A Secret Garden At Quattro in the Four Seasons Silicon Valley
It may not exactly possess storybook charm. Indeed, you might walk or drive past it without even knowing it’s there.
But if you look closely on the grounds of the swank Four Seasons Silicon Valley in East Palo Alto, you might just spot the secret garden that’s brimming with Meyer lemon trees, a Kaffir lime tree, lemon balm, lemongrass, lemon thyme, orange mint, pineapple basil, rosemary, and bronze fennel.
The Herb Garden at Quattro, as it has been so dubbed, serves an important purpose: It provides culinary inspiration for the chefs at the hotel’s Quattro restaurant, with its fresh, aromatic bounty just steps outside their door. It saves money, too. The garden now yields enough mint for the restaurant and bar that none ever has to be purchased. And when Executive Chef Alessandro Cartumini needs a few Kaffir lime leaves to roast fish, he just goes outside to pick some, rather than being forced to order a larger quantity than necessary from a supplier.
Cartumini planted the garden a year ago just around the corner from the restaurant, in a 100-square-foot, concrete-walled berm that’s part of the hotel’s landscaping. Like an Italian Johnny Appleseed, he’d like to sprinkle a few more seeds here and there on the hotel grounds, but he laughs that the landscaping crew might not go for that.
The fresh herbs are used in many dishes, most noticeably in the chef’s special tasting menu, where every course gets a flourish of them.
“It really gets cooks more in touch and makes them have more respect for the food,” Cartumini says of the on-site garden.
Adds sous chef Edward Higgins, “You can cut what you need five minutes before. It really preserves the flavor that way.”
If you haven’t visited the contemporary Italian restaurant since it opened three and a half years ago, many changes have occurred.
Higgins joined the team late last year. The Boston native, who worked at Craft Restaurant in New York, Insieme restaurant in New York, and Ekki Bar & Grill at the Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo, has brought an international flair and modern sensibility.
The food, once a bit rustic, is decidedly more refined now, positioning the restaurant as more a destination dining spot, Cartumini explains. The restaurant also has a new-found emphasis on local and house-made. It shows in the creamy ricotta that’s made daily to serve in place of butter with the freshly baked focaccia brought to the table. All the pastas are made in-house now, too, with the Ferrari of pasta machines, which set the restaurant back a cool $13,000.
When I asked Piemonte-native, Cartumini, why the pasta machine, with its 1.5-horsepower engine, is so pricey, he deadpanned:
