A special birthday dinner at Blue Hill 🐄

Documenting a meal I’ve been meaning to try for over a decade, by breaking form and writing multiple paragraphs.

Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! And I celebrate with a meal to remember ❤️ You can see pictures of this meal on my Instagram, @fivethingsiate.

Dinner (and a show) at Blue Hill at Stone Barns

630 Bedford Rd, Tarrytown, NY 10591

I had the amazing privilege of having dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns this week for my birthday (thank you so much to my husband for surprising me!). I’ve been wanting to go to Blue Hill for well over a decade – I first heard about it from a friend in college, whose parents took him there after he took a course on food ethics, which is one of the most liberal arts sentences I could ever utter. Unfortunately, I went to engineering school, so I didn’t get to take that course, or visit Blue Hill until my thirties. Some things, however, are worth the wait.

Let’s just get this out of the way: The dinner is pricey, there’s no doubt. At $448 per person (circa 2025), think of this more as a mini vacation than a meal. Because that’s what it felt like. Our dinner reservation was at 6PM, but we spent a good six hours there in total, arriving there at 4:30 PM and leaving after 10:30PM, from farm tour to dinner table to a pit stop course seated in the kitchen. It is possible that working in the service industry as a performer and being into labor issues has totally brain rotted me, but considering the amount of hands-on, personalized attention I received, and the amount of staff involved in each interaction, the hourly cost does start to feel worth it. You could arrive even earlier, if you want – and make a day of it, hiking the farm trail on the property.

The service was impeccable and friendly from top to bottom, and I truly loved learning more about the history of the farm and their philosophy. I guess it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that the dairy farm was originally owned by the Rockefellers, since everything in the NYC area is, but I still tucked that note away in the back of my brain for further investigation.

As for the meal itself? The courses felt endless but it was very veggie heavy, with only one small fish course and a few strips of “retired dairy cow” steak for the main course. A lot of the starters were literal plates of veggies pulled fresh from the ground, with just some salt and yogurt dip, and a small smattering of pickled fruits. I don’t really associate fine dining with getting my vitamins and nutrients in, but I definitely felt that way at Blue Hill after housing 3-4 plates of various leaves and fruits. I made it almost all the way till the end before I felt absolutely stuffed, although I did feel a little sick on the car ride home (but probably my own damn fault).

Standouts included the poached egg, English muffin and peas with pistachio dish, the rhubarb and buckwheat cold noodles (because I’m always craving Korean cold noodles), and the fresh whole wheat bread we tried on the tour before the meal. But the menu changes day to day, even table to table, based on local ingredient availability so it’s hard to say what you might find, if you go.

My favorite part was just how charming and VERY forest-mouse-living-in-a-cozy-underground-cave tucked-into-a-woolen-blanket-coded the whole experience was. Each table had a “field notes” brochure of the farm, and the cocktail and drinks menu was a beautiful map of the property. There were many radish dishes and evocations of dirt and trash. There’s a sense of humor and lightness to the whole place, like when the waiter brought over a giant wo cai (我菜) aka celtuce, showing it off like a man who caught a fish on his profile picture, and asked me if I knew what it was. I had to laugh because I really haven’t seen wo cai outside of my grandma’s kitchen in Beijing, or Chinatown, where you can get it for a few cents. At first it felt kind of funny to me that something so cheap and back alley for Chinese people could be elevated to a star in a Michelin restaurant, but after trying the dish I decided that that’s what I like about Blue Hill – it really highlights how every vegetable, even food scraps or weeds, can be made a star under the right circumstances. As a trash cat myself, I can’t help but agree.

Have a great weekend,

Soph