Tapping Into A Simpler Way of Life

SIX YEARS AGO, as Chris Lanier and Dana McClure prepared to spend the first night in their newly purchased house, situated on a former cow pasture in New York’s Ulster County, the couple freaked out.

“We drove to buy groceries, and it took 15 minutes to get to a main road,” recalls Lanier, a food stylist and chef who has worked in such New York City restaurants as WD-50 and Café Boulud. “I was in the driver’s seat crying, trying not to let Dana see, and she was in the passenger seat crying, trying not to let me see. We were both thinking, We’ve just made the biggest mistake of our lives.”

Lanier and McClure, who met as two among many roommates in a sprawling industrial loft in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, had spent almost three years searching for a place of their own, preferably with a little dirt to play in. “Chris got tired of outgrowing our rooftop garden,” McClure explains. “We wanted actual land.” The hunt, within their price range, proved discouraging. The pair toured property after property that offered gorgeous tillable acreage – and a flooded basement. Or charming, move-in-ready cottages – surrounded by rocky, subpar soil. Finally, they bit the proverbial bullet and settled on a modular 1970s home with four acres in the Catskill mountains. “We picked it a bit out of frustration,” Lanier admits.

Right off the bat, he built a greenhouse and planted ‘French Breakfast’ and ‘Ping Pong’ radishes, ‘Green Zebra’ and ‘Cherokee Purple’ tomatoes, and other precious edibles he knew would appeal to former colleagues in the restaurant world. Those efforts yielded a plentiful harvest that first summer, in 2011. Lanier proudly delivered the produce to his chef friends in Manhattan, only to find their kitchen staffers so overwhelmed, they’d point to a surface and bark something about sending an invoice. “It was the worst feeling,” the 43-year-old says, “to work so hard nurturing little seedlings and have such a connection with these ingredients, and then to hand them off.” On each trip, he’d invariably get at least one parking ticket. “Sometimes I never even got paid.”

“The best way to earn any kind of living growing food is to add value. You have to make a product, like a pickle or a sauce – or cook it.” – Chris Lanier

Lanier soon realized that “the best way to earn any kind of living growing food is to add value. You have to make a product, like a pickle or a sauce – or cook it.” That epiphany led to an experiment: He and McClure organized a series of farm-to-table dinners, hosting the first few in Brooklyn as under-the-radar, word-of-mouth events. As word spread, the couple was commissioned to re-create the experience for small Brooklyn-based companies and bigger clients, including Nike.

Meanwhile, the duo began renovating their upstate place in earnest, converting a garage into a studio for McClure, 37, a visual artist who’s taught at Parsons School of Design and New York University, and starting the years-long process of restoring a 166-year-old barn near the house. Soon, Lanier and McClure realized they were logging more hours in Ulster County than in New York City – a luxury afforded by their anti-9-to-5 careers. By 2014, when their son, Parker, was born, the family had expanded the farm to include 50 hens and a comically inefficient yet satisfying small-batch maple-syrup operation. Last May, they cut the cord and moved to the Catskills full-time. “We couldn’t really invest in the house, in the barn, and in our new community,” explains McClure, “when we still had a foot in both worlds.”