Two Philly chefs and a ceramics artist are collaborating for a New York restaurant series

The glass sphere arrives filled with steam and tender greens sprouting over what looks like a slab of concrete traced with the name “Pooka.” The plate was, in fact, lifted from a West Philadelphia sidewalk in front of the home of chef Omar Tate’s mother, cast in plaster, and transformed into ceramic by Glenside artist Gregg Moore.

The heat source fogging up the glass like a hothouse globe, the radiating warmth of fried mushrooms inside, is the physical representation of “a terrarium of Black breath” on the dish called Black Lung.

The salad, one of seven evocative courses in a $250 tasting menu that runs through March 13 at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., as part of the Chef in Residence at Stone Barns program, is Tate’s homage to Black lives that have been lost to police brutality, from Ahmaud Arbery to Breonna Taylor and many others. Its contrast of heat against the delicacy of greens and hard materials imprinted from Tate’s home is intended to create tension — a “visceral and empathetic response, an acknowledgment of life,” he says, “to really bring people onto the ground that I walk every day.”

That urban landscape in Mantua, where Tate and his wife, chef Cybille St. Aude-Tate, are building the Honeysuckle community center around social justice and Black food culture, might seem a world away from the rolling Westchester County farmland where the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture exists. An 80-acre former Rockefeller estate was transformed into the nonprofit center for in 2004 with a mission to explore sustainability and ecological cuisine. In addition to educational programming, its farm produces more than 300 varieties of vegetables and grains every year and stewards nearly 400 acres with integrated livestock grazing. Much of the produce is sold to its for-profit restaurant partner, Blue Hill, which has become a pioneering force of farm-to-table exploration awarded two Michelin stars under the restaurant’s chef-owner, Dan Barber.

But during the pandemic, Blue Hill temporarily closed, then revived itself with outdoor picnics, meal kits, and half its previous staff. The Stone Barns Center also decided to launch the inaugural season of its Chef in Residence program, a series of four guest chefs who run the kitchen at Blue Hill in five-week stints, and also participate in other educational activities with the Stone Barns Center. Barber says they wanted to learn from seeing the bounty of their work on agriculture interpreted “through a different chef’s lens, with a different historic perspective than mine, which is very Eurocentric,” says Barber.

It just so happens that the first two chefs are Philadelphians: Tate and Shola Olunloyo. Barber wanted to launch the program with chefs who could explore the historical impact that West African foodways, the subsequent Black diaspora, and the Great Migration, had in shaping American cuisine.

“American cooking owes a debt to enslaved Africans,” says Barber. “Because that’s who we are — it’s the cultural bedrock of our cuisine.”

They evolved a pattern of eating and agriculture supported by the landscape, he said, from the Carolina rice kitchen to Creole cuisine, and a celebration of crops like cowpeas, collards, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes that “farmers needed to grow” to foster fertile soils.

The Nigerian-born Olunloyo, a private chef, Le Bec-Fin alum, and consultant known for his inventive Studio Kitchen dinners, opened the season with modernist takes on his native West African flavors, though interpreting them through New York’s cold-weather ingredients wasn’t always obvious.

“Nothing that looks like Africa grows in the Hudson Valley in January,” says Olunloyo, who used pumpkin seeds instead of melon seed powder to make egusi stew with roasted pheasant. The bakery used Barber’s whole-grain heirloom wheat instead of traditional white flour to make Agege bread. And African spices such as uda pods and uziza pepper seasoned the farm’s goats, smoked and roasted over Stone Barns hay then served with puff-puff beignets and chutneys.

Olunloyo and Tate also had the benefit of another Philadelphia-area talent, the artist Moore, who collaborated with them to create custom ceramics that bolstered the artistic context of their unique menus.

Moore, director of the ceramics program at Arcadia University, has been working with Blue Hill and Stone Barns since 2014 when, after reading Barber’s book The Third Plate, he contacted Barber with the belief that his quest for artistic meaning in handmade materials he uses in his studio paralleled the chef’s work on sustainable food systems.

Barber was convinced: “Why was I ignoring the raw materials of our plates if I’m so obsessed with the raw materials of our food?”

The works Moore has produced since — making china from the carbonized bones of Stone Barns’ animals; crafting plates imprinted with the visible marks of pecking beaks, rooting snouts, and the porous dots where grass had been grazed — has helped convey the life cycle of the farm-to-plate concept in compellingly creative ways that menu descriptions and server spiels cannot achieve.

“Gregg is touched by a genius that was a revelation for me,” says Barber. “I’m so thankful he’s in my life, and now he’s in these chefs’ lives, too. He’s doing the same kind of work with Shola and Omar, but with very different designs and materials.”

Moore took cues from several African objects in Olunloyo’s home to create a large black sharing bowl for an opening offering of three Nigerian-inspired snacks, from Blue Hill beef tartare flared with suya spice and kuli-kuli peanut cake, spiced carrot soup shooters, and akara bean fritters.

A stone mortar and pestle was re-created in miniature to evoke the importance of ancient tools and spice-grinding in Nigerian cooking, while a slab of precious wenge wood was mimicked in ceramic to present Stone Barns’s famous baby carrots, harvested just hours before service, pickled, pureed, roasted, and dressed with fermented African purple basil honey, a benne seed-peanut crumble and a lemongrass-coconut milk “snow” that was Olunloyo’s wry wink to the winter landscape outside.

Moore’s work was even more collaborative with Tate, also a visual artist who frequently blended drawings, poetry, and music into the immersive Honeysuckle pop-ups that brought him acclaim in New York before returning to Philadelphia at the outset of COVID-19.

Tate, whose Philadelphia pop-ups have been largely constrained to takeout boxes during the pandemic, says working with Moore has been one of his favorite parts of the Stone Barns experience. The two both had their hands in plaster capturing key swatches of his mother’s Mantua sidewalk ; and he relished watching St. Aude-Tate shape “Cybille’s medicine cup” with her hands and mark its bottom with an “X,” a historic plantation reference to vessels used for healing.

The cup is used to serve a burnt whiskey tonic infused with sassafras root as part of a dish called “Antebellum Hoodoo,” an homage to a West African doctor named Elsey enslaved in South Carolina that also includes sorghum gruel with chicory roots, black walnuts, peach preserves, and bone marrow.

The cup and plates for that dish were inspired by Colonoware, an earthenware of mutual interest between Moore and Tate because it was made by enslaved Africans during the Colonial period. That it was reproduced here it in ceramic shards was deliberate, says Tate, “because the experience of black folks learning their history — and my own personal identity — is often fragmented. ... It’s the brokenness that makes it whole to me.” As the dish arrives with its various condiments on little pieces, the fragments come together to form a whole story on the table.

Tate’s suite of creations traverse multiple touchstones of African American history, from a Juneteenth barbecue course to Clorindy, a beef tartare dressed in lemony crème fraîche but tinted black with squid ink. Served on a white Moore plate it is “essentially a dish in blackface,” Tate says. It’s also a nod to the 1898 Broadway musical of the same name that featured an all-Black cast in blackface.

But Honeysuckle at the Stone Barns is much more than an historical reflection. From Tate’s toad in the hole tribute to 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, whose 1991 murder seeded tension preceding Los Angeles riots, to the more recent killings acknowledged with Black Lung, the meal’s full experience is intended to instigate difficult discussions with current relevance.

“Philly is as violent as s— this year, and I’m still close to people who are losing people,” said Tate. “My sister-in-law’s nephew was found murdered in an empty lot a couple weeks ago — and that’s what I do Honeysuckle for. That’s why that first plate [Black Lung] is there. People are suffering but one of the aspects of healing is also for me to be an example of excellence in my community. And that’s what’s important: I want to bring this whole thing [from Stone Barns] back home.”