Broccoli stems, cauliflower stems, pesto from stems.” Laing handed her a curly mustard green, and she praised its stem. “The thing to note about that is how tender it is,” she said. “Oh, that’s so fucking Swedish,” Guarnaschelli said. “We’ve seen more people using it for desserts,” he said. Laing was collecting a sample from a top shelf. She recalled how her grandmother would plant marigolds next to tomatoes because they keep the bugs away. “The taste of a marigold is one I deeply associate with my first tomato,” she said. Everyone applied Purell.Ī row of marigolds caught her eye. The plants sat on rolling shelves, like books in a library basement. The door to the farm opened with a whoosh, and they entered. “A chef gets dressed and undressed twenty times a day!” Guarnaschelli said. “This is to stop you from bringing pests into our farm,” Laing explained, apologetically. Laing handed her a hairnet, shoe coverings, and a lab coat, which she slipped on over a pink sweater. One recent afternoon, Alex Guarnaschelli, a Food Network star and the executive chef at Butter, visited for the first time. There’s no earth to commune with at Farm.One per se (hydroponic systems are soil-free), but sometimes chefs stop by to browse.
In the evening, the foodies arrive for a “sensory farm tour”-a “glass-of-prosecco-type thing,” Laing said. He listed some of the responsibilities: “Planting, harvesting, general upkeep, maintenance of the hydroponic systems, testing the water we use in the hydroponic systems, the cleaning of that water.” Later, the greens are packed into boxes for delivery, by bicycle or by subway, to restaurants around the city (nasturtiums for Jungsik, dianthus flowers for Freemans). Rounds begin each morning at 6:15, David Goldstein, a hydroponicist at the farm, explained. It’s red, like the grain, but it’s a microgreen.” “The first seed we ever bought was akatade, which is like a spicy Japanese water pepper. “We have microgreens, rare herbs, and edible flowers,” he said. The greens were visible through a window next to a pressurized door designed to keep out pests. He had on a black smock, jeans, and rubber clogs. Laing was standing next to a floor-to-ceiling rack of neatly labelled seed packets, in a small antechamber of the farm. At twelve hundred square feet, the digs are roomier, but, “agriculturally, it’s still pretty tiny,” Laing said. “It’s enough difficulty to get the plants to be happy.” A year ago, Farm.One, having overgrown its original home, at the nearby Institute of Culinary Education, was invited by Atera, a client, into the restaurant’s subterranean space. “We, sadly, don’t have any fish,” he said the other day. That’s distinct from aquaponics (farming with fish) and aeroponics (farming with air and nutrient-dense mist), explained Rob Laing, a thirty-eight-year-old Australian tech entrepreneur, who, in thrall to papalo, set up the farm two years ago. On Worth Street, in Tribeca, deep underground beneath the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Michelin-starred restaurant Atera, lies Farm.One, Manhattan’s largest hydroponic farm. You get some fennel crowns and a pouch of parasitic wasps, and you’re on your way. Suddenly, you’re up at all hours, watching vertical-farming videos on YouTube, ordering seed packets from eBay, buying rhizomes- rhizomes!-and worrying about spider mites. You come across a bunch of papalo, a leafy herb native to central Mexico, and toss it in your mouth (your tastes are expansive a papalo leaf is nothing to you) and wham!: a brand-new flavor. You might find yourself, one Sunday morning, at a Santa Monica farmers’ market, loitering among the apples, say. Alex Guarnaschelli Illustration by Tom Bachtell
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