While I was at the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, I was asked by dozens of my friends what awesome dining plans I had that weekend, for they know I always do make such plans, taking great care not to waste a meal when traveling. What I told them is what I already told you here —that the peak culinary experience of my trip wouldn’t be at the con, but after, at the eponymous Damon Baehrel.

What makes Damon Baehrel so special is not just its amazing food, but also its close relationship with a specific plot of land, a relationship which I don’t believe is replicated anywhere else in the world, as these words taken from the restaurant’s site prove.

In addition to the cultivated and native ingredients from our Sagecrest Native and Organic Gardens and property, all of the cheeses, cured meats, flours, vinegars, pressed oils, breads and butters (including cow, goat and sheep varieties) are hand prepared by Damon. Chef/Grower Damon partnered with a nearby organic farm long ago to raise these and other livestock, and whole animals have been utilized for the charcuterie and meat courses since day one. East coast seafood is personally selected by Damon for the popular seafood and vegetable courses. Damon also make all of the so-called “pantry” ingredients…including Fresh pressed Grapeseed oil, Sunflower oil, Nut oils. Flours: including Cranberry Bean Flour, Fava Bean Flour, Acorn & Hickory Nut Flour, Spruce & Pine Flour. (just to name a few) as well as over 60 Homemade Vinegars. Hundreds of powders & flours he creates to highlight his original Cuisine, Partridge Berry, Wild Fiddlehead Ostrich Fern, Smoked Cedar Berry, Wild Sorrel, Gem Studded Puffball Mushroom, Dandelion Root, Hickory Bark, etc. are just a few of the many ever changing tastes you will get to experience.

Now that I’ve experienced what turned out to be a seven-hour meal there, I’m being asked, “Well … ?”

And words fail me. Because in trying to explain what it’s like to have the privilege (and yes, that’s what it felt like, a privilege) of eating what Baehrel has dubbed “Native Harvest” cuisine, I feel as if I’m being tasked to describe the indescribable. I’ve been tossing out adjectives, which really explain nothing, and have been tempted to resort to one of the worst cliches of all—”You had to be there.” Which, while for the most part true, is tremendously unsatisfying for both of us.

So let me try to avoid that “You had to be there” cop-out and take you along on my journey as best I can.

It all began on January 7, 2014, when I was reminded by this Eater post that Damon Baehrel, located in Earlton, New York, was within striking distance of the World Fantasy Convention to be held the following year in Saratoga Springs. So on January 17, I shot off an email and hoped for a miracle.

Why would it be considered a miracle to get a reservation at a restaurant more than 22 months before the desired date? Because at the time I began my quest, there was a five-year backlog in place, and on April 1 of that year, just a few months later, Damon Baehrel stopped taking any new requests entirely, as there were already 100,000 reservation requests from 67 countries. Keep in mind that’s table requests, not just the number of diners, and that’s for a restaurant which only handles approximately 12-14 guests per seating, five days each week.

By May of 2015, I was informed that number had increased to 200,000 table requests from more than 80 countries, and with that increase, my hopes diminished. But (to make a long story short) eventually, miraculously, Chef Baehrel was willing to rearrange his schedule and open his restaurant for us the Monday after World Fantasy, on a day when he would normally be closed, a fact which I learned just two weeks prior to our meal.

And so, at around 3:40 p.m. on November 9, I pulled up to the locked gate at the mouth of the drive, filled with anticipation. And some justifiable fear as well. For how could anything possibly live up to that kind of hype?

(Spoiler alert: This anything did.)

Waiting there for me were the four other members of my party—David Shaw and B. Diane Martin (with whom I’d dined at Alinea and Next) and Cecilia Tan and Corwin (who were with the four of us at Journeyman as well as Night Market).

We got out of our cars and chatted about many things, but mostly about the meal to come. Then, at exactly 3:50 p.m., the gates opened, so we jumped back into our cars and drove on.

We were not to pass through those gates again until 10:50 p.m.

At the top of the drive, we entered Damon Baehrel’s domain, where we were treated to a unique culinary experience—and I mean that literally, not in the lazy way the word “unique”—and come to think of it, “literally” as well—are usually used in this inexact world. So much so that I have no problem stating you’ll find nothing like Damon Baehrel anywhere else in the world. Even Rene Redzepi’s foraging at Noma (where I had my birthday dinner earlier this year) pales before Baehrel’s efforts, which take place almost entirely on his own acreage, and involve ingredients most would never consider using in a kitchen.

This display in the dining room gives a small idea of what components made up the 25 courses we’d eat. Visible are flours made of acorns, dandelions, goldenrod, clover, pine (yes, pine, made from a layer shaved from just under the bark), and more, plus saps from hickory, maple, cherry and other trees. There are also mushrooms and lichen, all of which (and much, much more) were harvested personally by Baehrel from the land that surrounded us.

One astonishing fact must be emphasized, as it affected the ambiance of the entire night. Not only is Baehrel the only chef, he is the only employee. There is no sous chef. There is no serving staff. In fact, there are no other employees, save for the person who runs his site and handles reservations. (And with numbers like those I mentioned above, you can understand why help would be needed in that regard.)

Which means that, while you eat there, you’re the chef’s only customers. In fact, his only apparent possible customers, for before you arrive, he rearranges the tables and chairs to expand or contract with the number of diners in the party, so there are no empty tables to distract you. While you’re there, you are alone with Damon Baehrel, and as he comes and goes from the kitchen, placing perfectly cooked and beautifully plated dishes before you, you feel as if you’re not in a restaurant, but rather at home with him.

Before we began the meal, Baehrel asked whether we had any time constraints, and other than one member of our party who needed to catch a 7:00 a.m. flight the following morning, we did not, which meant that by the time the night was over, we’d been served those 25 courses I’d mentioned above, rather than the 20 he originally thought he might prepare for us before we set him free. And I would love to tell you in detail about all of them, but …

Here both words and pictures fail me. The first because some dishes contained more than 40 components, some of which were years in the making, and even though they were described to us lovingly and with infectious enthusiasm, I still (regrettably) cannot possibly remember them all. The second because no photography was allowed in the dining room, so the only other picture taken within Damon Baehrel beyond those above was our celebratory shot with him at the end.

So … some random observations, which are truly inadequate to the task of fully conveying the experience. But please accept them as the best I can offer.

You might think, without having had a chance to see or taste the food, that based on what I’ve described so far, this is all smoke and mirrors, a pretentious philosophical and intellectual exercise, with little regard for what the food actually tastes like. But everything we were served—by a chef at once open, adventurous, friendly, creative, warm, genuine, and oh, I could go on with adjectives, but I’ll just stop there—was beautiful, and delicious, and rewarding on every emotional, intellectual, and culinary level, touching my mind and heart and soul, leaving me giddy and filled with awe and wonder and joy. I’ve led a lucky life, and experienced many chefs on many continents, but I’ve never had so many dishes elicit so many moans and groans in a single night. One member of our party, an excellent cook who shall remain nameless, was even moved to say at one point during the night, “I’m hanging up my knives.”

The meal was that good.

To give you some idea of the extent to which Damon Baehrel went to achieve these ends—

When we arrived at our table, there were two different breads waiting, one of which was made with combined acorn, cat tail, and goldenrod flours, the first of which takes at least a year to create. In our glasses was, not water, but sycamore sap, clean and refreshing.

No butter or cream is used in Baehrel’s cooking, the lack of which, thanks to his techniques, wasn’t even noticed, and only known because he admitted as much up front. In fact, their absence contributed to the fact we never hit the food wall, never felt as if we’d overeaten. As for salt, an ingredient which Baehrel could not create on his property, he once returned home from Maine with 100+ gallons of ocean water in his car in order to create his own sea salt!

We were served two different cheese courses, a charcuterie plate near the beginning of the meal containing four cheeses and six meats (tamworth ham, goose, guinea hen, duck, goat, and venison, if the memories of my cohorts are correct), and one after the desserts containing an additional twelve cheeses. And based on what we were told, that represents only a third of the cheeses Baehrel creates.

I don’t drink alcohol, but it was clear from the murmurs and raised eyebrows of my companions that they were extremely happy with Baehrel’s choice in pairings. And the juice accompaniments for the teetotalers among us were equally satisfying.

We were served many different types of seafood—including mahogany clams, peekytoe crab, lobster, and prawn—plus goat, teal duck, a nugget of turkey leg nugget, and a dish of sirloin angus beef which had been cooked under glass. All of these—flavored with ingredients I can no longer remember (such as, in one instance, the buds of beech tree leaves, which are bitter most of the year and sweet for only a few days), had us either stunned into silence or groaning with delight.

A course of a goat sausage with witch hazel smoke was served with a thimble-sized ball of old potatoes. A combination of three different ones, in fact, which were fermented and then preserved in vinegar (two of them for two years, and one for three, I believe), all for one perfect bite. A great deal of effort … but worth it!

One of the desserts, described as a faux creme brûlée with cranberry, made of a duck egg “custard” and topped with a maple sap sugar brûlée—was better than any real creme brûlée I’ve ever had, redefining the meaning of the words real and faux.

We were given thumb-sized balls of slush on spoons as a palette cleanser—there were four such slushes served throughout the meal, if memory serves me correctly—and for one of them, Baehrel picked 100 pounds of clover.

At night, so the clover would not wilt.

Which he then reduced down to a mere 50 servings of clover slush.

Are you getting what I mean when I say Damon Baehrel is like no other restaurant in the world?

If my paltry words aren’t enough to sway you, then check out this description of my favorite course, kindly provided by Chef Damon Baehrel himself, which will shed more light on the number of components, the level of care, and the attention to detail which went into each, while at the same time explaining a bit more why it was impossible for the members of our party to recall the dishes in their entirety.

A wild foraged Honey Mushroom that was layered with a native Day Lily Tuber (both hand shaved very thin). It was drizzled with Damon’s fresh hand pressed grape seed oil and dusted with wild fennel powder before being roasted on a hardwood Cherry wood plank. The accompaniments were a sauce made from wild milkweed cooked in birch sap and thickened with Rutabaga starch/stock and a “burnt sweet corn paste” where he took his fresh heirloom sweet corn and plunged it into hot charcoal embers (about 1200 degrees with husks still on) to essentially melt, burn & liquefy the kernels before pulverizing them smooth on a stone with another stone. The dusting was a wild day lily shoot powder.

Now do you see?

And if all this isn’t enough to convince you, proving that the phrase “you had to be there” might have turned out to be true after all, perhaps these smiles will help.

As if the hospitality that preceded this photo wasn’t enough, what came after was even more astonishing. Because as we left, we were given loaves of bread. And bottles of wine. And even potted plants. And as the chef walked us out to our cars, nearly a third of a day having gone by, I was as happy as a meal has ever made me.

I am happy still.