84 JUNE 2020
pizzaiolos fired the popular weekly special—roasted potatoes
over garlic-cream sauce with crispy bacon, sharp island cheddar,
chives, and sour cream on a chewy crust—in a Neopolitan oven
that bobbed on a raft in the water. That indulgent combination
floored me.
Elsewhere, there were spice-dusted riffs on homemade
potato chips, a potato salad with kernels of sweet corn, and
tiny roasted organic creamers, sweet and silky, grown by the
VanNieuwenhuyzen brothers, three strapping guys whose par-
ents came from the Netherlands in the 1980s, chasing the oppor-
tunity this self-named “Garden of the Gulf” afforded farmers.
Though PEI’s producers work sustainably, with cover crops
to curb erosion and buffer zones protecting waterways, only a
tiny fraction farm organically; the VanNieuwenhuyzens do it
on a large scale. They also cultivate many of the gemlike spuds
that get sold in stateside supermarkets through The Little Potato
Company. On the boutique side of things, there’s Kevin Petrie,
the young agronomist at chef Michael Smith’s The Inn at Bay
Fortune. There, hand-grown Russian Banana fingerlings and
golden Yukon gems, Purple Chiefs and big Red Norlands find
their way into the nightly FireWorks Feast. Smith is a Food
Network veteran, and an evening with him is an interactive
extravaganza, beginning with a cocktail-in-hand farm tour.
The night I was there, Petrie delivered a rapid-fire disquisition
on small-scale organic production as he led guests around the
plots where Smith’s cooks learn to respect their ingredients
by pitching in, squashing potato bugs between their fingers.
The communal feast was cooked over roaring flames. Island
halibut came with a brown butter–toasted spud, its center
punched out and nutmeg-flecked pommes puree spooned
in; there was a salmon roe–topped new potato and potatoes
poached in whey.
“Potatoes four ways. For me that would be just baked, roasted,
boiled, fried,” said one of my tablemates. She had grown up on
a potato farm. “My mom fed the crew. I helped. We had meat
and potatoes every night.”
Umpteen courses in, we were stuffed. Then a server proffered
what Smith called “seconds.” That night, it was the ribs of an
Inn-pampered pig with mounds of roasted new potatoes. It was
delicious torture to find the room to taste it.
Still, despite the feast’s flamboyance, the most popular of
Smith’s dishes was his most humble: an exemplar of a homestyle
tart that derives its fame from the way it’s composed, in layers
of oozing cheese and tender sliced spuds baked with plenty
of garlic and herbs inside a crust composed entirely of bacon.
It’s everything you want for breakfast in one handsome slice.
“Potatoes, they’re iconic, a huge part of PEI,” the chef told me.
“The potato industry are good, hard-working people.”
That’s true even of the youngest among them. The follow-
ing morning on Randy Visser’s 1,000 acres in Orwell Cove, a
field hand named Leah Jay knelt in ruddy dirt and exclaimed,
“Let’s get digging!” She was all of 3 years old. Other kids filled
50-pound crates with the season’s final new potatoes, writingthis page, from top: A changing cubicle at the
beach; steamed mussels and clams, a lobster
roll, and a full lobster supper with steamed
new potatoes at Lobster on the Wharf on
Prince Edward Island. opposite: Point Prim
Chowder House’s PEI-Style Smoky Clam
Chowder (recipe p. 91)0620_FT_Spud_Island_PEI.indd 84 FINAL 4/14/20 9:51 AM