“Fall is a very tricky season, very tricky season,” Jon Feshan muses, as we walk through the Union Square Greenmarket.
At first, I’m not sure what to make of it. What hazards is he talking about? Jet-lag-inducing daylight saving time? Elections? Finicky weather?
For a minute I forget he’s the executive chef at County, whose American menu is focused on the seasonal, the ephemeral—the now.
He elaborates. It’s about produce, of course.
“You don’t have so many options, but you have so many varieties. Like pumpkin gives you 10 different types, right?” he said.
The farmers market is where he finds his inspiration. He goes there early in the morning, every other day, after his routine nighttime sleep of two or three hours. (And if you’re curious, there is no forthcoming nap later in the day. His caffeine consumption? Just two cups a day.)
Paffenroth Gardens is one of his favorite purveyors. “Almost 99 percent of the time, they’re good. You can always find good stuff for the price you pay for,” he said.
Then, straight from the market, he heads a few blocks north to Gramercy, to County’s kitchen. For a couple of hours every morning, before prep starts, he experiments. It’s his time and his space.
“What I learned from Jean Georges [Vongerichten] is, you don’t have to make it complicated. Let the food speak, let it be simple, clean,” he said. “My dishes, you don’t see more than three or four items. If you’re putting 14, 15 things in a dish, they get lost in each other and you don’t even know what you’re tasting.”
He roasts beets with jewel tones ranging from golden to a deep pink-crimson and sets them on a bed of yogurt. It’s as simple as it gets but it is delicious.
In another dish, he traces a creamy spiral of ricotta cheese and sets ripe fig halves on it, a labyrinth on a plate, with a dash of balsamic vinegar and the garnish of smoked speck bringing out the delicate sweetness of the figs. The yielding texture of the fig with creamy ricotta and goat cheeses is to be savored slowly.
