Blue Hill is more than a restaurant, clearly, given their location on the Stone Barns farm. You can take a tour of the farm where you can see your eventual dinner in the ground. It is a strange juxtaposition of ultra fine dining side suits and all, and sustainability in the form of farm education, whole animal butchery, and vegetable heavy menus.

It is somewhat disappointing then that on our dinner day, maybe only 15% of guests actually took the farm tour. For most, it seems that Blue Hills is primarily a fancy dinner with some style. Nonetheless, I greatly appreciate their emphasis on produce and the farm tour. The service is pretty impressive with nearly 1:1 staff to diner ratio. The meal itself is a 4 hour experience with a sort of intermission where you go to another part of the restaurant, for example, an outdoor grill. It is a fantastic format that gets you thinking about food. It is as much show as it is food.

Given the number of courses and somewhat curt names of the dish, I wish I could know more about the dishes. Only some dishes really get the whole farm backstory and explanation of why a dish is the way it is, which makes me really want to hear more about the dishes that don’t get that exposition. I had to ask about the dishes to hear more about the ingredients used and so on. I understand that most diners probably do not want all this information for 20+ dishes, but it feels like it is important, especially at a farm-restaurant focused on education.

For the main course, we were served steak along side a beet, cooked in the style of steak. It was a nice premise–showing how a beet is comparable to a cow’s psoas major, but I think I still got a very standard steak as the main course. Herein lies the tension: Blue Hill is a fine dining establishment catering towards diners who want expensive meats and panache, yet Stone Barns is a farm that cares about sustainability and ecological impact. The disconnect is evident, but Blue Hill does its best to serve both demands.

Despite this, Blue Hill was a fantastic experience. The food, the farm, the tour, and the education were all great. I’m more inclined to cook with produce in my own life. They were effective in communicating their message whilst delivering a spectacular meal.