Is Baehrel unheralded? You can read, and watch, a lot about him on the Internet. “But we couldn’t believe it-it just flew by.” In the end, they paid around four hundred and thirty dollars a head, including a corkage fee. Over the next seven hours, he served Merrihue and his companions twenty-three courses. He told them that he had just served a fifteen-course lunch to fourteen diners. Baehrel, in an apron, greeted them enthusiastically. Around back, they came upon a manicured entrance to the basement. They walked up a driveway to a house on a hill. The driver left them and headed into the nearby village of Coxsackie for some pizza. Once the others had arrived, the gate swung open. ![]() ![]() The gate to Baehrel’s property was closed. There was a fifth person as well-“my brother, who has no credentials,” Merrihue said. They met in Manhattan and hired a limousine to take them the two and a half hours to Earlton. Chan flew in from Hong Kong, Pak from Vancouver, Merrihue and Hayler from London. Merrihue hastily assembled a group, a “fantastic four of fine dining.” The three others were Kevin Chan, the editor of the Web site Fine Dining Explorer, who claims to be the first person ever to eat at all of the 50 Best Andy Hayler, a well-known critic who says he is the only person ever to eat at all of the Michelin three-stars and Mijune Pak, the editor of the Canadian Web site Follow Me Foodie. Baehrel had an opening, three weeks later, on a weekday at 4 p.m. “I thought, I might die before I get a chance to eat there.”Ī year and a half later, Merrihue heard from Terrance again. “I pride myself on getting into restaurants.” Still, it didn’t look good. ![]() “That wound me up even more,” Merrihue said. A man who identified himself as Terrance, a friend of the chef’s, wrote that Baehrel had stopped taking reservations. Undaunted, Merrihue sent an e-mail to the address provided on Baehrel’s Web site. “We spend our lives looking for places like this,” Merrihue said. But at the time it was booked through 2020. The diners who got into the restaurant raved about it online. He had christened his approach Native Harvest. He made his oils and flours from acorns, dandelions, and pine incorporated barks, saps, stems, and lichen, while eschewing sugar, butter, and cream cured his meats in pine needles made dozens of cheeses (without rennet) and cooked on wooden planks, soil, and stone. Baehrel derived his ingredients, except meat, fish, and dairy, from his twelve acres of yard, garden, forest, and swamp. Once called Damon Baehrel at the Basement Bistro, the place was now simply called Damon Baehrel, after its presiding wizard and host, who served as forager, farmer, butcher, chef, sous-chef, sommelier, waiter, busboy, dishwasher, and mopper. He’s also been to eighty of the restaurants to which Michelin has granted three stars.Īround Christmas in 2013, a friend of Merrihue’s alerted him to a Bloomberg News piece about an unranked contender, which Bloomberg called the “most exclusive restaurant in the U.S.” It described a gourmet operation-in Earlton, New York, a half hour south of Albany-in the basement of a woodland home. After a trip to Cape Town this spring, to a restaurant called the Test Kitchen, Merrihue, who lives in London and produces promotional videos for restaurants, became, he says, the second person to have eaten at every restaurant on the so-called World’s 50 Best list. “The people I go around with, it’s hard for us to find something that is genuinely unique and new.” The people Merrihue goes around with are gastronomes, the trophy hunters of haute cuisine, the kind who travel the world to dine at famous, or famously obscure, restaurants. ![]() “I didn’t understand how the secret had been kept,” Merrihue said recently. The first time Jeffrey Merrihue came across the name Damon Baehrel, he was amazed that he hadn’t heard of him.
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