A
“There’s something really nice about working in a garden, pulling weeds. You think a lot,” Narowski said on a recent hot morning during a break from tending the vegetable gardens at Middlebrook Restaurant in Fairlee.
This summer, the Newbury, Vt., native has started helping restaurateurs with their gardens at three Upper Valley restaurants and working with Barefoot Gourmet caterer Barry Clarke to maintain his organically grown vegetables and edible flowers.
“She has a magic touch,” Clarke said last week, overlooking his large backyard garden with wide rows of bright orange, red and yellow nasturtiums, lemon drop and tangerine marigolds, multi-colored pansies and red bee balm.
“The thing we try to do with our customers is to surprise and delight them. Edible flowers are a big part of that, and Amanda makes sure they stay looking lovely,” Clarke said.
For the last five years or so, restaurant gardens have been a rising nationwide trend, along with locally-sourced produce, meats and seafood, according to the 2016 National Restaurant Association survey of almost 1,600 chefs.
Hyperlocal sourcing, such as restaurant gardens, claims fourth place on the survey list with 77 percent of chefs saying it’s “a hot trend.”
Although it is easy to buy inexpensive organic, local produce from numerous farms in the Upper Valley, a garden can provide some of the more expensive vegetables, such as heirloom tomatoes, herbs and other specialty items.
At Middlebrook, chef Adam Dosz uses a lot of garlic to prepare dishes for his American cuisine with Hungarian and Italian influences, so he plants about 27 pounds of Montana, Russian red and German white hard-neck varieties that are easy to grow, harvest and store, Narowski said.
A restaurant can use a garden to stress the freshness of its ingredients. Chefs can emphasize on their menus dishes that feature the “just picked” freshness of ingredients, and they also serve as teaching tools for customers who can see the vegetables growing.
“We’re lucky to have so many farms around that it isn’t necessary to do it all yourself, but I think it’s great for these restaurants to be giving examples of how much produce you can get from a relatively small space. It is quite shocking, when you have good soil, to see what a tiny seed can turn into,” Narowski said.
At Peyton Place restaurant in Orford, chef and co-owner Jim Peyton manages a large garden, which he maintains with Narowski’s help.
“He told me a few weeks ago that he had just finished off the herbs he’d dried last fall. That’s impressive to me that he has time to manage the restaurant and raise enough herbs to last until the new crop comes in,” she said, adding that there is nothing “token” about a garden that is so productive.
“Amanda has a lovely presence in the garden,” said Heidi Peyton, who has owned Peyton Place with her husband for almost 15 years. “She’s really in her place when she’s working.”
The Peyton Place garden supplements the produce that the restaurant buys from area farms, and provides some specialty items that aren’t readily available, Heidi Peyton said.
“Jim really enjoys working in the garden on his days off. He plants the sort of things that make sense for us, and he likes to experiment, so he’ll try a few plants that might give us something different to use.”
Narowski also helps Nancy Murphy in the gardens at Ariana’s, a restaurant she operates in Orford with her husband, chef Martin Murphy.
“The garden’s purpose is two-fold for us,” Nancy Murphy said. “It supplies some of the vegetables we serve in the restaurant, but it also is a nice place for our guests to wander around and sit while they’re either waiting for a table or a place to relax after they’ve dined. The garden is laid out aesthetically rather than all in rows” like a garden designed for production, Murphy said.
“It is a decorative garden. For example, we plant a few artichokes because the plants are really cool, and we don’t use them that much in the restaurant. We would have to grow a lot of them if we wanted to serve them.”
In addition to vegetables, the Murphys grow an assortment of garnishes — edible flowers and a variety of pea that produces long tendrils.
Because of the demands of working in the restaurant and other duties, Murphy said she isn’t able to devote the time to the garden that it needs.
“Amanda helps with the planting, maintaining, and she’ll help with the harvesting. She’s been great. I can’t do it all,” she said. Narowski wants to learn more about growing vegetables, which is Murphy’s strength. “So it’s a good fit,” Murphy said.
On the recent hot morning at Middlebrook, Narowski was struggling with a new garden where productivity was hampered by undeveloped soils and the dry weather, she said.
“I think of myself as a pretty good gardener, and it’s disconcerting and disheartening to see things not doing what I want,” she said.
The gardens at Middlebrook play an important role in the cuisine, Dosz said. And despite her frustrations with the new garden, Narowski is playing an important part maintaining the existing beds.
“Amanda has been a tremendous help to us this year with upkeep and harvesting. Being the chef, gardener, and all around groundskeeper, I can get spread pretty thin during the busy season. She has been quite helpful as a team member,” he said.
“I enjoy growing produce; you simply can’t get any fresher than that, and our customers enjoy the interactive experience. From a financial point of view, there is certain produce that is more economical to grow here than others. French beans, broccolini, fingerling potatoes are some of the more expensive items at your local market. We try to cover the full spectrum more for convenience and customer enjoyment,” Dosz said.
Before Narowski, 28, decided to try to make a living out of gardening, she had worked summer jobs in private gardens in the Upper Valley and on Cape Cod. She also started reading about growing vegetables and flowers.
She became familiar with flavors and with uses for parts of vegetables that are often discarded, such as garlic scapes and the flowers of such plants as mustard and lettuces that have bolted.
“I like vegetables better than flowers, and I want to keep experimenting and learning about new things about them.”
During the winter, she works with Bradford Elementary School students, teaching them the joys of gardening as part of the Farm to School program, and helps her parents with their sugaring operation. Narowski hopes to study the economic side of restaurant gardening, for example, which vegetables are cheaper to buy than to grow.
“Adam (Dosz, Middlebrook’s chef/owner) told me fingerling potatoes are expensive, so we’re growing those. You don’t need to grow green onions, because they’re cheap to buy. I want to learn more about the pricing so I can be more useful in planning the gardens,” she said.
“We live in an amazing area with many options to buy from awesome people who love growing delicious food,” she said, noting that perhaps when she learns more about the economics of gardening, she will be able to grow produce that supplements what’s being grown by other farmers and not duplicate what they’re doing.
A side benefit of working with the restaurants has been getting to know the restaurateurs, Narowski said.
“One thing I appreciate is how nice people are,” she wrote in an email. “Everyone I work for is pretty enthusiastic and thankful for the work I do; they offer me drinks and snacks and try to pawn produce off on me. Sometimes they even comply when I try to pawn produce off on them (garlic scapes).
“Other times I get emails saying it’s too hot out, and that I should skip working for them that day and find somewhere nice to swim instead. That’s the best! People are forgiving and flexible when I have to reschedule, or when I’m super busy, or when I’m away for a long weekend, etc.”
But the thing she likes most about her job is the dirt.
Studies say “there are microbes in the soil that literally make people happier; that definitely helps my mood, as long as it’s under 80 degrees.”
Warren Johnston can be reached at warren.nelson.johnston@gmail.com.