Jamison Jackson scans the bustling dining room. A server at Slightly North of Broad (SNOB) for more than a year, she doesn’t need a clock to know it’s nearing 2:30 p.m. Her brunette hair tied in a low pony is now giving way to a few wisps framing her face. Another lunch rush. She chases after racing thoughts. Water for table 32. Tell chef to hold the olives. Check for the gentleman. She takes a deep breath to drown out the rush of sound around her. Our eyes meet.

     “Hey! My name’s Jamison, and I’ll be serving you today.”

     The menu is loaded with local food of the Lowcountry that’s at the heart of the growing farm-to-table trend, but that’s old news for SNOB Executive Chef Frank Lee, who’s been running a sustainable kitchen for decades. New York’s Blue Bell Candle may have its own rooftop garden and Seattle’s Sitka & Spruce may oversee its own farming operations, but Charleston isn’t fazed. Hasn’t Southern food always come from the backyard?     

​     Still, it’s hard to ignore the hype. Even if you’re from out of town, you probably know who Sean Brock is, what tail-to-nose means and how FIG isn’t a fruit but rather one of Charleston’s hottest restaurants. But we wanted to dig deeper. We’re not talking about the glamour of the movement; we’re getting into the dirt and picking apart the anatomy of favorite local dishes. Take a complete tour behind the scenes of farm-to-fork, from the tomato to the table service.

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The table

     Jackson sweeps a salad dish prepared by Chef Lee onto the table in one fluid motion. The majority of ingredients, she tells us, come from Ambrose Farm. “The grapefruit is obviously going to bring the tart-citrus aspect, the arugula has a very meaty flavor to it already, especially when it’s not cooked, fennel is going to bring in licorice. So you’re getting a lot of earthy and savory flavors,” she explains. “And right on the opposite scale, we really tart things, and so the cabbage blends it to make it a little more mild, the arugula gives it substance and then you’re going to hit some sharp notes from the grapefruit and fennel.”
     At SNOB, there’s a large focus on grassy, earthy elements. The turnips, asparagus and spring onions come straight from the farm covered in dirt. In fact, the dirtier, the better. Lee thinks from the ground up by bringing in every flavor from the earth, and he did it before it was cool.    
     Jackson puts it best: “When you have an apple that’s just been chopped and not one that’s been prepped three days ago in the refrigerator with something to keep it fresh, it makes a big difference as far as flavor is concerned.” You don’t have to be a foodie to understand that. ​​

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The farm

     Peter Ambrose explains what lettuce he’s growing as he hooks his thumb through the belt loop of his worn-in, dusty brown pants. The wooden door on the lettuce shed creaks as the wind pulls it open only to shut it once again. His calloused hands are permanently dirtied from his many years on the farm, and his nails are chipped away. His Southern drawl pulls us into his rambling stories. “I get off on a tangent when I talk,” he says. “I hope I haven’t bored you too much, now.”
     He started as a shrimper in Rockville, S.C., but switched to farming after 25 years on the water, because he felt he needed a change. For the past 40 years, Ambrose and his family have planted roots on the Ambrose Farm in Wadmalaw Island, S.C. Over this time, he has noticed changes in Charleston. “It is like a different planet,” he says. “I used to shrimp in Mount Pleasant … and in the summertime, I would leave the house at 3 o'clock and drive all the way to Mount Pleasant and maybe pass three cars. That’s the truth. Now, it’s a traffic jam all the time.”
     Not only have there been changes in the city he calls home, but in his business as well. “We were probably one of the first farm-to-table restaurants in the country. We opened in the ’90s and, um, it wasn’t cool back then,” he says. “Now we’re packed.”
     While the farm-to-table movement has swept New York and other large cities across the country, its roots were planted by calloused farmers like Ambrose. One of his first relationships was with Chef Lee at Slightly North of Broad. “One day I just got in my truck, and I drove downtown and went to the back door of [SNOB] and told ’em to come look what I had ... and that’s where it all started. I don’t do that anymo’; my son does it,” says Ambrose, who is passing down the duties to his son, Sam Ambrose. He and his family know the gritty side of this movement, not just the glitz that most people see.
     The Ambrose family once participated in the weekly farmer’s market in Marion Square, but that, too, changed. “It just became like, in a short time, a flea market. I mean there were people sellin’ pineapples or bananas and grapes, and we just quit. That’s not what it was supposed to be,” he says. The people selling fruits that were not even in season, let alone local, at the farmer’s market were not going through the same efforts as Ambrose. “A farmer’s market can never work for farmers if it’s just open one day a week. Produce comes in every day. You just have to pick it when it’s ready,” he explains.
     Ambrose is a community supported agriculture (CSA) farm, which forms a partnership between the farmers and those people who consume their produce. Members purchase shares of the products in season. While this seems like a great idea, it has its problems. “If I’m tryin’ to get the money from people to plant a crop, if they wait until a week before we open up for spring, how do I even have the wildest guess as to how much I need to plant?” he asks. There are deadlines in the program, but it’s hard to deny people their fresh produce, so Ambrose makes exceptions. This has also pushed him more toward the farm-to-table movement. When he has leftover produce he cannot use, he takes it downtown to restaurants that can always use them. 
     “So, if we’ve planted for 100 families and got six or seven hundred [crops], how are we supposed to predict that? We had to find a way to get rid of what we were growin’,” he says. “That’s how we got into restaurants. And we’ve just evolved as we’ve always done.”​



The kitchen
In 1990, in the wake of Hurricane Hugo, Ambrose founded the Tomato Shed Café, one of the first farm-to-table restaurants. It was a chaotic time when people weren’t going outside, let alone starting new businesses. Around the same time, Lee evolved from the water-logged wreckage with his own vision: a French-style bistro with a larder of Southern ingredients. In 1994, Lee founded Slightly North of Broad. For almost 20 years, it's been a definitive yet unsung site in the local food scene. Produce from Ambrose is often on the changing menu, along with that of purveyors throughout South Carolina, from Burden Creek’s Dairy to Timms Mills grits. The bustling lunch shift at SNOB is bursting with local flavor.
     With the open kitchen and the afternoon breeze blowing through, SNOB isn't closed-off or stuffy. Though some clients are sometimes richer than the cooking, the locally sourced food drives the lunch hour, not the patrons.
     Lunch starts at 11:30 a.m.; by 3 p.m., there has been no change of pace. One of Charleston’s most popular lunches comes out of a kitchen slightly larger than a studio apartment. The staff can count on six daily specials, but they’re also poised to make the signature Maverick shrimp and grits or deep-fried chicken livers. Tickets stack up along the countertops, pots clang about, cornbread batter sludges around in a stand mixer and dessert is looking good. The whole time, there’s a guy in his own world, cutting carrots. Orders come in while the ticket stubs never seem to go anywhere. Overwhelming? Focusing on one kitchen task is like napping in a video arcade.
     Squinting by the sauté stand is the man who sprouted his operation from the seeds of an “alternative vegetarian” restaurant. Lee started checking out farmer’s markets in the ’70s with a few buddies into yoga and organic foods. They banded together to start offering farm-grown restaurant food. His current helm at SNOB represents years of following the flow from the farm.
     Lee takes a break from the line to pull out a box of goodies from Ambrose, including asparagus, green onions, turnips, pea shoots and carrots. Back on the line, tattooed cook (and employee of the year) Braydon Sutherland is constantly by Lee's side, fileting tilefish, simmering asparagus spears and slicing strawberries. He stirs a vinaigrette with Ambrose Farms green onions. Lee sautés the fish slices, rubbing them down with a shrimp. The once-dirty turnips get sawed into slices and head to the grill, where Kyle Colvard also heats up tomatoes, zucchini and fish steaks.
     Lee follows an improvisational flow more common in jam bands than in a kitchen staff. In a starter salad, there's a pinch of fennel, grapefruit chunks, chopped Joseph Fields Farms cabbage and a simple vinaigrette. Earthy, smoky, tart, meaty, grassy: all with a simple presentation.
     “We’re really big on repurposing things around here,” says Lee as he scrapes up bits of vegetables for a stock or puts chopped leftover onion into a salsa.
     While there’s no music blaring in the kitchen, the Grateful Dead wouldn’t be out of place. Like a guitar soloist, Lee forgets exactly how it all came together, and the moment is a fleeting memory. Lee’s improvisational and loose spirit extends to everyone else in the kitchen. From an outsider’s perspective, every possible stimulation of the senses surrounds the back of SNOB. Since the working space is tight, the entire staff can feel the heat of the grill. They can smell the garlic when it melds with shrimp and hear every command, from the hostess to the manager, Peter Pierce. The entire time, the staff remains stone-faced and committed.
     The image of snarling televised chefs sizzles away faster than the Tasso ham. This ain’t Hell’s Kitchen. Lee may get annoyed, but he doesn't yell once. He also is big on the Tao, which centers around perseverance and harmony and drives his Southern kitchen philosophy. After almost a quarter of a century, Lee is still harmonizing several flavors and ideas together to make one contained kitchen and one-of-a-kind dishes.​​

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​Home plate​
A plate of artfully arranged, spotless vegetables looks a world away from its Ambrose-sourced roots 35 minutes south. All the same, Lee’s final plating puts the produce at the center. Forty years of experience speaks for both Ambrose and Lee, two mavericks in a relationship that stands for something much grander than one restaurant and one region. They had just seeds to start and brought Charleston dining out of the dirt and into a delicious spotlight.
     “[The vegetables are] literally coming from the farm with dirt on them, and we're washing them off,” Jackson says. “It doesn't get any more fresh than that.”​