I had the opportunity recently to photograph two of my favorite things — farms and food. Writer Mimi Towle put together a feature on San Francisco restaurants that use the organic food of Marin County to create their menus, and I photographed both ends of the food chain. (Here’s the story).
The story featured four farms, four restaurants and four dishes. Today, I’m posting the shots from the restaurants. Later, I’ll follow up with those from the farms.
The restaurants and their dishes are:
- State Bird — Sweet corn and chive short stack (above), topped with melted Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam cheese. (I ate three of these after the shoot!)
- Slanted Door — Manila clams with green garlic puree (garlic from Allstar Organics).
- Michael Mina San Francisco — Early Girl tomatoes and grilled octupus (tomatoes from County Line Harvest).
- Ristobar — Fresh summer salad (strawberries from Fresh Run Farm).
All the food was photographed on location. I love shooting in restaurants because they — and their crews — remind me of my newspaper days. Both restaurants and newspapers operate under deadlines, are staffed with idiosyncratic people who are drawn to pressure and shut it all down at the end of day only to start fresh the next.
(Be sure to take a look at my cookbook, Organic Marin, Recipes from Farm to Table, which celebrates the organic growers of Marin.)
Put 10 or 12 people in a dark coffee shop, add in a freelance writer, a magazine editor, a roomful of customers and a couple of homeless people in the back, and you’ve got a scene.