I was introduced to the ideas of Wendell Berry sometime in college, between 2003 and 2007, and became deeply skeptical of industrial farming and its quiet work of separating people from the source of their food. In early 2009 I bought a copy of Diner Journal and found myself drawn to a small restaurant in Brooklyn called Diner that was attempting to reimagine how a restaurant in New York City could source its food. When I moved to New York from Cape Cod later that year, I did it with the sense of stepping into a fire. I walked into Diner on Broadway and Berry, asked simply for a job, and was handed a line cook position. Under chef Sean Rembold, every dish mattered. We bought whole animals from farmers upstate, ground our own burgers, considered every ingredient. After four years I left the city changed and went to Martha’s Vineyard to work with Chris Fischer at the Beach Plum Inn, sourcing nearly everything from the island and his family’s Beetlebung Farm. A winter in San Francisco followed at Bar Tartine, where chefs Nicolaus Balla and Cortney Burns practiced a rigorous, from-scratch cuisine of fermentation and old-world technique. Returning to New York I became lead butcher at Reynard in the Wythe Hotel, breaking down a steer each week, cooking everything over wood fire, and traveling to Kinderhook Farm to roast a whole lamb for the farmers who supplied us. These fragments began to align.

In Greenpoint, at Achilles Heel, another Andrew Tarlow establishment, I stepped behind the bar as its cook. Out of that energy came Hell Chicken, a Sunday dinner series built around chickens cooked on a custom grill, a distillation of years of butchery, fermentation, and cooking between two fires. Eventually I felt drawn west again, to the vineyards and open skies. Cooking at Scribe Winery in Sonoma offered a reset: local produce, wine from the cellar, sunsets through tall windows. Hell Chicken traveled to Portland, Los Angeles, upstate New York, Texas, Japan. Over time I moved further from traditional restaurants and closer to events, to gatherings shaped by fire and season. LD Private Dinners grew naturally from that path, rooted in farmers, open flame, and the immediacy of cooking for people in a place.