Bret Cavanaugh’s scavenging verges on hoarding. But the things he’s crafting from that junk are remarkably original. And now, with the debut of his first furniture collection, he’s poised to redefine modern design, too. By Scott Edwards
The furniture featured here, with the exception of the platter at the bottom, is part of Cavanaugh’s Trophy Series. Top: Cavanugh may not be the tallest guy around, but he carries a big chainsaw.
I’m not clear. Where is your workshop again?
“Do you know the Wine Hut?”
Got it now. Thanks.
There are still some addresses where GPS will betray you. Bret Cavanaugh’s workshop is one of them. Then again, mine could have led me right to his front door, and I’m still not sure I would have realized I’d arrived in the right place. It resides among a ramshackle storage facility just north of Frenchtown, New Jersey, where the storage units are old shipping containers. But even that conveys a degree of orderliness, which would be misleading.
I pull in, then back out, prepared to go where, I’m not sure, when Cavanaugh waves me down from behind an old, mostly-dismantled Toyota pickup that sits in front of his workshop.
Cavanaugh is wearing a T-shirt, shorts that extend below his knees and construction boots that are laced up well above his ankles. All of it is covered with blotches of stain and/or paint. As are his stubbled face, his arms and his hands.
He’s been here, in this space, for the last three years, but he’s been working on the property, on and off, since he started getting serious about making furniture, about 10 years ago. The front room is a large, wide-open setup that still manages to feel crammed with loose-end materials. It’s also where his tools and machines are, most of it relatively organized by contrast.
Cavanaugh leads me to the back, through a salvaged-wood door of his own creation, to a much smaller room that he’s using as a showroom for the time being. It’s furnished, mostly, with a few large pieces from his Trophy Series, which he crafted specifically for the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center in May. He devoted himself to the collection for the better part of the last two years, and he’s just now, in late June, beginning to reclaim his life.
I’m having trouble digesting what I’m seeing, and it’s not just the suffocating heat. Everything I was exposed to up until this point indicated this was some sort of salvage yard. But the furniture in this room is right on the leading edge of modern—polished metal, sharp angles, abstract forms.
Cavanaugh is a compulsive scavenger. (And a bit of a hoarder.) Thus, the seven 40-foot shipping containers of his own, all filled to their capacity, clustered around the outside of the building. When he was starting out, it was the cheapest means by which he could source his materials. Along the way, it somehow became his signature.
“A lot of the stuff that I have comes with a story,” he says. “That’s kind of my thing.”
There’s an ingenious coat rack made from a bucket of crank arms he found on the side of the road and lithograph frames embellished with driftwood in an Etsy-ish riff. His is not a modern-farmhouse aesthetic. He’s not sanding, painting and reissuing. To call that repurposing against what Cavanaugh’s crafting is gross negligence.
That stuff, though, stands among but separate from the Trophy Series, his first collection crafted entirely from scratch. Still, the dining table, armoire, dresser and chandelier are clearly the next phase in the evolution of the same resourceful craftsman. The intricacy of the designs and the unorthodox juxtaposition of materials attest to a thoughtful, intensive process.
“What I try to do is make diamonds, make these pieces that are memorable but that capture something in somebody. Make them feel something,” Cavanaugh says. He talks quickly, his eyes widening and narrowing with his cadence. “I think 99 percent of people, even if they know furniture, they don’t know the depth of it.”
Not his, at least.
The Swiss-Army furniture maker
Cavanaugh doesn’t obsess over wood. (He’s got about a dozen logs behind his shop, and he plans to install a sawmill soon, but that has more to do with control and cost-efficiency than any kind of reverence.) Nor is wood his only medium. Or even his primary medium.
He grew up in Lambertville, NJ, around an antique car garage, built motorcycles for fun in high school, studied machinery, leatherwork, metal fabrication and welding. He also worked as a chef. (He built his own food truck.) And all of that experience and knowledge is applied regularly, often within a single piece of furniture. In fact, that’s what holds his attention, which is no easy task.
But what drives his designs is an ability he’s devoted no time to cultivating.
“I have a photographic memory, and I can mimic things really well,” Cavanaugh says. “That’s basically a huge portion of my skillset.”
He watches someone do something once, twice maybe, and he can put it into practice. That’s not to say that he’s an immediate expert; just a faster learner than most.
The bio on Cavanaugh’s Web site describes him as a “Hunterdon County native,” which struck me for some reason, probably because I’d never seen it phrased as such before.
“I think it was an important thing to say, as far as the tradition of the furniture,” he says.
Do you connect with that?
“Yeah. I connect with it a lot,” he says. “I have Phil Powell’s table saw in there. I have his lifetime collection of sea glass. I’m going to cast it into a table soon. And I have a couple of his tools.
“I get a lot of inspiration from Paul Evans and Phil Powell. They didn’t have any questions about what they were doing. They just did it. They didn’t look for any outside opinions.”
Living with his furniture
“This,” I say, “is the longest you seem to have stuck with anything. Does that mean you’re a furniture maker?”
“That’s a good question. That’s a really good question,” Cavanaugh says, slowly with the first sentence and slower with the second in that manner that it’s evident the observation is just occurring to him. Which surprises me, in turn, because we spent the previous 20 minutes talking through his plans for tomorrow, for the next few months and, potentially, the next few years. Don’t let the half-dozen shipping containers loaded with other people’s junk fool you. Cavanaugh knows what he wants and how to go about it.
“I’d like to do a food thing again,” he says. “And I’d like to design and build houses, modern spec houses, the same way I build furniture, with a hundred different materials and a hundred different finishes.”
You should probably build one for yourself first.
Turns out, he recently came across a home in nearby Milford that he could see making his own, retrofitting being a shorter path than building from a blueprint.
“It’s an industrial building. It looks like a house on the outside, but inside it has these 18-foot ceilings,” he says.
If he moves forward with it, the home would double as a showroom. He’s already plotting his first piece of furniture. Cavanaugh walks over to a corner of the front room where he’s amassed quite a collection of the rectangular shells for those old freestanding phone booths. “Where else do you see bent metal like this?” he says. There’s even more on the other side of the room. In all, there are probably 20 of them. His plan is to make a Herman Miller-style, wall-mounted shelving system with them. He’s going to weld them together, line them with mahogany shelves and affix doors to some. He wants the backlit strips across the top that say “phone” to light up again, too.
An homage, but very much a Bret Cavanaugh original.
All photos courtesy Bret Cavanaugh / Andrew Wilkinson
First there was a small farm, which became a bigger farm. And then came a market. And now, a restaurant. It’s taken 10 long years, but Double Brook Farm and Brick Farm Market and Tavern finally appear poised to change the way we eat. For real this time. By Scott Edwards · Photography by Josh DeHonney
Brick Farm Tavern chef Greg Vassos, right, with Robin and Jon McConaughy—and some of Double Brook’s newest residents. Top: The fashionable Brick Farm Market.
When fine dining meets farm-fresh at Vassos’ inspired hands.
This all started with a modest enough ambition. Robin and Jon McConaughy wanted to close the gap some between their young family and its food sources. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was just about to be published, and they’d read an excerpt in The New York Times Magazine, which drew the same disgusted reaction from both of them. Soon after, they started looking for a little more property on which they could spread out.
“The original idea,” Robin says, “was to find a piece of land where we could have a couple of animals and show our kids where their food is coming from, and they could have some chickens that they would presumably feed. Which has never happened. Ever.”
Beyond a backyard garden, neither Robin nor Jon had any experience with farming—Jon worked in finance on Wall Street and Robin owned a sports media company—but what they were imagining was less a farm than it was an elaborate hobby. They landed on 60 acres in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, and built their home—a turn-of-the-century farmhouse on the outside, a model of modern energy efficiency on the inside. Then they were connected with an Angus calf that had been rejected by its mother. They named her Elsie and nurtured her to a robust 1,400 pounds. When the time came to slaughter Elsie, everyone they asked wanted a share. More cows followed. Robin and Jon started staging farm stand-style sales in their barn. The hobby was hurtling toward something much bigger.
“It just mushroomed out of control,” Robin says.
“But I think that somewhere along the way, we looked at, if we truly are going to be farmers, what makes the most sense,” Jon says. “So, it was in those early years that we decided, well, if we’re going to do all this, we probably should connect all the pieces, and we should have the restaurant and the market and the farm.”
Jon refers to it now, 10 years later, as a “vertical model” or a “closed-loop, sustainable food system.” In theory, it’s pretty basic. There’s a market and a restaurant. Both are stocked almost entirely by the farm, from the microgreens to the merguez. That cuts way down on the marketing and distribution concerns that plague the modern farmer. In practice, however, it’s rife with challenges—challenges that plague the other farmers, too. In other words, it’s an improvement, but it’s far from ideal. More on that in a bit, though.
Once Robin and Jon began acquiring more land, they turned their sights toward the market and the restaurant. They bought both properties, which sit about a mile apart from each other, around the same time, six years ago.
“The plan was—and for various reasons, it’s good that it didn’t work out this way—,” Jon says.
“—our sanity,” Robin interjects and laughs.
“—the market and the restaurant would open together.”
Brick Farm Market opened three years ago in a fashionably retrofitted 1930s Chevy dealership located in the heart of Hopewell Borough. The restaurant, Brick Farm Tavern, opened in a meticulously renovated 1822 farmhouse just outside of the borough in November. Sustaining both at the same a few years ago, when there was still so much to figure out with the farm, likely would have sunk them. They see that now. Opening the market alone enabled them to get a better foothold, which included establishing an audience for the restaurant. Two weeks before it opened, Friday and Saturday nights were booked solid a month out, and that remains the case.
During those three years between openings, another critical piece fell into place. After months of detours, the McConaughys constructed the second USDA-inspected, on-farm slaughtering facility in the entire country. It’s significantly streamlined their operation. It’s also satisfied a concern that has roots in the farm’s impetus. They could humanely raise their animals, but, with so few options available to them, they could not ensure that they’d be slaughtered that way.
The Double Brook Farm slaughterhouse is designed according to the recommendations of Temple Grandin, the famed animal science scholar, every aspect of which is aimed at calming the animal right up to the end.
“To us, it is the most important thing about our farming operation, being able to humanely take these animals to the final destination, basically,” Robin says. “Even if you’re squeamish, which I am—I made myself watch the slaughter one day—I just couldn’t have been prouder of our guys and the way they do it. It’s totally quiet. It’s totally calm.”
The microgreens are grown hydroponically, then transplanted to a greenhouse behind the restaurant so they can be picked fresh.
What sustaining looks like
Double Brook Farm, today, encompasses roughly 850 acres, 500 of which the McConaughys own (they lease the rest), spread across several parcels, all but one of them in Mercer County. Their staff measures about a hundred strong, the great majority of it divided between the market and the restaurant. The mission statement, though, remains relatively unfazed by the staggering growth: Provide tasty, nutritious food in the most sustainable and humane ways available.
With each year, they inch a little closer to that ideal of a completely closed-loop operation. It’s an admirable aspiration, but it’s not that realistic.
“People want salt, as it turns out,” Robin says. “And vanilla. And pepper.
To remain true to their cause, they’ve learned to prioritize their decisions once they move beyond their immediate reach. Sourcing locally is second-best. If they need to look further, they’ll evaluate based upon the practices. The flowchart establishes an order, but the decisions it produces rarely come so easily.
A more glaring opening in their loop than the salt is the beef. Raising cattle, they realized a couple years back, was not sustainable, not for them. They had over 300 head of cattle then divided among seven herds that were rotated daily. The farmers who tended to them were logging about 150 miles a day because the herds grazed between three to 10 miles apart from each other, and the farmers were visiting each one at least twice a day.
“You’re basically doing it all day,” Robin says. “And then, whenever a farmer would get hurt or something would happen, it would be because we were moving cattle in a trailer from this 30-acre lot to that 150-acre lot. It just consumed us.”
So even though they got their start with Elsie, the McConaughys were learning, gradually, not to marry themselves to any preconceived perceptions. They moved all of their calves and cows down to Lakota Ranch, in Virginia, which adheres to the same all-natural and humane treatment. The only difference is that its several hundred acres are continuous. The beef that’s sold at the butcher counter at Brick Farm Market and featured on the tavern’s menu comes from Thistle Creek Farms, in Central Pennsylvania, which has been cultivating pasture-raised steers, including those from Lakota, for more than 25 years.
“Now we drive about 150 miles a week, instead of seven days a week, to meet halfway at the slaughterhouse,” Robin says. “That is the one piece that we don’t slaughter ourselves, is the cows. That does give us pause, but it is really the best-possible and way more-sustainable solution for us.”
A decade in, there is one amendment to the mission statement: and do so in an economically viable manner.
“We made the realization probably two or three years ago that that needed to be part of the equation,” Jon says. “As we listed our pillars of sustainability, economic sustainability wasn’t initially on there. Everything was a fun experiment, but not necessarily thought out in the way of, OK, how is it eventually going to make money? A model isn’t a model if it can’t be an economic model as well.”
For the better part of the last hour, we’ve been sitting around a table set for four in the dining room furthest from the tavern’s kitchen. The walls are adorned with paintings by the Pennsylvania Impressionist John Fulton Folinsbee, who is Robin’s great-grandfather. The next room over is decorated with a series of prints that she brags she picked up for 50 bucks at the Golden Nugget.
Later, as Jon and I pull up to the slaughterhouse, we’re discussing how realistic the concept of a profitable, sustainable-minded farm is. Before the tavern opened, they were supplying a number of New York restaurants.
“If we weren’t within an hour’s drive of 20 million people [between New York and Philadelphia], would it work? I’m skeptical that it would,” he says. “I think proximity makes a big difference.”
As do resources, of course. Jon and Robin, thanks in large part to their lucrative, former careers, were uniquely positioned to venture down this path and weather the onslaught of obstacles they’ve encountered along the way. Still, it’s been 10 hard years just developing the infrastructure so that they could arrive here, the farm, the market and the tavern driving each other. Without one, none of it really works. But it’s still too early to tell if it works all that well with all three.
Robin, Jon and I leave the restaurant and head for the market, Robin climbing into her Tesla, Jon and I into his Audi SUV. Just along the horizon, Jon motions toward a large barn that contains towering walls of hydroponic heads of lettuce and tables loaded with bok choy. In the surrounding 25-acre field is where the vegetables are grown. On the other side of the restaurant, there’s a fenced-in plot that’s been handed over to Tama Matsuoka Wong, the co-author of Foraged Flavor. “She’s cultivating some weeds,” as Jon puts it, that’ll be used at the tavern. With so much so close, what could go wrong?
Logistics first, cooking later
Our notions of farm-to-table eating, and even farming itself, are deeply romanticized. Once we started catching on to how bad the conventional set-up was (and still very much is)—the sugar-laden processed foods, the factory farming—it was a natural reaction to get as far away from all of that as we could, to get back to the land, to start eating pure again (or, really, for the first time). But we’re not that much better informed now about how our food is created or where it comes from. For someone so recently burned, we were quick to throw our trust behind a bunch of marketing terms—organic! grass-fed! free-range!—and picturesque magazine spreads. (Thank you.)
The reality: “Farming is relentless,” Robin says.
“Even for these two outlets, the market and the restaurant, we go through a lot of animals. And vegetables,” Jon says. “Yeah, it’s rotational grazing, but there’s 2,000 chickens that have to supply the 300 a week we need to keep this operation going.”
More numbers: two Berkshire pigs, two whole lambs and 35 chickens. That’s what the tavern went through in a week in May, according to its executive chef and partner, Greg Vassos, who describes the synchronicity that’s needed to pull off farm-to-table dining night in and night out as “very chaotic.”
On any given day, the tavern’s susceptible to a freak storm, a broken-down truck, an ill farmer. And then consider this: Brick Farm Tavern is the only restaurant in the country with its own slaughterhouse.
“It’s a juggling act because we’re getting whole pigs, whole lambs, whole chickens,” Greg says. “There are a lot of different parts to the animal, so it’s a lot to figure out.”
And that constant planning, between Greg and his chefs, between Greg and the farmers, between Greg and Double Brook’s butcher, encompasses that night, the upcoming weekend, the following week, the following month even. Killing an animal will never be taken lightly when all involved feel a personal and professional responsibility to see that every viable part is utilized.
“The farm-to-table movement, I think the hardest part is having the chef fully understand what that means, using the full animal,” Jon says.
The slaughterhouse is located at the end of a long, potholed, dirt driveway behind a sprawling field where chickens strut in all directions, near and far, under the close watch of a big, white sheepdog that sits atop a prominent outcropping toward the front of the field. Near the entrance, there’s a muddy pigpen. Most of the lambs, once they’re weaned, are raised nearby too. The idea is to foster a sense of familiarity right up until the end.
From the outside, the building looks like any other generic farm structure. Just as we’re about to go in, Jon acknowledges a bucket at the foot of the door that I overlooked. Inside, there are two lambs’ heads. “The USDA comes and collects the heads,” he says. That would be the most dramatic thing I’d see. Inside, it’s empty. And spare.
Before this was built, they were spending about $100,000 a year to slaughter their animals. That’s down to about $20,000. The building’s solar-powered, so almost all of that cost is labor. What that means, basically, is that they can match and usually even improve upon the price of conventionally farmed chicken, turkey, lamb and pork.
If Greg’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he owned a short-lived restaurant in Pottstown called Racine, which was a critical darling. Racine was farm-to-table—Greg himself sourced the ingredients from the neighboring farms. But, he says, there’s a big difference between that and this. His learning curve, even with that experience, was steep. “Very, very steep” is actually what he said. On one hand, you’re cherry-picking all the best veg and parts of the pig and cow. And with the other, you’re being told there won’t be enough tomatoes to go around an hour or two before dinner service, and you’re figuring out what to do with short ribs. And ground beef. So much ground beef.
“I feel my duty as a chef is using what’s available, and making something special out of it, rather than me telling them, ‘I need this. I need that,’ ” Greg says. “This job, I think, is the ultimate dream. If you’re going to do farm-to-table, this is the way to do it.”
Shifting the paradigm
After we leave the market, sitting at a stoplight, I ask Jon what he’d be doing if he wasn’t driving me around.
“The average day is still sort of connecting the pieces, probably more from an infrastructure side,” he says. “I’ve been the general contractor for the entire project, and it’s been a lot of construction over the last four or five years. But the real reason I got into this is farming. So my days are slowly starting to shift from manager conversations and construction to being out on the farm.”
In piecing together his own operation, he’s visited countless other farms. In the beginning, it was just the likeminded ones, but then he grew curious and needed to see how the other half, the conventional farms, lived.
“I wanted to see why they’re doing it. And, just how bad is the situation,” Jon says. “I think it’s easy to blame people and point fingers. But I think you really have to see it first before you make those assumptions.”
We drive past one of their fields where ewes are paired up with their lambs, all of them nestled in the grass around a pair of giant, brown donkeys. Are those donkeys? I ask. “Yeah,” he says. “They protect them.” Really? “I think, actually, the donkeys are just protecting themselves.”
I know you said that you were moved to undertake all of this, or maybe a smaller version of it, but to make even that kind of commitment, it seems as though the seed was planted long before. Was there a part of you always kind of pining for this lifestyle?
“I think if you were to ask Robin, she would say no. I’ve always sort of had the desire to get into farming,” Jon says. “When I got into finance, I always sort of perceived it to be a means to an end.
“Now, a different question would be, after being in farming for 10 years, is it what I anticipated? Not yet, so far. We asked ourselves, especially a year or two ago, could we have done anything differently? I don’t think we could have. If you don’t connect [the farm, market and restaurant], it’s not profitable enough. And there’s no easy way to connect them without trying to get them up and running at the same time.”
For all their effort, their kids, now 13 and 16, only seem interested in the farm when they’re friends are over. But even though Robin and Jon may have started out wanting this for them, it’s their eventual grandkids they’re doing the heavy lifting for now. Jon was right when he said that a conscientious farm alone was never going to shift the paradigm. But a self-sustaining market and restaurant could show us the way.
It’s time to start embracing who you are. That doesn’t mean acting your age, though.
By David J. Witchell
The news of Scott Kelly’s return to Earth this winter, after more than a year in space, as a taller and younger man than when he hurled himself into it got me thinking about zero gravity. Specifically, where could I find me some?
Designing appearances is what I’ve come to be known for. And as I approach 50, I’m beginning to appreciate its value in a barrage of new, personal ways. I’m not a fountain of youth, far from it, but I know what it means to help someone look as young as he or she feels.
I’m inspired by social influences, but I’ve never tried to be trendy. Simplicity tends to get drowned out by those looks, but it’s never done me wrong. If you’re hunting for a fresher hairstyle for the summer, start there and then follow these other principles.
Time is of the essence There’s nothing wrong cherry-picking ideas from an issue of Us Weekly, but know that every one of those women has a full-time stylist at her disposal. Bottom line: If you don’t have the time and resources to maintain a hairstyle, it’s not right for you.
Time is of the essence, part two In that vein, coloring does not come cheap. And it definitely does not come from a grocery store aisle. Most of my time in the salon these days—too much of it, really—is spent undoing the evils of home coloring kits. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t go blonde. What I’m saying is that there’s an appropriate shade of blonde (and brunette, and red) for everyone, and it needs to be determined and applied by a professional. If you can’t devote the necessary time and money, it’s not right for you.
Work with what you’ve got Faces, to me, are either triangles or squares, and both are attractive in their own ways. But I know a lot of you think that everything pales in comparison to the ever-elusive oval. The sooner you embrace the shape of your face, the better this will go for you. Then, your stylist will be able to complement your shape, which will draw everything into balance.
But don’t accept everything Youth is not exuded by a certain style. It’s exuded by your hair’s texture. Young-looking hair is supple, it’s dense, it’s vibrant and it shimmers. All of these qualities diminish with age, but that can be slowed, if not outright halted, with the right products. The controversy surrounding keratin-based treatments may forever swirl, but I’m a believer. I’ve seen them restore beyond repair-hair again and again.
But before that part, you need to take another honest look at yourself and determine whether your lifestyle is accelerating that decline. If you’re overly stressed, not eating healthy, or there’s an underlying health issue, no amount of product’s going to offset the damage. Get a blood test—seriously. In my experience, the culprit’s most often a basic nutrient deficiency. And then you can walk out of the salon feeling as good as you look.
A few tips to help you land a bumper crop and a plot that’ll be the envy of your neighbors.
After last summer, there’s a lot to feel confident about. The peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes grew like gangbusters. So much so that at a point, you could have opened your own CSA. But the squash went awry and suffocated the beets. And the deer got to the corn. Again. Gardening can be as frustrating as it is fulfilling. Even when you do everything right, a new variable enters the equation—a plague of bunnies, a historic heat wave—and undoes months worth of hard work. This summer will be different, though. Before we plant a single seed, we turned to the foremost authority we knew for advice on how to build our best backyard garden yet. Jack Staub spends his winters lecturing and writing—his seminal 2013 book, Private Edens—Beautiful Country Gardens (Gibbs Smith), is all the inspiration you really need—and his springs and summers tending to his Wrightstown estate, Hortulus Farm, one of the most influential (and photographed) public gardens in the country. Here, Staub offers a few pointers to help fortify your own and ignite a Pinterest frenzy. —Scott Edwards
Follow the sun The location of your plot needs to be a priority. If you tucked it in a far corner of the yard because it was out of the way or next to the compost pile, don’t expect to be rewarded beyond the convenience. A vegetable garden needs sun, and lots of it—half a day’s worth at least.
Dig a barrier There’s nothing more heartbreaking than finding your row of infant lettuces nibbled to the soil. Fencing is essential, but it’s not the be-all, end-all. Rabbits tend to burrow into a garden more than they jump into them. The solution: Dig a 12-inch trench around the perimeter and pack it with stout wire grid stapled to the bottom rail of the fence.
Raise your game Raised beds pack a whole slew of advantages. Not insignificantly, they push your garden within closer reach. They also: allow you to amend freely, heat up faster in the spring and drain better than a conventional garden, clearly delineate path from bed so you never compact your soil or stamp on your seedlings, make the garden a far prettier idea. Your beds should be six to 12 inches tall and no wider than a couple of feet so that you can easily reach the middle.
Refresh the soil With the exception of legumes, vegetables will deplete the soil’s nutrients over the growing season. Start by filling your beds with some top-shelf topsoil. Mix in some bagged manure next. Then, if you’ve got a compost pile, fold it in. If not, find a bagged equivalent. The compost goes in at the start and finish of every garden season. And this entire process should be repeated in the fall.
Build up, not out Constructing trellises and tuteurs out of timber and bamboo will not only add valuable square footage without enlarging your garden’s footprint, it’ll create an entirely new plane to entice the eye. That they’re perfect for the support and cultivation of the vining and climbing varieties of vegetables, like beans, peas, cucumbers, squash and tomatoes, is icing.
Keep them moving The legume, as I mentioned, is the only vegetable family that adds nutrients to the soil. Some are relatively benign, but solanums (tomatoes, eggplant) and brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts) will actually create viruses in the soil if they’re planted in the same spots season after season. A good rule of thumb: Rotate your crops every three years.
Forget the elliptical and the ridiculously expensive circuit trainer. All you need are these five versatile (and inexpensive) pieces of equipment.
By Todd Soura
I’ve followed an exercise regimen since I was in high school and dedicated my career to fitness, but I’m a stranger to gyms. From the beginning, I created one at home and never really strayed from it. Why would I? There’s no commute, no line, and I can use multiple pieces of equipment in a single superset without getting stared down.
If you have the space—I use our garage—don’t let the potential cost deter you. The foundation of an effective home gym is not a bunch of sophisticated machines. In fact, I can boil it down to five simple (and inexpensive) pieces of equipment.
Adjustable dumbbells. Gone are the days of a mammoth weight rack that eats up space and your checking account. The new generation is a single pair of dumbbells that can be adjusted to your desired weight. I use a set by PowerBlock. You’ll never run out of exercises, and, from shoulder presses to the farmer’s walk, dumbbells will strengthen every part of you.
Bench. Pay a little more for one that inclines. That’ll open you up to lots of variations of the bench press and chest fly. A legs extension is worth the additional cost, too. With or without it, the bench is a vital piece of equipment for lower-body exercises. Think steps-ups and box jumps.
Kettlebell. The standard kettlebell swing is about as efficient an exercise as you’ll find. It’ll tax you aerobically and anaerobically. And that’s just the start of its appeal. The kettlebell’s endlessly versatile. Beyond the tens of movements designed for it, you can swap a kettlebell for a dumbbell in lots of other exercises, like snatches and goblet squats. PowerBlock makes an adjustable one of these, too.
Suspension straps. You’re probably familiar with the TRX kind (from $200), but there are plenty of cheaper options that are just as durable and effective. I use a set by Woss that ran me about 40 bucks. It anchors to a wall or a door and packs up easily, which makes it a perfect travel companion. But, again, its versatility is what makes the straps an essential piece of home-gym equipment. Up the degree of difficulty of most bodyweight exercises, along with a slew of others designed specifically for them.
Jump rope. It’s still one of the most effective cardio exercises around. And the cheapest. I started jumping rope during the 30- to 60-second “breaks” between weightlifting sets to beef up the intensity. They’re also an integral part of my wake-up workouts. Try this one: three rounds of 20 pushups, 20 lunges, 20 crunches and 30 seconds of jumping rope.
I’m piecing together a modest gym in our garage—a barbell, a few sets of dumbbells, a jump rope, resistance bands, an adjustable kettlebell and a 36-inch box. (And a couple of space heaters in the winter.) About a year ago, I started gravitating to CrossFit-style workouts because they don’t require a lot of equipment. Not to mention, they’re challenging as hell. My latest addition, the Black Mountain Products Gym Rings(pictured; $35), has opened up a whole new batch of WOD’s for me, a blessing and a curse. Instability, I’m learning is the truest test of fitness. I managed to add 40 pounds to my clean-and jerks over the last few months. It’s rare that I bask in my progress, but fresh off of Grace (30 clean-and-jerks for time) one morning, I couldn’t help but let a smile slip in between gasps for breath. That pride lasted barely five minutes, because I whimpered and quivered through the next set: three—three—ring dips. It was a humbling moment. And one I’ve aimed to repeat during every workout since. —Scott Edwards
There are so many ways that converting a church to pretty much anything other than a church can go wrong. But when it goes right, as it has with this 2,100-square foot home that’s tucked away on an acre-and-a-half in the woods of Upper Bucks County, it’s a marvel of innovation and preservation. Like the thoroughly modern, wide-open living space set against the arched, stained glass windows and ceiling mural. Or the 13-foot-tall built-ins that nearly reach the ceiling in that space. The best sides of the 143-year-old de-sanctified Catholic church coexist with the relatively new (the renovation was conducted during 2003 and 2004), three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath home that now fills its mold, which is all the more impressive considering how little either one sacrificed in order to make the relationship work. —Scott Edwards
Photos courtesy Kurfiss Sotheby’s International Realty / Michael Colavita
Not even the recession fazed the New Hope developer’s meteoric trajectory over the last decade. And with his two latest projects well underway, one in the city and the other in the ‘burbs, he’s showing no signs of flaming out any time soon.
By Scott Edwards
A rendering of Rabbit Run Creek. Top: Scannapieco, pictured outside of Waterview, another one of his New Hope projects. Below: 500 Walnut.
Tom Scannapieco is sitting around a conference room table with the Buckingham metalsmith Ray Mathis talking through Mathis’ sketches of the gates for Rabbit Run Creek, the high-end townhome community Scannapieco’s building across town. Toll Brothers, this is not. Thirty-seven homes, each about 3,500 square feet, each with its own elevator, will be embedded among pocket parks. The asking prices start at just over a million.
Rabbit Run Creek is Scannapieco’s suburban follow-up to Waterview, which changed the game for the New Hope developer. “That was a real departure because no one ever built million-dollar condominiums in the suburbs,” he says. Again, not what you’re thinking. Twenty-eight nearly-4,000-square foot condos perched right on the west bank of the Delaware, a short walk from downtown New Hope. Every one of them sold before construction was even completed in 2006.
Scannapieco used roughly the same template in erecting the 31-story 1706 Rittenhouse Square, which was named among the Urban Land Institute’s “Top 20 Projects in the Americas” in 2011. He wanted to build it on the Main Line and in Princeton, New Jersey, but land and progress came faster in Philadelphia. Construction ebbed through the recession, but Scannapieco never lowered his asking prices. Again, every condo sold ahead of schedule. And three have since been sold again—for at least a million over the original asking price in a mere three years.
Last April, Scannapieco found himself publicly refuting a rumor that Jay-Z and Bey had bought the penthouse at 500 Walnut, another posh, 26-story condo tower shooting up over Society Hill, overlooking Independence Hall. “The rumor was that they bought it for $20 million, which was curious because we only had it on the market for 17.6,” he says, a sly grin underlining the obvious: Not exactly bad publicity. Nonetheless, he’s still looking for a taker. Precedent says he won’t be for much longer.
The real estate mogul may have no regrets about abandoning a career as a physicist, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still think like one. Also, for someone who spends most of his days thinking about how the upper crust lives, he’s remarkably low-maintenance.
I bought my first property … in 1974 for $11,000. It was a shell of a post-Civil War townhome in the art museum area. Those houses now are all million-dollar townhouses. I basically took a building that was converted into six small residential units and converted it into three condominiums. Sold two and lived in one. Great memories of that.
If I didn’t become a developer … I’d be an architect, because I love design, or an investment banker, because I enjoy structuring deals and negotiating land.
The last book I read was … Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point Press, 2000), by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk [and Andres Duany and Jeff Speck]. It was written 16 years ago, but she already perceived what we are now fully recognizing, this movement toward community and more urban-type spaces. And a lot of her comments, I think, were a result of living close to New Hope. As you read the book, you see her talking about New Hope.
The last show I binge-watched was … Probably “24.” Actually, the last one was “House of Cards.” I kind of liked the earlier episodes more than the later episodes. By the end of it, I was done with it.
If I ran Philadelphia … I would take all the empty rowhomes and give them to people. And then I would give them free materials and let them fix them up themselves. Because right now we have a system where you have people that need housing and we think the way to approach that is to pay people $100 an hour to go build a house for them. So you’re addressing one hundredth of one percent of the problem, because that’s all you can afford. You’re spending $200,000 to $300,000 to build a low-income house. Just give them a credit card for Home Depot and limit how much they can buy at any point in time and have spot inspections to make sure the money’s being spent. I think we’d be amazed at what people can do if they’re not told how to do it, they’re not inspected twice a day and they’re just left to do it themselves. And it would be a fraction of the cost of what we’re doing today.
To break a sweat, I … play racquetball once a week and I lift probably three times a week. I go to Cornerstone, here in New Hope.
When I’m not working, I’m … reading the newspaper in a bay window overlooking the river.
My last vacation … was in Venice, a year-and-a-half ago. My daughter was living in London and moving back to Philadelphia, so I met her in Venice and the two of us spent four days there during the Biennale. That was fantastic. It was like going to a world’s fair.
My death-row meal … would be between pizza and a pasta dish with a seafood marinara sauce or something like that. The pizza would probably be plain, nothing imaginative.
The advice that’s stuck most with me … I can’t put a source to it, but I absolutely believe that things are never as bad or as good as you think they are. There’s a real coming back to the norm. It’s just a point in time and, eventually, that’ll pass too.
In five years, … I’d like to be doing exactly what I’m doing. I’ve thought about retirement off and on. It’s only in the last year or so that I finally clarified in my mind that that’s not my calling.
Portrait by Josh DeHonney | Renderings courtesy Scannapieco Development Corp.
If you ever thought about moving beyond your trusty ol’ drip machine but didn’t know how, this is your gateway.
By Mike Madaio
Five years ago, while serving as the director of education at the Wine School of Philadelphia, Zach Morris—yes, that’s his real name—presided over perhaps the greatest wine tasting I’ve had the pleasure of attending. Though the pours—Grand Cru Burgundy—were outstanding, it wasn’t just what was in the glass that left such an indelible mark. Morris’ palpable enthusiasm for the material made the region and its winemakers come alive.
He’s earnest and easygoing, but what’s immediately evident about Morris is his unquenchable thirst to know. Everything. At the wine school, his ability to digest even the most obscure details about a plethora of regions, producers and methods was uncanny. Curious as his decision to open a café may have seemed from the outside looking in, there could be no doubt that he’d approach Green Engine Coffee Co. with the same voracious appetite.
We meet at his Haverford café, where I planned to test the limits of his relatively newfound knowledge. I needed to know how to make a better cup of coffee. I finally arrived at the point in my life where I was ready to make an effort beyond setting the timer on my drip machine. Morris lights up and starts talking cold brewing straightaway.
“The beauty of cold brew is its simplicity. It’s almost no work. If you can grind and weigh, you just set it and forget it,” he says. “And you can use pretty much any vessel for brewing.”
The catch is the required steep time: at least 12 (and up to 24) hours per batch. In other words, planning ahead is mandatory.
“It’s just like barbecue, low and slow,” Morris says. “But the flipside of advance prep is that cold brew keeps well, especially when stored in an airtight, dark environment like your fridge.”
Beyond organization and patience, the grinding is the most critical part of cold brewing. Set your burr grinder to “coarse.” (If you’re not grinding your own beans, invest in a burr grinder. (See below.) Regardless of the brewing method, it’ll prove essential. And you’ll notice a difference in the taste of your coffee within the first sip. And every one thereafter.)
Once the beans are ground, use a two-to-one ratio of water to grounds. “But you can adjust that based on how strong you want it,” Morris says. Mix them thoroughly in a French press, ideally, then lower the plunger to the water line and let it sit overnight. Come the morning, lower the plunger the rest of the way. Morris, a perfectionist, suggests filtering, but I’ve seen consistently excellent results using just the press’s strainer.
This is our ever-reliable backup at the café. Special features aside, the only one that matters when it comes to weighing coffee and water is that the scale measures to a tenth of a gram.
Taking pride in brewing your coffee gets addictive really fast. This app’ll come in handy when you start obsessing over tenths of grams and temperatures.
Surreal as the James Beard dinner was at turns, there were, thankfully, lots of normal touchstones, too, to ground our chef on the biggest night of his career.
I met my crew at the inn at seven the morning of the dinner. We packed everything the night before, so it was just a matter of loading the cars and then double-, triple- and quadruple-checking it all. Three hours later, we were pulling up to the James Beard House.
By 11, we’d unloaded the cars, checked into the hotel and were tying on our aprons back in the kitchen. I made a list of everything that still needed to be prepped and then a timeline for the next 10 hours. I wanted all of the prepping done by two and everything organized by course in the refrigerators. The most labor-intensive task ahead of us was making the chocolate and yuzu cremeux. Jeff’s young, but he could make cremeux in his sleep. I didn’t need to worry about him, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t worried about the cremeux. Sure enough, a box of baking soda was accidentally tipped over on one of the trays. Plenty to spare was suddenly just enough. But that was our only real hiccup. We even had some time to break for lunch and wander the neighborhood some.
Around 4:30 p.m., the maître d’ came looking for me to perform a couple rites of passage: sign a copy of the menu and the chef’s jacket that’s exhibited on the second floor. The jacket’s refreshed every few weeks, and at the end of the year, they’re auctioned off. The weight of the moment sunk in a little deeper as I signed next to Jonathan Benno’s signature. Think of the jackets like the footballs signed by the winning Super Bowl teams. Among the tens of signatures, there are a few stars that will become legends, some rising studs on the cusp of breaking through and a bunch of others for whom this was the pinnacle of their otherwise anonymous careers. Every one of them, though, could count themselves among the precious minority privileged to call himself a Super Bowl champion.
Back in the kitchen, I walked my crew through the hors d’ oeuvres, and the night seemed to slip into fifth gear. The next time I glanced up at the clock, it was six. Time to deliver the lineup to the service staff. I ran through the courses and thanked everyone for helping to pull off what was becoming a night that would never fade from my mind.
The nerves and this out-of-body sense I’d been experiencing to some degree all day evaporated the moment we started assembling the hors d’ oeuvres. I have a tendency to set very serious in the heat of the moment. My focus sharpens and, at the same time, I can anticipate the next few steps. That broke temporarily when my family walked into the kitchen. The rest of the guests filled in behind them. There was a guy among them who took up a post by the far wall and studied us closely. His face was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. And then I did: Mark Teixeira. Holy shit. It was the first baseman for the New York Yankees.
Just before eight, we started plating the first course. This is where all the preparation is felt most acutely. The course needs to be plated 80 times in 10 minutes. Repeat five times. Everybody had one responsibility for each dish, save for my sous chef, who I asked to get a head start on the next course.
The dinner was done in two hours, more of a sprint, really, than a marathon. I toasted my crew back in the kitchen as the guests lingered out in the dining room. Much as this was a milestone night for me, it wasn’t anything that a chef, no matter how talented he or she is, could ever pull off on his own. I made it to this moment because of the people standing around me with their glasses raised. And with that, we were off into the night, celebrating into the wee hours, a desperately needed release after a week-plus of mounting tension.
I’ll be serving the tasting menu from my James Beard dinner at the Stockton Inn throughout March.
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A Frantic Homestretch
As if cooking dinner at the James Beard House wasn’t pressure enough, Jonas intervenes.
By Alan Heckman
With three weeks left before the dinner, I’d confirmed delivery of all of the ingredients. The wine order was still a work in progress because some were more difficult to get ahold of than I expected. There was plenty of time, but it still ate at me. At the restaurant, I could always call an audible, but this dinner’s different. Nothing can be left to chance. By the end of the week, I managed to finally secure one of the wines I planned to serve. A bright spot to end the week on, at least. The second wine’s confirmed the next week. Four to go.
Two weeks out, I was pretty sure I was on the cusp of a heart attack. Three of the wines weren’t available. I’ll look for another year of the same vintage, I thought. Each state has its own wine purveyors, and they’re allocated certain amounts by the wineries and importers. So, basically, I needed to pray that the wine I wanted wasn’t already spoken for. It was. Panic. A week out and I had to come up with three new wines. But this time, instead of telling the purveyors what I wanted, I worked off their lists of what was available. It’s not ideal, but it was a relatively easy fix. By the end of the day, all six wines were ordered and scheduled to be delivered to the Beard House 24 hours ahead of the dinner.
From there, I turned my anxiety to the weather. I needed to see clear skies across my 10-day forecast. Even a random flurry between now and the dinner would wreak havoc on my delivery schedule.
And then Jonas descended. Monday, 8 a.m., three days until the dinner, the first call comes. “Chef, our trucks can’t get out. We should be able to get to you tomorrow.” That was my veal cheeks and venison. Veal cheeks take a solid five hours of prep, so I was nervous, but still in the game. Somehow, the produce arrived on time. So did the seafood—but with the wrong shrimp. I put the order in a month ago. The purveyor apologized, said he could get a new batch to me by Thursday. Ugh. “Send me the same size shrimp, but for half the price for the hassle,” I said. It was worth a shot.
The veal cheeks and venison came at 2 p.m. Tuesday. Two days to go. But it’s only half of what I ordered. Back on the phone. “No later than 8 a.m. tomorrow,” I said. We still managed to get a lot of the prepping done Tuesday. And at 10 the next morning, the rest of the cheeks and venison surfaced. The cheeks are frozen, though. Naturally.
It was 45 in the kitchen. And the water was running about 38 degrees. Trying to thaw the cheeks was like watching ice cream melt in a freezer. I started to pray. Again. We finished the prepping, at least. Finally, around 6, about 24 hours until the dinner, I began to braise the cheeks. They’d take close to four hours. In the meantime, we loaded up the coolers.
I climbed into bed around 11:30 that night, knowing that sleep wasn’t going to come. My mind was retracing the last couple days and bracing for tomorrow. And then the alarm was sounding.
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It’s Real Now
By Alan Heckman
It feels like it was just yesterday that I was invited to cook at the James Beard House. In case you’re wondering who James Beard is, a quick primer: He’s considered the father of the American dining renaissance. Most of us grew up watching Julia Child, but Beard’s was actually the first cooking show on TV. The foundation that bears his name today is based in New York City, in Beard’s former home, and, as part of its mission to support forward cooking, it invites star chefs, rising and established, from all over the country to cook dinner for some of the leading tastemakers in the industry. My turn comes in a little over two weeks, and, as you can imagine, it’s an incredible honor. Not only is it a big notch on the ol’ CV, it’s also a way to support my community. (The dinners help generate funding for the foundation’s scholarship and educational programming.)
The magnitude of all this didn’t really hit me until I broke the news to my wife and watched the excitement spread across her face. Just that fast, the floodgates broke open in me. What will I cook? What if nobody likes it? (My family will be there, so at least they’ll tell me they did. I hope.) The kitchen is notoriously small. How am I going to pull this off? I didn’t sleep an hour that night, as my thoughts careened between pure elation and anxiety.
When I woke, I started prioritizing. First thing I needed to do was lock down the menu. I knew, at least, that I wanted to showcase everything that’s had a significant impact on how I think about and work with food. That helped a lot. From there, I submitted my menu to the foundation (you can view it here), and it replied with all the necessary prep details, which brought a slight sense of relief.
Still, one big question loomed: How small, exactly, is this kitchen? I’d been warned a bunch of times over to brace myself for the worst. And for this to be a success, I really need to cook this dinner in my head as often as I can, which means being able to visualize where each component of every dish is going to be prepared. So, I decided to scope it out for myself.
From the outside, it’s a modest-looking four-story rowhome (if such a thing exists in New York). The event coordinator greeted me and led me around. As we came around the corner to the kitchen, I felt like a game show contestant who was about to find out what was behind the door I picked. There it was at last—several blinks and pans of the room—the very kitchen that James Beard cooked in for more than a quarter century. I laughed to myself at the sight of the low ceiling and Styrofoam-padded hood vent, imagining all the great chefs who’ve scraped and knocked their heads against them. It’s not the smallest kitchen I will have ever cooked in, but it’ll be tight.
Methodically, I inspected everything from the plates to the equipment. This experience up until that point felt surreal. But that started to change with every new thing I touched.
[divider]Your Backstage Pass[/divider]
Watch Alan and his team cook the biggest dinner of his career on January 28. The James Beard Foundation will be live-streaming from the kitchen here. Three different angles will be available. Given the tight confines, every last crumb should be covered.
Photo credit: Courtesy the Stockton Inn
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
Alan Heckman Has Arrived
As he prepares to cook the biggest meal of his career, let us introduce you to the Stockton Inn chef.
In Alan Heckman’s kitchen, there’s always a large pot or two filled with a scratch-made sauce that requires a few days of simmering and constant monitoring. His old-school methodology and the subtle depth that comes out of it have become the foundation in the resurrection of the Stockton Inn in the Central Jersey riverside town.
Heckman cuts an imposing figure, but his baby face immediately undermines any potential threat. Physically, he’s 30 going on 18. Even though he’s not that long out of culinary school, his mentality is pure Thomas Keller. He’s a stickler for a spotless restaurant, he cooks on the line every night and he talks about having needed to pay his dues before he finally became an executive chef—at 24.
Straight out of school, Heckman stepped into one of the most revered kitchens in the country, Canlis, a Seattle restaurant established in 1950 and run today by the founder’s grandsons. He left there appreciating the gravity of maintaining tradition.
An extensive trip through Europe and Northern Africa brought him back to the literal beginning: food as sustenance. Heckman watched wide-eyed as a woman slapped dough against the sides of an in-ground tandoori oven outside of her modest home in Tunisia, the inside of her arms scarred from the daily ritual.
Back home in Connecticut, or as close to one as he’s ever had (he’s a Navy brat), Heckman made up for lost time, pulling double-duty as the morning prep cook at Craftsteak and sous chef at a small, modern-American restaurant. Overnight, he was introduced to the business of cooking—the ordering, the scheduling.
Around this time last year, the Stockton Inn was searching for its identity. Heckman, fresh off of four years heading up The Washington Crossing Inn, was beginning to come into his own. Together, they’ve managed to draw the attention of kingmakers. Back in the fall, Heckman was invited to serve as the featured chef for a night later this month at The James Beard House, in New York City. He started right in on sketching his menu. It’ll trace his own maturation—the tradition, the humility, the poise.
Over the coming weeks, Heckman will journal his preparations for the dinner and its aftermath here, from his thought process and the sourcing to his anxiety (or lack thereof) and the swell of reflections that’s bound to come standing on the cusp of a landmark moment. Then you can say you knew him before he blew up. —Scott Edwards
The winter that barely was—until Jonas crashed the party—is turning out some surreal foodstuffs at the Yardley Farmers’ Market.
By Susan Forker
Lovely as the unseasonable warmth was while it lasted, the farmers and small-batch growers around here seemed to be savoring it even more than we were. Their summer crops kept growing deep into fall, and the fall’s spilled into winter.
On a recent trip to the Yardley Farmers’ Market, which relocates to the Yardley Friends Meeting in the winter, the inventory was expectedly less than in the summer and fall but no less vibrant.
Gnarled celery root and oversized carrots looked like small creatures hibernating in their baskets. The locally foraged maitake and lion’s mane mushrooms were downright sculptural, while the saturated colors of the lemon and pink oysters were relief from the relentless gray and brown outside. Massive heads of kale and broccoli and intriguing watermelon radishes all seemed impossibly green.
Beyond the produce, there was pure honey, artisanal soap and fresh-roasted Covered Bridge Coffee. I loaded up on Hakurei turnips, parsnips and beets that I used to make a root vegetable dish, along with half a loaf of Wildflour Bakery Yards Porter pumpernickel, which was devoured by my family. Reason enough, as far as I’m concerned, to return soon.
Susan Forker is the owner and designer of the Doylestown-based joeyfivecents, a line of one-of-a-kind jewelry and accessories.
