In Queens, Chefs Grow Herbs and Produce in Backyards and Planters
Before it was city, New York City was farmland. Sheep really grazed in Sheep Meadow; journalist and photographer Jacob Riis, for whom Jacob Riis Park in Rockaway Park is named, documented Manhattanites in shantytowns tending to their livestock. But by the end of the 19th century, much of the land had been leveled and built over. Today, New York City’s closest approximations of farmland are dedicated spaces like the rooftop gardens at Brooklyn Grange in Long Island City, the half-acre plot at Edgemere Farm in Far Rockaway or the community gardens scattered around the five boroughs.
But a smattering of chefs across Queens are cultivating their own produce for use in their restaurants on varied scales, from simple herb planters to off-site gardens spilling over with berries, tomatoes and root vegetables. They supplement their kitchens with their own produce, garnishing dishes and concocting menu specials around what’s ripe.
In the Rockaways, a community has sprung up around gardening and growing produce; friends trade tips and even plants, according to Tracy Obolsky of Rockaway Beach Bakery, and Edgemere Farm sells produce from local growers as well as its own garden. “People are definitely into it,” Obolsky said. “Eating well, and eating good produce.”
The benefits are myriad: Katherine Fuchs, of Astoria’s Thirsty Koala, likened gardening to meditation, while Anna and Antigoni Sakalis, of the Victory Garden Café just around the corner, celebrated the superior taste (and the knowledge that their fruits and herbs wouldn’t contain any pesky additives).
Plus, even if they’re just supplementing a small corner of their operations, these chefs’ gardens lower their restaurant overhead and their carbon footprint—good for business, good for the environment. “Growing food is the only essential thing for us living on this planet,” Matt Webster, of Brothers Rockaway, said recently. “Everything else is sort of frivolous.”
THIRSTY KOALA, ASTORIA
Katherine Fuchs, the executive chef at Thirsty Koala, grew up gardening in Queens, rooting around in the soil planting flowers and vegetables in her mother’s home garden. “My mom could grow stuff in the dark; that’s how green her thumb was,” Fuchs said. Her garden spilled over with herbs, tomatoes, zucchinis, eggplants, cucumbers, peppers, occasionally Swiss chard—many of which Fuchs has adopted into her own garden, located just a few blocks from her restaurant.
For the past three or four years, she’s grown crops of herbs including basil, thyme, oregano and mint—along with a failed experiment in cilantro—as well as zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants and figs. (This year, she’s also anticipating bringing in habanero peppers and beets.) Limited growing space means Fuchs reserves her crops for menu specials, like a caprese salad or stuffed eggplant, rather than staples, but even in spite of the constraints of raising produce in the city, she’s quick to note what makes it worthwhile.
“When you make it yourself and you grow it yourself, and you’re eating it, there’s nothing more satisfying than that,” she said. “There’s nothing better than that flavor.”
The Thirsty Koala
35-12 Ditmars Blvd, Astoria
718.626.5430
DAWA’S, WOODSIDE
Just before one summer vacation in grade school, Dawa Bhuti, the chef behind the Himalayan café Dawa’s in Woodside, planted a few seeds in one corner of her boarding school’s campus. She returned in the fall to find it had sprouted, a mythical beginning to her interest in gardening. When she and her father, Ngodup, opened their bakery in 2015, they envisioned using the backyard space as a patio; the mounds of red tape involved, though, led them to abandon that plan and instead use the space behind their bakery (which became the restaurant Dawa’s in 2016) to grow produce to supplement their menu.
Since then, they’ve grown cilantro—which is used in Tibetan momo—garlic and scapes, turnips, buckwheat and potatoes; this year, Bhuti anticipates beets and chilis, too. “I was so excited when I pulled out my first turnip,” she said. “It felt so good, like, ‘Hey, actually, I grew this.’ Even here in the city, it’s possible.”
Dawa’s
51-18 Skillman Ave, Woodside
718.899.8629
CUISINE BY CLAUDETTE, ROCKAWAY PARK
The first year Claudette Flatow tried to plant outside her restaurant, Cuisine by Claudette, someone stole her planter. The second year, thieves struck again. But Flatow hasn’t let that stop her: Since opening the restaurant in 2012, she’s continued to cultivate an array of herbs, including sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary and mint—a staple in the cuisine of Morocco, where she was born; sprigs of each garnish every dish she serves at the restaurant.
This year she added a fig tree, and an additional deterrent to would-be thieves: a really, really big planter, a squat metal basin filled with tufts of greenery. Before she opened Cuisine by Claudette, Flatow taught cooking classes out of her kitchen in Rockaway, and she still views her herb garden as didactic. “We need to use the environment in our favor. It’s New York, and New York was a farmland before, and everything can grow here,” she said. She encourages customers to touch, smell and even harvest herbs from her planter. “I want to educate people that it’s so easy to have your own little garden.”
Cuisine by Claudette
143 B 116th St, Rockaway Park
718.945.5511
BROTHERS ROCKAWAY, ROCKAWAY BEACH
Frustrated by what he perceived to be a dearth of good, healthful food options along the Rockaway Beach boardwalk, Matt Webster opened Brothers Rockaway in 2016 with longtime friend Robert Wagner. Gardening seemed a natural extension of the restaurant’s—and Webster’s own—philosophy: He studied food and agriculture in college, and while working at Rockaway Taco (since renamed Tacoway Beach), he began tending the restaurant’s garden plot.
He continued to grow on the same site even after he left the restaurant, cultivating microgreens that he sold at nearby Edgemere Farm. In 2017, he began growing at his home, too; now, the Brothers garden has taken over his front and back yards, though he gave up the off-site garden plot this summer. In addition to the microgreens, Webster grows basil, tomatoes and a rotating cast of other herbs and vegetables including lemon verbena, lemon balm, holy basil and cucumbers. He recently planted moringa, a tropical tree native to South Asia that’s reputed to have powerful anti-inflammatory properties.
Brothers opens in May and closes for the season in the fall; in the off-season, Webster works on a friend’s farm in Pennsylvania. “I was, like, ‘What can I do with my life that is good for the planet, and for me and the people living on the planet?’” he wondered. “I just think that farming and growing food is the best thing you can do.”
Brothers Rockaway
Beach 106th St, Rockaway Park
VICTORY GARDEN CAFÉ, ASTORIA
Nestled on a quiet block in Astoria, surrounded by Greek bakeries and restaurants, are the Victory Garden Café and Victory Sweet Shop. In addition to their addictive tsoureki bread, chef Antigoni Sakalis and her daughter, Anna Sakalis, who run the dual ventures together, also tend a garden out back (it’s not just called the “garden café” for its tranquil back patio), as well as several planters in the front of the restaurant where they grow herbs. Mint and basil are their staple crops, used in traditional Greek dishes like chickpea fritters and stuffed grape leaves, as are various citrus—lemons and oranges, whose bright sweetness lend flavor to the bakery’s honey-and-walnut-dipped melomakarona. (Previously, they also grew watermelons; this year, Antigoni hopes to add dill and parsley, both of which she uses in large quantities in her kitchen.)
Antigoni’s penchant for gardening is, in part, the product of her upbringing in Rhodes, Greece; the Sakalis family still has a house there, where Antigoni grows miniature finger bananas, plums, pomegranates, figs and Swiss chard.
So why garden in Astoria? “Primarily, she loves it,” Anna said, translating for her mother. Her work at the restaurant has also fostered community: Each year, the night before the Greek Orthodox Easter, churchgoers gather at the Victory Garden Café to enjoy her mother’s lamb stew. Naturally, it features mint fresh from her garden.
Victory Garden Café
2169 Steinway St, Astoria
718.274.2087
ROCKAWAY BEACH BAKERY, ROCKAWAY BEACH
After 16 years of living in Greenpoint and a decade of working as a pastry chef in Manhattan kitchens (including Esca and North End Grill), Tracy Obolsky relocated to Rockaway Beach and decided she wanted to stay there.
“I said, ‘Man, how do I not leave this place? How do I stay in the beautiful peninsula that I live on?’” she recalled. She found a solution: Two years ago, Obolsky opened Rockaway Beach Bakery and hit up Edgemere Farm to acquire some plants to fill the shop’s backyard. “I bought a ton of shit,” she said, including “eight or nine different” tomato varietals, including Brandywines, Green Zebras, San Marzanos and Sungolds—none of which yielded more than a single tomato.
So beginning last season, she changed tack, growing a host of berries—blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, even gooseberries—as well as eggplants and chives; walking through the garden on a recent May afternoon, she realized a previous season’s parsley had flowered into cracks in the cement and was bursting forth again. “If the focaccia or quiche is made with some kind of vegetables or herbs from our backyard,” she said, “I’m, like, ‘We grew this! This is Rockaway Bakery backyard quiche.’ They’re, like, ‘What?’” she laughed. “It’s just exciting and makes you a little bit more proud of the product you produced.”
Rockaway Beach Bakery
87-10 Rockaway Beach Blvd, Far Rockaway
347.727.7680
IL BAMBINO, ASTORIA
If Darren Lawless is in his kitchen, fixing himself something to eat, he might go out back and snip some herbs. The chef behind Astoria’s Il Bambino, an unassuming panini joint dishing out some of the most beloved sandwiches in the borough, began growing herbs on his restaurant’s back patio 11 years ago; since then, he’s raised a steady crop of thyme, basil, rosemary and cilantro, as well as the occasional lavender shrubs and sprays of mint. (Mint, he said, is an unexpectedly pernicious one; it has a tendency to take over, “no matter how many mojitos you want to drink.”)
His herbs aren’t really for public consumption: Il Bambino goes through a couple pounds per week of each herb he grows, well more than his garden could supply, and anyway, he wouldn’t want to chance whatever leftover beverage someone might have tossed in the planter. But since moving out to Long Island more than six years ago, Lawless has started a flourishing vegetable garden at his own home. Flourishing, that is, except for his tomatoes, which he recently lost to a day of heavy rain.
“They’re actually ruining my life right now,” he said. “My kids are easier to raise than a friggin’ tomato plant.”
Il Bambino
34-08 31st Ave, Astoria
718.626.0087
