Blue Hill At Stone Barns

Because of the pandemic, Blue Hill have switched to a outdoors picnic-style setup. You have to book online: new dates for the following week are released at 9am sharp on Wednesdays, but cancellations sometimes come up at other times (we got a Wednesday table the previous weekend). There’s no menu but you can specify broad dietary restrictions such as vegetarian or gluten-free and beverage choices from a selection at booking time. After your booking is confirmed you can email to make specific requests from the normal wine list. On arrival you are temperature-checked at the gate and after parking and going to the main courtyard you are greeted and given a personal copy of the day’s menu. This shows you the location of your table. The tables are socially-distanced and outdoors but under cover so no need to worry about rain. At your table you’ll find a picnic basket for every two people booked. This contains all the appetizers, side dishes and dessert for your meal. For appetizers we had a selection of the day’s vegetables from the farm, tomato soup, a lobster ceviche-style salad with squash, tuna confit, avocado squash guacamole and bread and butter. The hot portion of the entree course was brought to us by staff serving using a pizza-oven style paddle to maintain distance. We had steak accompanied by roasted squash. The picnic basket sides were cucumber salad in a sesame dressing, a bean salad, charcuterie and cheese and ruby kraut. Dessert was raspberry ice cream and warm cookie again served by paddle, with rice pudding and summer fruits from the basket. There were a couple of minor glitches: although our email request for a specific wine was waiting for us on our table we had no wine glasses and had to seek out the staff to fix this. The allergies section of the booking form does not allow for specific details. Although on our email request we specified that one of us has a lobster allergy, our basket contained two lobster salads. To the staff’s credit, as soon as they were made aware they provided an alternative and confirmed that no other items had lobster. The food in general was of very high quality. The tuna confit, bean salad, steak and rice pudding were the standouts for me. My wife especially liked the artisanal bread and butter. All in all this was a very good, fun experience. Blue Hill have taken pains to adapt to the pandemic and have produced a very enjoyable experience. It’s still pretty pricey, about 2/3 of the cost of the usual fine dining experience, but the standards remained very high. We hope that Blue Hill will provide a picnic option like this in future summers as well as it works so well.

Wow, fun place to find in Rockefeller park. Or at least accessable from it 😉. Great farm to table food with vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, and just plain old delicious options. Nice store on site also with things you might expect and some you didn't know existed! Come here with some time to spare