The ram is not happy. We are too close to his ewes and it looks like he’s about to charge. He makes a short lunge and that’s all I need to concede defeat. Teague and Matt laugh but even they know that we’re no match for a protective ram. He makes one last charge as we slide out past the gate and close it. Maybe visiting the rabbits and vegetables will be calmer.
We’re at Dark Hill Farms in Santa Cruz, about an hour south of San Francisco. It’s a private farm solely dedicated to providing produce, meat, and herbs for Teague Moriarty and Matt McNamara’s restaurants, Sons and Daughters, Sweet Woodruff, and The Square.
I didn’t expect to end up here when Teague and I first talked about the restaurants a couple months prior. At the time, I had known Teague as one of the founders of Sons and Daughters, a respected Michelin starred restaurant that has been a steadily busy but under the radar establishment in the growing San Francisco scene. There had been some blurbs here and there about their garden and farm, but I didn’t give it much thought considering restaurants that list local farms or mention some sort of restaurant garden are usually somewhat exaggerated and really used more as a marketing tool. “Farm to table” has become just as much a buzzword as “handcrafted”, where it sounds appealing but is ambiguous enough that it’s impossible to know what it exactly means.
As we stood in the middle of a big field looking at rows of vegetables (with each row capable of producing literally a ton of food), I realized my “locally-sourced” prejudices were clearly off the mark. Teague and Matt explain how they’ve been planning out their crops and figuring out how to go from supplying 70% of what Sons and Daughters uses to almost 100% in the next couple years. This is what farm to table is supposed to mean.
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