Blackberry Recharged

By flinging open the kitchen doors and dining rooms to its expanded fields and meadows, Blackberry Farm has become more than just an idyllic Tennessee retreat. John Kessler surveys the inn's barnyard and cuisines.

Posted: June 23, 2008

Sam Beall, Blackberry Farm's owner and ever present host, 
drives the Rolls-Royce of golf carts. He pulls a plush six-seater—properly, a GEM electric car—up to one of two dozen new buildings, which he identifies as the Larder. Inside and down a flight of stairs lies the butcher shop, and this is where he finds Michael Sullivan breaking down the farm's spring lamb, rolling their rolled bellies to cure for pancetta and cleaning their walnut-sized hearts for a chef to pickle. Up in the creamery, cheesemaker Kristian Holbrook transforms fresh ewe's milk into bloomy-rind Violet (a dead ringer for French Pérail) and washed-rind Trefoil. Across the hall in the preservation kitchen, "jam lady" Haesel Charlesworth has set out the ingredients for a pumpkin preserve.

"I wanted to call her kitchen the 'Jammery' because I just liked the sound of it," says Beall. "But, well, I learned that jammery is not really a word."

Forgive him this small oversight. Beall has had a lot to consider in recent months as he has rolled out a transformative expansion of this luxurious inn and restaurant at the edge of the Smoky Mountains in Walland, Tennessee. Originally purchased by his parents, Kreis and Sandy Beall, in 1976, Blackberry Farm has undergone many refinements over the years. It has morphed from the Bealls' private family home into a corporate retreat for Sandy Beall (founder of the Ruby Tuesday restaurant chain) and eventually into a Relais & Châteaux designated hotel with its own spa tucked into an historic clapboard house. But none of these changes has been as far-reaching as the one that the younger Beall, all of 31 years old, has just completed.

With the purchase of an adjoining 640-acre parcel of land, Beall has not only added 14 cottage suites (bringing the total number of rooms to 63) but has also realized his ambition to back up Blackberry Farm's celebrated dining program with a productive and multifaceted working farm. The farm and its attendant operations already produce as many orange-yolk farm eggs as guests can eat, along with honey, yogurt, lamb, and all manner of greens and vegetables. Beall estimates that the farm will soon produce 90 percent of the produce used on site, and this property may one day supply the dining room with the nation's only estate grown black truffles: 150 hazelnut trees ringing the property have been inoculated with Tuber melanosporum.

The centerpiece of Blackberry Farm's expansion onto this new property—indeed, the very metonym of its new spirit—is the Barn, which opened in January. An extant Amish bank barn (a style of barn built into a hill) that Beall found in the Pennsylvania countryside after trying and failing to find an appropriate structure in the South, it straddles a hillside and houses its wine cellar, a state-of-the-art cooking school under its gambrel, and a grand dining room—the inn's second restaurant—beneath its soaring pitched roof.

"In past years guests went to the Main House for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the same room," says Beall, "Now there's a choice. They can experience more of what this land has to offer."

In short, he aims to provide the fullest farm-to-table experience money can buy. The vision first came to Beall eight years ago in Northern California, where he moved to attend cooking school and work as a stagiaire at The French Laundry in Yountville. Yet Blackberry Farm stands alone among the nation's grand temples of rusticity in that its outdoorsy guests—people who come for horseback riding, fly fishing, and hiking—not only want to enjoy the fruits of farm life but also, at times, participate. Couples who can easily drop $5,000 here for a long weekend often rise early for the popular "Day in the Life of a Cheesemaker" program that begins by herding ewes into a milking parlor to slather iodine on their udders. With activities like this, Blackberry Farm seems at times like the Petit Trianon that Marie Antoinette would build for her Slow Food convivium.

If there's a person missing from this farm-to-table hoedown, it's the one who brought them to the dance. Blackberry's longtime chef, John Fleer, who earned both Relais Gourmand designation for the restaurant and two James Beard Award nominations, left in early 2007, prior to the opening of the Barn. During his nearly 15 years at the helm, Fleer's exuberant and hyper-local "foothills cuisine" was all but synonymous with Blackberry Farm.

Rather than trying to find someone to fill the vacuum left by Fleer's outsized personality, Beall found it more in keeping with his mission to redraw the focus to the whole crew of farmers and cooks. "It's not about one chef," he maintains, "but about the whole team of artisans we've assembled—our three chefs, our butcher, our forager, our cheesemaker. They all contribute to what Blackberry Farm is about."

Maybe so, but artisan-in-chief would surely be Peter Glander, to whom Beall has given the showcase dining room inside the Barn. An alumnus of Gabriel Kreuther's kitchen at The Modern in New York City, Glander cooks without "a lot of masking of ingredients," says Beall. In other words, guests walk away from his table marveling at a salad of deeply crenulated spinach leaves no bigger than their pinkies and the tingly funk of those pickled lamb's hearts. His asparagus soup will be as thin as skim milk but sing with flavor and find itself in the surprising company of gyromitra mushrooms, freshly foraged false morels that Glander thoroughly cooks to get rid of their toxins. Glander has the finesse to keep dishes such as Chatham cod in Tennessee caviar vinaigrette with heirloom radishes from coming off as spa cuisine. His cooking is simple but persuasive, and head sommelier Andy Chabot and his team find many ways to engage it with canny wine choices from a cellar that specializes in Rhône and Burgundy varietals from small producers.

"It's all about choosing wines that complement but don't interfere with the ingredients," says Chabot. "It's all about ingredients here."

The cellar is vast but new, and not yet as deep as Chabot would like. Few bottles have more than 10 years of age on them because Blount County, Tennessee, was dry until eight years ago and still restricts wine purchases.

"We can't go to auctions or buy wines from private cellars," laments Chabot. "The only way we can get older wines now is if a winery releases an older vintage. Luckily some good properties, such as Domaine Leroy and Gaja, will do this occasionally."

With its expansion, Blackberry Farm can now plan more culinary events with visiting winemakers. In the past, Beall would invite the winemaker and registered guests to his home. Now he can host these events in the newly renovated Main House, where Joseph Lenn, a veteran of Fleer's kitchen, is chef. Lenn cooks with more Southern brio than Glander and will match wines to a barbecue-like braised lamb neck with fennel confit. He might also pinch a bit of fresh curd from the cheesemaker for gnocchi, which he'll pair with the wild Tennessee cress known locally as "creasy greens."

For the time being the Main House only serves as a venue for special events and wine dinners but will open as a second à la carte restaurant in the fall. In comparison to the Barn, says Beall, it will be more relaxed, without a jacket requirement for men. "We want to take it back to the home it once was," he avers, "and the menu will be Southern food in the Blackberry way."

Equally Southern: the grits and biscuit-heavy breakfast that Josh Feathers, the third chef in the troika, prepares in the Main House. Sure there are lighter choices—butternut squash mousse, fruit and sheep's milk yogurt parfait—on the menu, but most guests want their Southern breakfasts. And there will always be a bowl of blackberries set out on the Continental buffet, even if it's mid-winter and these berries come from Chile. The farm-to-table movement, as practiced here, is sybaritic rather than political.

No visit to Blackberry Farm would be complete without a visit to gardener John Coykendall, who oversees the five-acre plot. In his quaint garden shed (which looks like a forest cottage from a fairy tale), Coykendall has collected and catalogued over 500 varieties of heirloom beans with names like Whipporwill and Red Goose.

If Coykendall isn't around, then his friendly cat, Pearl, will greet you at the shed and accompany you on a walking tour through the garden. She will subtly herd you toward her favorite part, the catnip patch, to roll around and purr at your feet. Like every other being at Blackberry Farm, Pearl shows inordinate pride in her purview.