The restaurant is located in Earlton, New York, in the basement of his home. The dining room can accommodate only 16 diners. FoodieHub named Damon Baehrel the best restaurant in the world in 2015. Writer Nick Paumgarten tells us:
Baehrel derived his ingredients, except meat, fish, and dairy, from his twelve acres of yard, garden forest, and swamp. He made his oils and flours from acorns, dandelions, and pine; incorporated barks, saps, stems and lichen, while eschewing sugar, butter, and cream; cured his meats in pines needles; made dozens of cheeses (without rennet); and cooked on wooden planks, soil, and stone.
I am not a gourmet but I know some. And, apparently, folks fly in from all over the world who either have, or want to, eat in this basement. One man told Paumgarten he hated long meals but Baehrel served him and his friends twenty-three courses over seven hours and the time "just flew by."
The food prep takes days and weeks and years. For instance, he makes his flour from cattails, pine, dandelions, clover, goldenrod, beechnut, hickory nuts and acorns. It takes one to one and a half years to make acorn flour.
Following is a description of the first course (of nineteen) Baehrel served Paumgarten:
The first course was served on a slab of sawed wood. It was a small rectangle of what looked like salami atop a curled cracker. He said, "It takes me sixteen to eighteen months to make cedar flour...so the crisps is made from cedar flour, with a little hickory-nut oil, duck-egg-white powder, water, sea salt, which I sometimes render....The rectangle of meat, he said, was blue foot chicken cured in pine-needle juice, pulp and powder for eighteen months.
Baehrel is a one man show, chef, waiter and clean up guy. So the writer found some of his claims hard to believe - like what kind of records would have to be kept by one person to handle ten years worth of reservations. Other food critics have reservations as well. But most of the skepticism iso about the reservation list. One reviewer called it "Brigadoon" because it seems to pop up only occasionally.
Ken Morris, who once worked for Damon Baehrel calls him a "crazy genius."
If you are a foodie, you will love this ten page article by Nick Paumgarten in the August 29, 2016 issue of the New Yorker.
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