LYME, Conn. – Forget the maitre d’ and imported caviar. Sophisticated diners are now tromping across muddy fields and braving mosquito bites to eat gourmet food at its very source.

Outdoor dinners at family farms, popular on the West Coast for several years, are making their way east as part of a local food movement fueled by concerns about tainted food and a desire to eat vegetables grown nearby rather than halfway around the world.

“The cruel irony is that this is the way everyone used to eat,” said chef and restaurant owner Jonathan Rapp, a co-founder of Connecticut’s Dinners at the Farm series. “Now it is special, and hopefully we’re going to get to a point where it becomes ordinary again, where eating wholesome, locally grown delicious food is every day.”

While the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t keep statistics on farm dinners, the Connecticut program isn’t alone.

A California company, Outstanding in the Field, started with two farm dinners for 60 to 70 people in the Santa Cruz area in 1999. A few years later, Chef Jim Denevan and his crew were traveling across the country.

This year, joined by chefs from all over, they’ll have served 80 to 140 people at each of 14 dinners in California, Massachusetts, Canada, Illinois, New York and Kentucky since June. The next is Sept. 30 in California’s Sonoma County.

“Everybody has to eat and they eat every day, yet previously no one had any idea where their food came from,” Denevan said. “People realized along the line that the story of where the food came from might make food more interesting but also make it taste better.”

Denevan has been pleased to see similar dinners elsewhere, including some put on in Oregon by a company called Plate & Pitchfork.

“I think our goals have been met when they just kind of pop up in obscure places and people don’t necessarily know where they got the idea,” Denevan said.

Connecticut’s Dinners at the Farm series was conceived last fall as Rapp hunched over a Weber grill in the pouring rain to cook at a fundraiser.

He and local farm owner Chip Dahlke wanted to feed more people the same way. They enlisted Drew McLachlan, a chef and gourmet market owner, to join them in planning and executing 10 dinners, each held at a different farm to raise money for charities.

They outfitted a 1955 Ford F600 with a smoker grill and a six-burner commercial range and approached area farmers about supplying produce and locally raised meats.

“We’re friends with the people who grew all this food,” Rapp said. “Most of the people who eat here know the people who grew this food. It adds a whole other human element to it.”

They originally hoped to feed 80 people at each event, but now draw nearly twice that. A recent dinner in a southeastern Connecticut horse pasture drew more than 150 people, who gathered at long tables for a 10-course meal made only of ingredients from less than 30 miles away.

“Whatever is happening here, it’s a good thing,” Dahlke said. “This will probably be remembered like Woodstock was in 1969.”

Guests who pay $85 a ticket never know exactly what they’ll be eating or who they’ll be sitting with until they show up that night. Often the farmers who produced the food are there to talk about it.

“It’s very flexible and free, and in a lot of ways that’s sort of the point, that we’re working with whatever’s available, whatever’s freshest, whatever’s best at that moment,” Rapp said.

Guests are warned ahead of time to wear sturdy shoes, and no one seems to mind the occasional bug bite or mud puddle.

“This is so wonderful to actually be in the spot where your food was grown, and it reconnects you to nature,” said Alyse Chin of East Haddam, whose sister bought her and her husband dinner tickets as a birthday present.

Course after course emerged from the kitchen, bruschetta and pizza appetizers followed by three different types of salad, a hearty fish soup, and three main courses.

Stomachs already full, diners groaned, then dug in as volunteer waiters distributed bowls of peach cobbler. Strangers no more, they shook hands and exchanged phone numbers, promising to call or visit.

It’s a scene familiar to Kathy Stephenson of Old Lyme, who attended a dinner earlier this summer and was so smitten that she became a volunteer member of the kitchen staff.

“There’s a glow under the tent, it’s great food, people are happy,” she said as she chopped squid to top a pizza appetizer. “They’re drinking wine and they’re eating great food and I think they know they’re part of something really special. It’s really magical.”

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On the Net:

http://www.dinnersatthefarm.com

http://www.outstandinginthefield.com

AP-ES-09-30-07 1301EDT

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