New Haven Independent

The occasion was Denise Appel’s fifth “Chef’s Table” event Wednesday night at Zinc. The restaurant’s back room was filled with basil pesto bruschetta and egg salad with dill on cucumber rounds and plenty of eaters to consume them. It was a celebration of the coming of spring’s bounty.

It was also a celebration of the serious inclusion of local produce — and thus support of local Connecticut farms — in the Chapel Street eatery’s tasty and delicate cuisine.

“We have been waiting and waiting,” said CitySeed Executive Director Jennifer McTiernan (at left in photo), “for a local restaurant to pick up on the local food movement and to buy at local farmers markets. Denise and Zinc really have come through. She’s the first, a true change agent.”

McTiernan described Appel as “foraging” the city’s farmer’s markets in order to create, based on the fresh and seasonal food, a market menu at Zinc, which is featured Wednesday through Saturday nights.

Those farmers markets, coordinated by City Seed, are beginning to open again: Satudays at Wooster Square beginning on May 17, and the three others - in front of City Hall on Wednesdays beginning June 18, Sundays at Edgewood Park on June 22, and Thursday afternoons at Quinnipiace River Park beginning July 10.

Chef Appel was all over them last year, so this season will be the second. It’s a serious commitment, initiated, McTiernan said, by Denise Appel, who grew up in Glastonbury, and therefore knows her local produce, especially corn.

“The Connecticut River makes the corn near where I grew up delicious,” she said as she brought out trays of cheeses (Beaver Brook Farm) and grilled beef kielbasa with local honey mustard (Four Mile River Farm). “But the best I’ve ever tasted are the ears grown by Stacia Monahan at her Stonegarden Farm in Shelton.”

Stonegarden is one of the farms which whose produce is brought to the Wooster Square and Edgewood markets. Appel (no relation to the writer of this article) this year will be there as she was last.

To create the three-course local market menu, a prix fixe offering at Zinc, over a four-day period, Appel estimates the following purchases at the green markets: 25 pounds of tomatoes, 35 ears of corn, 20 pounds of protein consisting of meats for, for example, short ribs; 25 pounds of eggplant, cucumbers and tomatillos.

She also buys at the various green markets bread, cheeses, and — when they are ready — strawberries, blueberries, and rhubarb (which this night she concocted into fabulous smoothies). All this adds up to approximately $200 a week, or six to seven thousand a season at the markets.

That’s serious support, and it’s also time-consuming. McTiernan said she hoped other restaurateurs would be following Appel’s example. To make that happen, she said CitySeed had received a grant this year to expand a program called “Seed to Table.”

The idea is that chefs can go online and order from all the participating farms. Instead of going from farm to farm, CitySeed would do the gathering, and the restaurant’s purchases would be assembled, packaged, and ready to pick up at one of the markets.

“It takes an incredibly dedicated chef,” McTiernan said, “to do what Denise does. Most chefs don’t want to say away from their kitchens” In truth, some of the farmers and Appel have established relationships over the years so they call her in January, she said, and say, “So, Denise, what do you want us to plant this season?”

Zinc, which is co-owned by Appel and Donna Curran, is proud that 100 percent of its produce is local and organic, and 75 percent of the meats and fish. “Connecticut is getting there,” she said, as she described how it’s impossible to get organically grown chicken in the state unless you do it and kill it yourself. “I’ve also had to go buy trout and then club them on the head myself. But it’s happening.”

The results? Rachel and Nathaniel Kaufman gave the chef tables a big thumbs up, when their thumbs and other fingers weren’t otherwise occupied in the eating of roasted garlic with lovage pesto on endive. “We go to the green markets,” said Rachel Kaufman, a veterinarian, “and to Zinc, so to support a partnership like this just seemed right.”

They had partaken of the market menu last year, but couldn’t remember the meal because they have a 1 year old, Nathaniel, who permitted them only two hours sleep a night for 12 months. They do remember that their son fell in love with sheep’s milk cheese at Wooster Square.

For the full market menu and all of Zinc and Denise Appel’s culinary magic, click here. For more info on the opening of CitySeed’s greenmarkets, click here.

McTiernan said that at the grand opening of the season, on May 17, at Wooster Square, this year’s ceremonial lettuce throwers, a highly coveted position, will include WNPR’s Faith Middleton, and State Sens. Toni Harp and Donald Williams.