While there, Carter had a whole new crop of food experiences. His first food job was a stint as a ranch hand at Terra Firma Farm in Yolo County his second was as a busser at Chez Panisse. Upon returning to his native California after years of exploration, Carter started spinning closer and closer to the world of food. (Eileen Roche/for Sonoma Magazine) Back to the roots
(Eileen Roche/for Sonoma Magazine) Stephen Carter at Scribe Winery in Sonoma. He worked a summer in Glacier National Park, built bicycles in New York City for a spell, and then traveled extensively through Japan, Korea, and Australia. After graduating from Palo Alto High School, Carter attended Utah State University, where he’d climb 10,000-foot peaks on weekends. “She would put on ‘Dallas,’ or whatever soap opera she was watching at the time, and me and my sister would snap peas with her, and she would tell us weird stories about Arkansas.” His parents carried on the tradition of cooking and hosting, throwing tea parties for his sister: “They would have all the weird English tea dishes,” he remembers, “like pickles wrapped with ham and mayonnaise.”Ĭarter didn’t like the mayonnaise (still doesn’t, in fact), but his love of food has endured through many adventures in his adult life. “We’d shell peas with my grandma in the living room,” Carter recalls. You might say that Carter was raised with cooking in his blood: His mother’s parents were sharecroppers in Arkansas before moving to the East Bay.When Stephen and his sister were growing up, the entire family gathered at the grandparents’ house for big, celebratory Sunday dinners. As Kelly Mariani, Scribe’s chef and Carter’s former Chez Panisse colleague puts it, “I feel like Stephen’s lived many lives.” But in fact, tending the vegetables and fruit trees and chickens at the scenic Sonoma Valley vineyard is just his latest endeavor. Now, looking around the grounds of Scribe Winery, at Carter’s neatly planted rows of radicchio and chard and dandelion greens, ferny-leafed cardoons and sculptural puntarelle, finger-like fava beans and vivid purple cauliflowers, it’s hard to believe that Stephen Carter hasn’t always been growing radicchio and chard and, well, everything else.
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