Dan Barber

Did You Know?

• Barber graduated from Tufts University in 1992 with a B.A. in English and also graduated from the French Culinary Institute.
• He was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the President's Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition.
• Barber is a member of the advisory board to the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment.
• He is married to Aria Beth Sloss, with whom he has two daughters.

Career

Dan Barber runs two restaurants: Family Meal at Blue Hill in Manhattan and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York. Around 2009, he worked with Michael Mazourek to create the honeynut squash, a miniature butternut variety. The two later founded Row 7 Seed Company, which sells that squash and other specially-bred seeds. In 2014, Barber published The Third Plate: Field Notes On the Future of Food, which traces human development through food in four sections: "Soil," "Land," "Sea," and "Seeds."

During the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, he started the resourcED program at both Blue Hill locations, offering boxes of ingredients from the Stone Barns farm with cooking instructions, designed to keep the restaurants and their suppliers operating while dine-in was impossible. In August 2020, Barber announced he would leave the kitchen at Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Blue Hill in Greenwich Village, with the transition expected in 2021. The kitchens would adopt a diversity-focused chef-in-residence model, a response to Black Lives Matter protests highlighting systemic inequities in the restaurant industry.

By 2022, Barber had returned to cooking at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. A 2022 Eater article alleged a history of abuse, a toxic work environment, and other issues at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, particularly that Barber was unaware of an employee's report of sexual assault. Through crisis firm Trident DMG and defamation firm Clare Locke, Blue Hill denied all allegations.

Recognition

In 2002, Food & Wine named Barber one of the Best New Chefs. He received James Beard Foundation awards: Best Chef: New York City in 2006 and Outstanding Chef in 2009, and was named the top chef in America by the foundation in 2009. That same year, Time magazine included him in its Time 100 list of the world's most influential people. Barber appeared in episode two of the first season of Netflix's Chef's Table in 2015.

Approach to cuisine

Dan Barber learned from California cuisine pioneers Mark Peel at Campanile and Alice Waters at Chez Panisse. His writing on food and farming has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet, The Nation, Saveur, and Food & Wine. In a 2008 TED talk, Barber described a Spanish farm that produces foie gras without force-feeding, calling it a "Garden of Eden." Two years later, he gave another TED talk about his discovery of extensively farmed fish at Veta La Palma in Spain, explaining how sustainable, ecological farming methods influence the taste of food.