- Ladies and gentlemen, you leave that television set alone right now because I'm in charge.

I've taken it over.

Now get yourself an adult beverage and remember surrender completely.

(Itty Bitty Pretty One by Screamin' Jay Hawkins) Hi, I'm Sydney Meers.

I'm the greatest chef in the United States of America.

And I'm also a pretty damn good artist.

If you're color blind.

I make food.

I make art and sometimes I make whoopie and I hear it's very good.

Now we're searching America, one town at a time.

I like collecting people and ingredients.

I go to farm stands, meat producers, fishmongers.

I figure out what makes a place cook and I give it a little cowboy sit and spin.

(music continues) This is gonna be a great adventure.

Ladies, gentlemen, you're here with me and my girlfriend, Kat.

(cajun music) The Eastern shore is very, very special.

It's a peninsula.

And so you got bay on one side, you've got ocean on the other side and you got all of this marine life.

You got lush land.

They used to be there all by themselves forever.

And now we got this long bridge to get there.

Virginia has tons of wonderful farmers and fishermen and cattlemen and everything in between.

And I want to go and collect these things, invite them to a dinner.

And the end of the day, pull up somewhere, put out a fancy little table, Kat'll decorate it up.

I'm gonna cook the food and let 'em eat some of the food they grow 'cause they rarely ever get to do that.

- Here we are.

- And here we are.

- Pickett's Harbor.

- Pickett's Harbor.

- Fresh fruits and vegetables.

- Fresh fruits, produce, support family farms.

Baby, we're here.

How are you, WT?

- I'm doing fine.

- This is my wife and love slave, Kat.

- Nice to meet you.

- So we're gonna a field?

- Yeah and I want to give you something before we start and make it official.

- All right, what you got?

- Can't take a tour of Pickett's Harbor Farms without a Pickett's Harbor Farms hat.

- Ah, thank you!

- Look at those peaches.

- There's this crazy little guy that owns this place called Picketts Harbor and he's literally almost, well probably only about two or 300 yards from the dang Chesapeake Bay.

Beautiful farm.

He's got bees.

He's got peach orchards.

He's got blackberry bushes.

He even grows these beautiful Gerber Daisies, so you can pick and put on your table and stuff, but he also plants a lot of tomatoes and other produce and watermelons, cantaloupes, things like that.

- No, I want you to sit in mine, come on, come on girl.

- Look, it's like a roller coaster ride because look at this.

- You're right?

Let's hit it.

Let's get out of here.

- Now I know you're probably asking why do I go to all this trouble when I could go to the grocery store or some other little market and get it.

Well, because that's grown in a commodity situation and they use a lot of pesticides and things that I'm not so sure are good for you.

These other farmers like to let the grass grow around it and it helps hold in the moisture.

And you go to a farm that looks like that, a little gnarly.

That's where the good food is.

And that's why I like to go to them.

I don't want a perfect peach, all to look alike.

That scares me 'cause nothing is perfect on planet Earth, except for me.

(bluegrass music) - What do ya think?

- What do you compare to that?

- That is the best one.

That is gonna make the best cobbler.

Look how beautiful it is.

- You know how to tell it's good?

When you look at your hand and you see all the juice.

- All runnin' down.

- And it's red.

- Here's how I tell when it's good.

When it's all over your (beep) shirt, and your hand and everywhere.

We're done out in that garden and field and as you can see, I'm wearing a little bit of the peach and some of the other stuff.

It's really quite wonderful.

And I'm very excited.

I've got a lot of stuff I'm gonna do with this stuff.

I'm gonna make cobblers.

I got Haymon sweet potatoes.

Oh my God.

These things are like sweet potatoes.

They're smaller than Beauregards.

They're not orange.

They're wonderful.

We're gonna fry 'em up, put them on top some pork and some fish.

(bluegrass music) I'm in beautiful Cape Charles and I'm heading down the street to the Brown Dog Ice Cream shop and I'm gonna see if I can get her to make us some crazy savory ice cream for our dinner.

I think it'll be fantastic with all the food I just got.

For this little dinner thing we're gonna do, I wanna do some savory ice cream.

- Okay.

- And I know we talked about it a little bit.

What'd you have in mind?

Like we're gonna do some goat cheese and corn, right?

- Right.

- What else?

- Sweet corn, local sweet corn with goat cheese, jalapeno, and some basil oil.

- Ooh.

- That's really good.

- Yeah.

- All right.

- Good, let's go, let's go, let's get some ice cream.

- All right, let's go in the back.

♪ Every time it rains ♪ - How many ears do you need for this formula.

- When I make a batch, it's about three dozen.

We use half and half and we steep that corn in there.

So now Sydney, if you want to put the corn in there.

- Good.

- Perfect, it's beautiful.

- And we'll throw that cream in there, Kat.

Just add a little bit of sugar to bring that out.

We'll put it on the flame.

- Yeah, so you got to bring it to a boil.

- Bring it to a boil.

- Then reduce to simmer for about what?

30, 40 minutes.

- For about 30, 40 minutes.

But I'd leave it at a boil for about a minute and a half.

- Uh huh.

♪ Still it's raining ♪ ♪ Teardrops from my eyes ♪ ♪ Remember the night you told me ♪ Oh, look at that.

That's crazy.

Look how beautiful it is.

- I know, look how pretty.

- Seriously it's very balanced.

- [Kat] It is.

- I love that basil flavor, but the jalapeno is very refreshing, but not over biting, but the cream of the corn is so delicious.

This is gonna be perfect.

- It's really, really good.

- I'm so glad.

- I don't think that could have gone any better.

What do you think?

- It was awesome.

- And the flavors are amazing.

I can't wait to do something creative with it.

♪ 'Cause I miss you so.

♪ ♪ And it's raining ♪ ♪ Teardrops from my eye ♪ So for this dinner, I thought for the table, you know, flowers are pretty on the table, but so typical, why not throw a little bit of art on there?

So we'd swing by Mama Girl's and see if we can get a piece of art.

Oh, am I supposed to start with you in the window?

I got it.

Y'all got to get me more instruction.

All right, ready?

Well, Kat, here we are.

That's Mama Girls.

There's a sign.

I know that's gotta be her.

I can't wait to go in there and find her.

I met Mama Girl around 2004.

There was an art gallery that was gonna show an outside artists.

I was one of the guests invited and then there's Mama Girl from the Eastern shore.

And I've always loved her stuff.

I've seen it through other friends collections.

I met her there and we got a long time to chat and got to know each other.

And then later as time went on, every time I'm on the Eastern shore, I go see Mama Girl.

Now are these the ladies that are gonna be around the watermelon.

- Of course and these gonna be the chairs.

- She worked the fields over on the Eastern shore picking beans or whatever they were raising.

And she had to quit that after a while because she did it for probably 20 plus years or so.

And she had to quit because she was starting to have seizures.

So that's when she found art in her life.

She, you know, asked her spirit, asked God, you know, what should I do now?

I gotta do something.

She didn't even start doing art until she was after 50 years old.

- One day, I would land in my living room.

And I said, "God, give me something that nobody else "had never done.

"I go where you say and do what you say."

The spirit told me how to work with glue and newspaper.

That been 26 years ago.

You have to get another piece?

- I have six of your pieces of art.

- So this will add to the six.

- Uh huh, that's right.

- A watermelon cat.

- I eat watermelon more than anybody.

- [Kat] Syd's buyin' a watermelon cat.

- Wait a minute.

Can I do something?

Can I hold that cat for just a minute?

- Yeah, 'cause you bout to lose it.

- I just wanna bless this cat with a kiss.

- Can I get a picture of you two together?

- Can I get a little kiss too?

- Ah, wooh!

I haven't got a kiss from a man in a long time.

This is where I do a lot of praying in this room.

Whatever this spirit will have, what mood the spirit will me to turn next.

- You know as I had said in the time before the last time that I had said this, I just wanted to say that on the other page, before I get to it, the words are there.

- [Mama Girl] Okay.

- Amen.

- [Mama Girl] Amen, okay.

(organ music) - So we're out hitting all these farms through the next couple of days and we're gonna make a dinner.

Do you wanna come to it?

- Of course, you know I would.

- All right, good!

(country music) - See and there's Bernie.

Hey, Bernie.

- [Bernie] Sydney.

- [Kat] Hello.

- [Sydney] How you doin'?

- How are y'all?

- This is Kat.

Bernie Hermon, he's a professor at the University of North Carolina and he's big in the food ways, preservation and stuff.

And one of the things he does is he travels around the whole Eastern seaboard.

He tries to find these original fig varieties that are all there and he'll take cuttings.

He'll grow 'em.

- This one is the fig that Grover Cleveland dined on for dessert after his reelection in 1892.

(upbeat jazz music) - Well, these figs, they're beautiful.

- [Kat] Beautiful.

- They're not too sweet.

They're savory as much as they're sweet.

And this is gonna work good with the goat cheese basil ice cream with a little bit of jalapeno, but it's also gonna work with the pork.

So I'm not sure where it's gonna end up.

They're beautiful and they're big and fat and gorgeous.

Look at this thing.

I mean, you just wanna talk to 'em in the water and kiss 'em and say girlfriend, I might have to eat you for dinner.

Isn't that beautiful, Bernie?

So Kat, the eel, that was the best part.

I know you were squeamish with it, but I gotta tell you, - [Kat] I don't really care.

- that was exciting to look at these beautiful creatures.

And then you trim around them, you hook a rope on them and it's like oh whirl, and you just pull that skin, and then it comes right off.

It was fantastic.

They smell wonderful.

And they're gonna be very delicious when I cook them.

- All right.

License and registration.

(everyone laughs) - Ya know, I don't know that I have either one.

- Well, you don't wanna overdo it.

- Well, they don't pull a car like this over.

Bernie, this was fantastic.

- [Kat] That was fabulous.

- I love you brother.

- [Kat] Thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- Be safe out there.

- All right.

- [Kat] Goodbye.

(upbeat music) - A peeler house.

That's one of the ones we're gonna go do.

And the guy named HM owns it, HM Arnold.

So he's got these big tanks, this building's over a hundred years old.

It's amazing.

And he's got peeler tanks.

So he gets 'em when it's time for some good old soft shells.

And he'll just put them right in that tank and keep 'em ice cold water.

It's comin' right off that river.

- This is a peeler.

This is in the multi-stage this crab'll probably shed by tomorrow.

This is a female crab.

- [Sydney] Yep.

- [Kat] Yep.

- [Sydney] Look at that.

- [Kat] I could tell.

- We call it a she crab, When she sheds she'll turn into, she'll have an apron and she won't ever shed again.

The next thing she'll have egg mass, The orange eggs.

- Yep.

- They're orange and when they turn black, they're ready to rub off.

- I'm a fourth generation Waterman.

I'm 68.

So I've been here for 68 years.

Business went from oysterin' to soft crab and fishing and just utilize what was here to stay here.

This is when I was growing up in 1960, 1965.

Everybody came down here, we had a diving board, all the girls, all the guys.

I was cultivatin' out here in the field and I'd get off for lunch.

That's when I got to get down there.

And eat lunch.

- [Kat] Take a dip.

- And go back and it has changed a lot since me growing up, but it's still, it's still about as quiet and rural as anywhere, probably on the east coast.

Born and raised here and made a living.

Luck of the draw.

- Thank you so much for bringing me on this trip.

This is really cool.

We've met so many great people already and I can't wait for the dinner, but thank you.

- You're welcome.

And you don't have to thank me.

You know, you were my first and my second choice.

You weren't my third, but you were my first and second.

And that's important.

- That is important.

- I think.

- That is important.

It makes me feel proud to be one and two.

- Well I'm about done with my cigar, girl, how about you?

- It bedtime, I think.

I'm tired.

(lively bluegrass music) - So a cool thing over there is you have a lot of older farmers and older fishermen and all, but you've got this little group of young guys coming in and there's this place called Perennial Roots.

And it's this young couple.

He's actually a website designer by day.

And I think she's a nurse or something like that.

And then they come home from work and they do their farm.

He raises a Berkshire pigs.

He's got beautiful pigs.

Delicious meat and stuff.

And he also grows produce.

And he goes to the farmer's market with his goods and he sells 'em there.

- One thing we do that's really old is that it's organic.

So people didn't use to use synthetic chemicals.

We don't use synthetic chemicals.

- Good.

- That's awesome.

- We go a bit beyond that and we're a biodynamic farm.

So we plant and tend to everything according to the rhythms of the moon.

And when you integrate that to how we manage our livestock, means that we rotate animals every single day onto a new section of grass.

So they're constantly getting that fresh growth.

You're on clean pasture to minimize parasites, keep the healthier animal and a healthier animal, that's tastier food.

- One of my dear old friends, I've been buying wine from a long time, John Winter, he and Mills own this winery, it's called Chatham Vineyard.

They have secured the land with the government to where you can never develop or build it no matter who owns it from history and history.

Even if his kids sell it.

It can only be farmed.

And it has to stay as what it is.

His soil conditions are very much like Bordeaux in France.

And you got the ocean over here and you got the bay over here.

So no matter where the wind's coming from, you're gettin' a breeze crossing over.

So at night it's cool, during the day, it's just burning hot.

It's some of the best Virginia wines I've had.

I like his stuff.

I think he does a great job and he's drop dead gorgeous.

So ladies, you might want to go there and taste some wine.

And that's all I'm saying.

- This is the Cabernet Franc.

- So, we're gonna do some pork and I can tell you this is gonna be good with pork, but this could be good with blackberry cobbler.

See the fun of this is, we're gathering all this stuff everywhere and then we'll get there and supposedly I'm assured that I have time to do prep before everybody shows up.

And then I'm gonna figure out and write down on paper and then bam there's dinner.

- Right.

- And that's the way I do because I'm a little bit ADD.

I'm a cockeyed and I'm dyslexic.

To the garden.

- Let's go.

- So right here, we're gonna leaf pull these leaves right by the clusters.

And we're gonna get some nice sunlight in here.

And then we don't leaf pull the west side 'cause that's the hot side.

- That's the hot side.

- Yeah, so we want to keep that shaded.

- And this angle, Jon, does that mean you get sun around eight, eight o'clock in the morning.

- When the sun comes up, we get full sun until about noon.

And then at noon we're protected and that's the hot sun.

- [Sydney] I got ya.

- And then I would say two o'clock, three o'clock, all this is shaded.

And these rows run perfectly north, south.

So we're really taking advantage of the sun.

- Jon raises his grapes within a hundred feet or so of the water where Tom Galvin likes to do his oysters.

So it's kind of cool to see that you're raising oysters right here and you're growing grapes right here.

I don't think you see that in too many places, even on the Eastern shore, let alone around the country.

- What's interesting about the Chardonnay is it has this really nice minerality and a little saltiness to it.

So it pairs beautifully with the oysters.

Cheers.

- These are bayside and they're salty as hell.

Why do you need seaside?

We're lucky on the Bayside here, we don't have any major watershed behind us because we're on the skinny peninsula.

And we actually have a really deep salt wedge that comes in the mouth of the bay, that's on the edge of the, actually a meteor crater, really deep water that follows the edge of the Eastern shore.

So the salinity is significantly higher than directly across the bay from where we are.

- So these would be good on that second course with all the fish and the eel.

- Oh, that would be good.

- Let's see, you're gonna be out of town.

- Yes, I'm sorry to miss it.

- How about you?

- I'm in.

- Dinner, - Wine, oysters - [Sydney] I mean, how bad can it be?

And we're gonna have some of Bernie's eel.

- Cheers!

- Cheers!

- Tom, thanks for being here.

- [Kat] Thank you.

- Well, I love shopping around for kitchen stuff and there's this place called R and T Nautical on the side of the road and it's an old closed down gas station.

They put all kinds of tchotchke in there.

We decided to go there and see what he had and stuff.

Your door, not my door.

I lock my door, you lock your door.

- All right, all right - 'Cause I don't wanna check your door.

- We're locked out 'cause we locked the doors.

Boom, big trouble.

- Kat wanting to be nice and lock my door for me and then she gets out and locks her door and the keys are in the truck.

- Maybe I can find something to help y'all get unlocked.

- Okay - [Sydney] That's perfect.

- That would be awesome.

- This is a cool little window.

Well, you know what we can do.

I can actually write or paint the menu on this.

- [Kat] Oh for tonight.

- [Sydney] We can maybe hang it on the wall or something.

- Oh that would be a good idea.

- That one's cool.

- Yeah.

- So I like to, instead of putting all the flowers in one big vase, I like to have the little ones.

- Okay.

- Around with the zinnias.

- Pull this pin out, now see if I can get this hammer.

- You got it.

There we go.

- I want to tell you about an important lesson I've learned, always lock your own door, but do not lock anyone else's door.

Just your own door.

Thank you.

(slow country music) - So we found this location called Sock Grove an old conch shed, where they used to bring in conch and process 'em.

And then over time it's been redone into just a building for celebrations and stuff, and it sits right on the water on the creek.

And it's so beautiful.

So I thought that'd be a perfect location.

There's a porch all the way around it, so we can set up our table, put the truck to do the cooking.

Butch has been my friend for a very long time.

He's 30 years old, but for what he is, that's very, very old.

Butch is a 1989 Ford F-150 Lariat.

I got a little kitchen in the back of that truck and I pull it out after I go get a bunch of this food and I slide that thing out and I light everything up.

We cook.

(slow bluesy music) Look.

Oh (beep), How'd they do that in the west?

Eh, (beep).

Well, our problem is the wind was coming this way, now it's coming this way.

My flames ain't workin'.

Can't cook without a flame.

So we're gonna move everything around the corner just before the guests gets here.

I think that's brilliant.

We'll hope it works.

(lively banjo music) Tell everybody to get the (beep) out of the way.

I got this (beep).

We're set out.

We're ready to go.

We're gonna get this cookin'.

(lively fiddle music) Kat had set up the table.

So we have all this beautiful flowers and the Mama Girl art on there.

So everything's lookin' fabulous.

Then the guys start showing up.

We take them down to one of the piers.

We had WT Nottingham of Pickets Harbor.

We had Miriam Elton of Brown Dog Ice Cream.

We had Mama Girl.

We had Bernie Herman with the figs.

We had HM Arnold.

Shooting Star's Tom Galavan.

Perennial Root's Stewart and Natalie.

And we have hors d'oeuvres set up for 'em and some crackers, raw oysters.

We had some pimiento cheese.

And a lot of these guys, which was fun for me while I'm prepping and getting ready for it, I'm looking over there and checking 'em out.

And you know, these guys, I could tell they know each other, but they didn't always have time to spend with each other.

So this was like a revelation for them.

They're like, oh my God, you are real.

You know, and they're having fun.

And they're talking to each other.

We almost couldn't get 'em back up for the dinner.

Our next course was a cool salad with fried spot and spade and eel on top.

And that also came with the savory ice cream.

I like hot and cold so her ice cream was a cold.

The neutrality of this dish is your vegetable mixture, which were the same ingredients minus the goat as what her ice cream was.

So, 'cause if I were to do this in the restaurant and saute the vegetables, put my fish on top, I would do goat cheese and cream sauce.

So that's what this is, except the cream is frozen.

And then our third course was pork loin.

We had bacon and sausage grilled, and then we did it with zucchini and kale.

And then we finished it with a little bit of a blackberry peach chutney I had made.

Now that I'm caught up on that, I want to sincerely thank all of y'all for your contribution of this wonderful food.

I was gonna send out the hot sauce with that and then my delish, but pass them around and taste them with your pork.

It's wonderful with that.

The hot sauce is called not hot because it's not as hot as most hot sauces, but it's designed to go with food and this food.

So I did a crazy little chutney cause I love pork with fruit, but I like it to be more savory than a sweet thing.

The bottom has that savory cook down tomatoes and fennel.

I got tons of herbs and the figs and his figs are wonderful 'cause they're not too sweet.

So I liked that.

So, but anyway, the fun of this is y'all have so much stuff.

The kale, he just brought me the kale and I had enough time to cook it down and get it tender and flavored.

I got your bacon in it.

It kind of all works together with a tomato water and smoked tomatoes and stuff.

It's beautiful.

(glass tapping) - Friends.

What a great day, what a great evening.

Sydney, thank you so much for coming across the bay and going to see each of us, spending time and regaling us with stories and good humor, but most of all, to bring the poetry of this fine meal to all of us.

And I know that all of us here, Tom and Annie, Mary Lou, HM, Stewart, Miriam, Natalie, WT, we are all in your debt for the revelation that you have shown us in what we grow and what we try to do in this place that is near and dear to all of our hearts and which we are always happy to share with others who care, who get it.

And you are a soul who gets it.

Thank you.

- [Everyone] Cheers, to Sydney.

- To all of you guys, you all do wonderful things.

And it gives me a reason to keep doing the restaurant.

I got to tell you what, it was, I sat back and I just saw them.

And some of 'em were still eating.

It was the greatest feeling I've ever had.

And I've done a lot of parties where people were very appreciative of the stuff, but for some reason to see these guys, some of them still with dirt in their fingernails and stuff, eatin' there, that was the greatest feeling I've had in a long time.

I loved it.

I'm still high from it.

This adventure for me was extremely successful.

Even with the keys locked in the truck.

That was kind of, I think it was meant to be so that it calmed me down a little bit 'cause we were doing so much so fast and all this stuff and my head was spinning.

That was amazing and I want to do it like at least 234 more times, probably that's it.

But I think 234 is pretty good.

(mellow country music)