eat salmon. I was on my guard.

Best day of the year on the Island?  Memorial Day, the parade and reading the names at the Legion.

Favorite book?  “A Sand County Almanac,” by Aldo Leopold.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?  Curt Stager. He taught an evolution and geology course at Paul Smith’s that changed my life.

Fresh Pond's history of water quality

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Green scum on the shores of Fresh Pond on Monday.

When Native Americans lived on the shores of Fresh Pond thousands of years ago, they dumped discarded scallop shells in the water.

Before the Shelter Island landfill opened in 1950s, Fresh Pond was the most popular dump site on the Island with everything from refrigerators to car batteries tossed into the drink.

But according to Tom Junod, who has been swimming in Fresh Pond for 17 years, water quality reached a new low last Sunday.

“It was the first time I looked and said, there is no way I’m going in that–milky-green water with scum piled up on the shore,” Mr. Junod said.

It’s been a tough year for Fresh Pond, Shelter Island’s only deep freshwater lake, with the  town putting up signs late last week cautioning against swimming.

Fed by the local aquifer, the pond is what geologists call a kettlehole, dug out by the receding glacier of the last Ice Age.

Putting refuse into Fresh Pond may be an Island tradition that goes back thousands of years, but it’s taken an especially toxic and widespread sort of pollution — nitrates from untreated sewage — to fuel the algae bloom that colored the water green in recent weeks and led to Monday’s posted warnings against any exposure of humans or animals to the potentially poisonous conditions in the water.

Town Engineer John Cronin, in a presentation to the Hay Beach Association two years ago noted that, “Nitrate pollution of the aquifer has been a known issue on the Island at least as far back as the 1980s.”

In addition to untreated sewage, harmful algae blooms (HABs) can be the result, according to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s website, of a combination of factors, including extended periods of still water, sunlight and high temperatures.

Monday afternoon the surface of the water was glass, reflecting sky and trees. A woman who said she was a visitor emerged from a minivan full of bathing-suited would-be swimmers, but decided against letting the kids out when she saw the warnings.

“What a shame,” she said. “It looks so beautiful.”

Island Profile: Albert Dickson asks 'Did I do good?'

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Mary and Albert Dickson at home on Shelter Island.

Albert Dickson’s family history includes a number of people about whom you could say, “They did good.”

His great uncle got the idea that places for public access to the water should be designated by the town, and not just rely on the friendly and tolerant owners of near-shore property. He helped establish the town landings we use today. Albert’s grandmother once risked her life to rescue a swimmer in trouble near Second Bridge, and was rewarded when the woman she saved gave her a set of gold spoons. And his parents, Anton and Mary Dickson, in spite of their own very modest means, somehow managed to give food and support to people in the community who needed it.

With this family tradition of doing good in mind, Albert, who has just retired, decided the time is right to go beyond his involvement with the Water Advisory Committee. He’s running as a Democrat for a seat on the Town Board in the upcoming election.

“There are a lot of people who have been here for 30 or 40 years and don’t know who this Albert Dickson is,” he said. “People who do know me are the people I grew up with. I’m anxious to meet people, let them get to know me, and I get to learn their hopes and concerns for the Island.”

The Dickson’s family home was a tiny cottage on Grand Avenue in the Heights, bursting with six children, three boys and three girls. Albert mowed lawns, worked at the pharmacy and summers on the North Ferry. The Heights Post Office was practically a family agency, with Mary, Albert’s grandmother, and Mary, Albert’s mother, serving as postmistress, although not at the same time.

One of the lawns Albert mowed was at the home of his great-uncle, Joe Mack, who lived in a bungalow on Oxford and New York avenues. Uncle Joe served as superintendent of highways from 1938 to 1957, and Albert said when he decided to establish town landings, many people at the time thought it was a crazy idea. “He told me that people said things like, ‘Who goes out to Hay Beach?  You go to the water wherever you want,’” Albert remembered. “It was extremely progressive.”

His was a childhood of total freedom. “It seemed like we always had boats, we were always on the water,” Albert said.

Graduating from the Shelter Island High School in 1971 in a class of 25 — four or five of whom are still living on the Island — he left to study education at SUNY Fredonia and become a teacher.

By the time Albert left the Island, he had already endured many losses. His older sister Sandra died in a car crash caused by a drunk driver in 1963, and his father died in 1968, when Albert was 15. But no loss was more wrenching than the death of his brother Owen.

Owen was 29, married to his childhood sweetheart, with an infant and a toddler, when he developed an incurable blood cancer. At the time bone marrow transplants were experimental, but Albert was a good match for his brother, and so he left college in his senior year and went to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle with Owen and Owen’s wife, Susan.

After some initial success, Owen’s body began to reject the transplant. After four and a half months of struggle, Owen died.

Albert went back to Seattle and married a woman who worked at the research center where Owen had been treated. “I had to stay out in Seattle to try and hang on to Owen,” Albert said. “Maybe there was a degree of survivor guilt, thinking I could have done more. It wasn’t easy to accept. It was a devastating loss. It still is.”

Albert worked as a residential contractor in Seattle and continued that work after he and his wife moved from Seattle to New Jersey, bought a house and had a child. Their marriage ended shortly after their daughter, Kirsten, was born. When he had moved on to New Jersey “I happened to meet this terrific woman.”

Early in their relationship, Albert brought Mary, who loves to fish, to the Island for the first time on the weekend of the Snapper Derby. Mary recalls saying, “I’m in” when she spotted the first sign announcing the baby-bluefish competition.

By the end of the day, “I had a bucket of fish, and I was hot to trot,” she said. “I went to the weigh-in and the woman said, ‘This is for children.’”

Mary was crushed. “He knew the whole time! And I had a snapper that would have won.”

Albert readily admits he set her up, “I was testing her mettle.”

They married in 1985.

Their blended family included Mary’s daughters, Susan and Elizabeth, and Albert’s daughter, Kirsten. Elizabeth, then a teenager, was the oldest, but “the girls” were within a few years of each other and readily became a family. “All three of them are my daughters,” Albert said.

“The girls” are now married and have six children, two each, and a standing Thanksgiving weekend reservation with the Dickson grandparents on the Island. Susan lives in Connecticut, Elizabeth in New Jersey, and Kirsten in Chicago.

A few years after Mary and Albert married, he got involved in the environmental field, employed by a national company that did remediation, working on an oil spill in the Chesapeake and asbestos removal. For years he’s worked for a demolition company, which he described as similar to taking down a house, except the house is, say, Giants Stadium or the Delta Terminal at JFK. His swan song was (safely) taking down the Gansevoort Sanitation Facility on the West Side of Manhattan.

He officially retires on June 30.

Throughout the years that Albert and Mary lived in New Jersey, they continued to spend time on the Island whenever they could. “That this is a special place,” Albert said, “It was always my hope and my plan to come back here and to give back to this community.”

During the “second home” phase of his relationship with the Island, Albert served on the Shelter Island Heights Property Owners Corporation Board and later was involved in the Menantic Peninsula Association as a trustee. In November of 2012, Mary and Albert left New Jersey to live full time here.

Shortly after moving back, Albert saw that the Water Advisory Committee was looking for a volunteer. He thought this might be an area where he could be helpful, and was appointed. Later, when the opportunity to run for Town Board came up, he pursued it. “I feel very fortunate to be a candidate,” he said.

Albert’s not ready to lay out his platform just yet, but said about the question of water quality and supply, “I hope to bring some clarity to things and to start to mitigate issues we have developing on the Island. I think everyone expresses a concern, but we need to start to break the inertia to address it and start to plan.”

At the end of Albert’s favorite movie, is a scene where an elderly man is standing over the grave of a man who died young, and asks his wife if he’s done good. Albert said he often asks himself, “Could I look at my family and say I did good?”

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you?  I wear a Miraculous Medal my parents gave me when I was 14.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  Second bridge. I used to go with my father and brothers and clam and crab there.  We’d go with the girls, now we go with the grandkids.

Last time you were elated?  When our one and half year-old grandchild Juliet came for Memorial Day.

What exasperates you?  People who lack empathy.

Last time you were afraid?  When Juliet was going to have surgery. (She’s fine.)

Best day of the year on Shelter Island?  Thanksgiving. The family comes and they spend a chunk of time, at least 20 for dinner.

Favorite movie?  Saving Private Ryan.

Favorite food?  Mary is a wonderful chef. I like everything — except mint jelly.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?  Abraham Lincoln

Off the Fork: The greatest thing since sliced bread

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | English Summer Pudding made by a rebellious colonist.

The irony was not lost on me. On July 4th, the anniversary of the day that my country declared independence from Great Britain, I was scouring the English countryside checking every menu, quizzing every cook and searching every cookbook I could find, in the thrall of Summer Pudding, a traditional English dessert of thin-sliced white bread soaked in berry juice. 

My research complete, I returned to the rebellious colony of New York and began turning out Summer Puddings, a dessert that depends on the juiciest, sweetest berries, such as the raspberries, gooseberries, blackberries and currants we have here in July.

First, I had to overcome my prejudice against white bread. Aside from really sweet ripe berries, the only other ingredient in Summer Pudding is plain white bread with the crusts cut off. Forget about crusty, homemade whole grain bread. This is the pre-sliced kind from the supermarket that comes in a plastic bag and has the texture of a sponge. And don’t be tempted to use sliced cake in this recipe; it will disintegrate.

Summer Pudding sometimes shows up on restaurant menus, but it’s really the province of the home cook. Since everyone I spoke to agreed that the definitive instructions for Summer Pudding were written by Elizabeth David in her 1955 book, Summer Cooking, I started there. My recipe makes use of the Independent American Berries that we have here on the East End in July, but any combination of berries will work, provided they give up several cups of juice once they are cooked a bit. You need plenty of juice to dip the bread in, and to pour over the assembled dish because, as Felicity Cloake wrote in The Guardian, “no one likes a patchy pudding.”

Traditional English Summer Pudding

Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 ½ pounds of summer berries; 1 pound of raspberries and 4 ounces of blackberries or substitute red currants or gooseberries for the blackberries if you prefer a little tartness.

Up to 4 ounces sugar, but taste the berries first because if they are really sweet, you may not need any.

½ loaf day-old white bread with the crusts cut off.

Whipped cream for topping.

A deep, one-quart bowl and a plate that will just fit inside it.

1. Combine the berries with the sugar in a saucepan, and heat just until the mixture begins to boil. Cook for 2 or 3 minutes.

2. Pour the still-warm cooked fruit into a strainer, catching all the juices in a bowl.

3. Line a one-quart bowl with two pieces of plastic wrap, allowing each piece to drape over the edges by a half inch. The plastic wrap will help you un-mold the pudding later.

4. Arrange the crust-less bread over the plastic wrap. Dip each piece in the reserved berry juice, and place the largest in the bottom of the bowl, with the rest arranged like a jigsaw puzzle around and up the sides. There should be no gaps.

5. Spoon the berries into the bread-lined bowl.

6. Cover the top of the berry mixture with more slices of white bread, dipping each piece in the berry juice first, and then overlapping so there are no gaps. Reserve about a cup of the juices, and spoon the rest over the pudding.

7. Place the plate on the top bread layer, and put a weight of two or three pounds on the plate to hold the bread layer down. A 38-ounce can will do the trick.

8. Refrigerate overnight, or for at least 12 hours.

9. When you are ready to serve the pudding, remove the plate, fold back the edges of the plastic wrap and gently turn the pudding over into a flat-bottomed serving dish with a lip to catch the juices that will flow out of it. Remove the plastic wrap.

10. Spoon on the reserved juice, especially if you have a patchy pudding.

11. Top each serving with a dollop of whipped cream.

Annette Hinkle, telling the stories that matter

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Annette Hinkle outside the Reporter’s office last week.

In the Shelter Island Reporter, you won’t often find stories about the staff, even though they are some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet.

But Community News Editor Annette Hinkle’s story is too good not to be told.

Annette’s life was interesting before she came to the Reporter in 2016 after 20 years at the Sag Harbor Express, and it’s only gotten better. Just six months after a December fire destroyed the Sag Harbor Cinema, Annette has written a history of the beloved theater — “Sag Harbor: 100 Years of Film in the Village,” a 128-page book full of historical photographs, theater history and memories, with an introduction by Jay McInerney. And she did it in six weeks.

“I used to take improv classes at Second City,” Annette said. “It helped me think on my feet.”
Annette had a rough upbringing in the Rust Belt city of Dayton, Ohio, the last of five children, and so much younger than her siblings that by the time she was 11, they had all moved out of the house. “I went from being in a big family to an only child,” she said.

Her father sold restaurant equipment. Annette remembers going with him to call on customers, in commercial kitchens permeated with the mingled smells of bleach and grease, a sensory assault that haunted her later when as a teenager, she worked at a Wendy’s.

“The worst job I ever had,” Annette recalls. “I didn’t have much in the way of confidence, and there’s something about fast food — people think they can be evil.”

The polyester uniform and striped apron didn’t help her confidence either.

In high school in a Dayton suburb, she felt alienated from classmates she considered small-minded and ignorant. “My older sister had moved to New York and married a man who was African-American. Meanwhile, kids were coming to my school dressed as K.K.K. members. I knew I would leave there as soon as I could.”

Her father’s chronic health problems, including mental breakdowns, made it hard for him to make a living. While hospitalized with heart problems, he died on the last day of Annette’s senior year of high school.

When Annette graduated from high school, no one in her family had gone to college. But two weeks before he died, her father told her he wanted her to get a college degree. “It was out of the blue,” Annette said.

With her father’s dying wish in mind, and the Social Security benefit he left her in hand, she enrolled at Ohio University. In the early 1980s, the university had a strong presence of international students, and Annette made friends with people from Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates and Germany. “It was a real eye-opener,” she said.

She decided to study audio engineering and landed an internship with the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in the fall of 1984. For three months, she lived in Manhattan in the apartment of a friend of a friend, working in a small, exciting newsroom in the middle of a fascinating election year that resulted in a second term for Ronald Reagan. She got to escort Henry Kissinger to the green room.

After graduation, she moved to Chicago where her typing skills got her a job typing commercial scripts at the Leo Burnett ad agency. After two years she transferred to Leo Burnett’s New York office and moved to Hoboken — close to Manhattan, which was her goal.

In New York, she worked in client-sponsored programming and commercial production for Leo Burnett, and soon met a graduate  of New York University’s film school named Adam Flax, who provided equipment for film shoots. They bought an apartment in Hoboken, then moved to the East End in 1995, when Annette began working at the Sag Harbor Express. In 1997, they bought a house in East Hampton and got married. Their daughter Sophie was born in 2001.

When Annette came to the Shelter Island Reporter last year, she said it reminded her of the Sag Harbor of 20 years ago, with a small-town vibe that has disappeared elsewhere.

The conflagration that consumed the Sag Harbor Cinema was the kind of shock that forces people to examine their values, and very quickly Sag Harbor’s arts community formed in solidarity, determined to bring the theater back in a way that made sense for the future.

The Sag Harbor Partnership had the idea to rebuild it as a nonprofit cinema arts center, with classrooms, café and cinema, and they’ve set about to raise the $13 million needed to achieve that vision.

It was in the context of that effort that publisher Pauline Neuwirth approached Annette to write a book about the Cinema for her firm, East End Press. “I was the ideal person to do this because I’d been at the Express so long I was able to tap into some of the historical details,” Annette said. “It takes time to foster contacts especially if you’re talking about a local story going back.”

After some research, she started writing the first week in April and by early May was done. The book grew beyond the story of a single theater, into a history of film in Sag Harbor, told through the handful of cinemas that operated there. The first copies of the coffee-table book came off the press in late June, in time for the July 16 benefit that will raise the money needed to purchase the theater.

“An insanely fast project,” said the exhausted, but happy author.

This won’t be Annette’s last book. She is already planning a history of Sag Harbor’s venerable American Hotel and is almost finished writing a book of Sag Harbor’s “true ghost stories.”
And someday she plans to collaborate with her husband, Adam, a dedicated fisherman, to write a book about fishing and small-town America, which sounds a little like Shelter Island.

Lightning Round

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  Sylvester Manor, it feels like I’m reincarnated there.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  Maui. You’ve got to love a place where you see rainbows every day.

Last time you were elated?  Pauline sent me pictures of the book on press and I felt like I was giving birth again.

What exasperates you?  People who put on their left turn signal and then turn right.

Favorite movie or book?  Brazil

Favorite food?  Lebanese stuffed grape leaves with lamb.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?  Spalding Gray. He always had his eyes open. He was inspirational in my wanting to tell stories.

Most respected elected official?   Elizabeth Warren.

On the half shell. My dinner with kombu

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Our columnist found this seaweed, made it into chips and fed it to her family.

Two years ago I heard that kelp farming might soon come to waters off the East End and a jolt of excitement went through me.

I love to cook with and eat kelp, but finding fresh kelp is tricky. Determined to take slimy matters into my own hands, I stuffed a large plastic bag full of seaweed I found in shallow water on the beach near Bootleggers Alley, took it home, rinsed it carefully, baked half of it into seaweed chips and cooked the rest into a broth. Then I fed it to my nieces.

It tasted pretty great, but as it turns out, it was not kelp.

My family survived my reckless foraging. And thanks to a recent kelp-tasting at Noah’s in Greenport, sponsored by the Cornell Cooperative Extension Marine Program, I recently got a much-needed grounding in the current state of kelp farming, learned a number of new ways to use kelp in cooking, and found out all local seaweed is edible. (Whew!)

Kelp is the most commercially viable local seaweed, a nutritious and versatile vegetable, that contributes to clean waters and a healthy marine ecosystem. But what really gets me excited is the way it tastes.

Toasted kelp is like a blue-corn-tortilla-chip-of-the-sea. It is full of umami, a taste that is also associated with meat and mushrooms, a great source of iodine and contains no fat. Kelp (also called kombu) is a staple of Japanese cooking.

Kelp farming in New York waters makes sense, especially for oyster or scallop farmers who already work the waters, and whose small businesses would benefit from more diversity in what they raise. Seaweed farming is already a big business in Maine and growing in Connecticut, where one aquatic farmer has figured out how to create a multi-level diversified farm by stringing lines across a patch of deep water, and hanging mussel socks, lantern nets for scallop spat, and kelp. I’m not sure what a mussel sock is, but if stockings for bivalves complements kelp farming, I’m all for it.

Farmed kelp grows in huge brown sheets like flags flapping in an underwater wind. And it grows fast, one to two feet a day. If the romaine in your kitchen garden did that, it would soon cover the house like a Vietnamese lettuce wrap.

Like most seafood, kelp is at its best when it’s fresh out of the water, but high-end restaurants in the New York area scarf up most of the fresh kelp currently grown in Connecticut. For the rest of us, there is dried kelp, usually from Maine, at stores that sell organic or “health” foods.

The kelp-tasting at Noah Schwartz’s Greenport restaurant was a sign that local kelp may soon be readily available, as people who farm the waters, aka aquaculturists, stake out their aquatic plots and start growing. The tasting menu Noah created showcased ways to use fresh kelp that I had never dreamed of.

The eager kelp-tasters gathered in Noah’s back room were an eclectic bunch. One man had made a day-trip to Greenport from Brooklyn, where he works for a start-up that makes seaweed snacks. He was there trying to scout out additional kelp suppliers for their products. Before the official tasting began, he shared samples of his kelp jerky.

It was … chewy.

A man who seemed to be a Hong Kong-based businessman for half the year and an Amagansett-based farmer the rest was there to learn if kelp might be a worthy crop to add to his land-and-sea farm. This possibility was encouraged by his wife and mother-in-law, who grew up in Singapore, eating and cooking with kelp, and who sampled and intelligently critiqued each dish that was brought to our table for tasting.

For the starter, Noah wrapped a tenderized strip of savory kelp around a chunk of seared yellow fin tuna. Definitely a crowd-pleaser. Next up were kelp sushi rolls, and a fantastic kelp noodle salad that combined savory and slippery translucent noodles with spring veggies and tiny sweet tomatoes from Latham’s Farm in Orient.

The Hong Kong mother-in-law told me that one of the wonderful things about Chinese cuisine is its emphasis on the variety of textures in food, for instance, things that are slippery. She was slurping up the glistening kelp noodles as she explained this to me.

The main course was a trio of kelp-dusted Shinnecock sea scallops in a bed of kelp risotto, a dish that my Asian tablemates thought should have been spicier. But dessert, a kelp-enriched chocolate cake with candied kelp garnish vanished like a mussel into its sock.

If I had any misgivings about kelp being snobby food, my kelp-tasting companion set them aside when she confided that her twin boys are addicted to a Japanese snack that is the South Asian equivalent of potato chips; nobody can eat just one. It’s called Tao Kae Noi Crispy Seaweed, a combination of roasted kelp and secret spices.

The next day I went online and ordered six bags, eating one bag a day until I had to reorder.

I’ve decided not to feed my family any more foraged sea vegetables, so I guess the Crispy Seaweed and Kelp Jerky will have to do until the fresh kelp starts to appear in a fish market near me.

Dave Arnold, Man Behind Museum of Food and Drink, Says Gristmill Was His Rosebud

A conversation with Dave Arnold the founder of MOFAD, the Museum of Food and Drink in this issue of NYFoodStory.

 A puffing cannon in action at “Boom!”—the Museum of Food and Drink’s exhibit on breakfast cereal. (Photo by Paul Adams)

https://www.nyfoodstory.com

First and South: A collaboration of food, drinks and community

Sarah Phillips partner/operator visits K.K’s Farm in Southold where she purchases and harvests lettuce and other produce for the weekend menu. (Credit: Randee Daddona)

At the intersection of First and South streets in the Village of Greenport, there’s a lovely old house; all windows and garden, with a homey vibe that begs you to “find your way” in.

It’s First and South, the five-year-old bar and eatery that has become a center for the collaborative, community-based style of hospitality championed by partner and manager Sarah Phillips.

She calls it “the blend.”

“Farmers, boat-builders, second-home owners, it’s so great to get people together. Food and drink is a pretty good common ground,” she said.

Phillips grew up in Babylon, Long Island, a small place with a seafaring tradition, not unlike Greenport. “In Babylon, you knew what everyone was having for dinner and whether their grandma was coming over to eat,” she said.

Bartender Bob Paquette also known as “one-eyed Bob” at First and South in Greenport. (Credit: Randee Daddona)

Her father was a teacher, ran a bar on the side and worked as a lifeguard for over 50 years. Phillips grew up with fishing and sports and, although she did some catering even before studying at the International Culinary Institute in New York, her main work during the decade before she got into the restaurant industry was also lifeguarding.

After culinary school, Phillips was living in New York and working as a consultant to restaurants when she realized she had gone astray. One hot night in June 2011, she was stuck on an L train that was completely lacking the refreshing smell of the sea she remembered from Long Island summers. “I couldn’t believe I was in the city. It felt so wrong,” she recalled.

By July 4th weekend, Phillips made it happen. Visiting the Jedediah Hawkins Inn in Jamesport she noticed the restaurant was short-staffed and offered her resume for consideration.

“Are you a restaurant angel?” the general manager asked, hiring her as beverage manager and later general manager. Jedediah Hawkins was exactly the track change her career needed, introducing her to all the best of North Fork food and wine and leading her to the Greenport property that would become First and South, her delicious community fishbowl.

Chef de cuisine Ivo Duarte at First and South in Greenport. (Credit: Randee Daddona)

Ivo Duarte is chef de cuisine at First and South and Phillips said his experience working at Sang Lee Farms enriches what he brings to her kitchen. “We got a whole new perspective,” she said, “because he was working hands-on at the farms.”

Bartender April Uihlein works one day a week with Ira Haspel at KK’s The Farm, harvesting greens on Thursday for First and South to serve on Friday. It gives Phillips a pipepline to her main vegetable provider that’s the next best thing to a kitchen garden. During a recent spinach-harvest, Uihlein texted Phillips from the field to ask, “Do you want the small, fine spinach or do you want the larger leaves?”

These are not unimportant questions. First and South goes through 22 pounds of lettuce in a weekend and menus are planned around what’s in season “I want to do some zucchini fritters, and a local summer crudité with a warm crab dip. But I need really great, fresh zucchini to do that,” she said.
From Surrey Lane Farms, the June crop of scallion scapes found their way into the striped bass and the steak frites and nasturtium blooms are adding zest and “a beautiful touch of femininity” to the Negroni.

Huckleberry Lemonade at First and South in Greenport. (Credit: Randee Daddona)

The transition of the North Fork from a land of potato and duck farms to wineries, diversified farms and specialty foods has made it a food destination; a land where the fruity perfection of Briermere’s apple pie lives side by side with the dark chocoholism of Blackbottom Oat Pie from Orient’s Four and Twenty Blackbirds. At First and South, Phillips serves these signature products that make the North Fork food scene so vibrant. “People come out to Greenport without a car. These are brands they can’t get hold of easily,” she said.

A trained sommelier and a devotee of North Fork wines, Phillips is especially happy to include her favorite winemakers in the First and South collaboration. “At Macari, Kelly Urbanik takes it up a level every year,” she said. “Anthony Nappa is doing an incredible cabernet franc.”
“We like to showcase varietals that are outstanding,” she added, ticking off a list that includes chenin blanc from Paumanok Vineyards, McCall Wines’ 2013 Chardonnay and the grüner veltliner from One Woman Wines & Vineyard.

“Wines that pair well with our food,” she said.

First and South in Greenport. (Credit: Randee Daddona)

Phillips sees the restaurant as a place where people who share an interest in the food and drink of the North Fork can develop and move forward. “This place was always intended as a platform for people who want to be in this industry,” she said.

She’s also a booster for former First and South colleagues, including her former chefs: Taylor Knapp started the pop-up restaurant PawPaw in Greenport and farms snails at Peconic Escargot, and Scott Leventhal went on to make beautiful blue smoke at North Fork Smoked Fish Company.

On Monday nights in the spring and fall, the main dining room becomes a dance floor with Phillips’ friend Blake Hobby, a champion swing dancer, leading the celebration. On Monday nights in the summer, Phillips pairs a pig from Wells Farms and beer from a local brewery to reach for the pinnacle of traditional American outdoor cooking: the pig roast. “We have fun together and highlight each other’s businesses,” she said adding, “There is a lot of Tetris here.”
Phillips has become the ringmaster of this group of local farmers, fishers, artists, dancers and pie- and winemakers, who work with her to create a rich experience of North Fork hospitality at the corner of First and South.