Meet The Team / Rebecca Rothbaum

Lattes are so last year. As a matter of fact, so are cappuccinos and macchiatos.

At least, that's what the emergence of a new kind of coffee bar suggests. Oh, this new breed has the requisite La Marzocco machines for those who really must have their shot, but the emphasis is on brewed coffee made using a variety of venerable counter-top contraptions, from the simple ceramic cone to the laboratory-like siphon, two glass bulbs perched above a Bunsen-burner. (Sorry, Mr. Coffee: the automatic drip still hasn't made a comeback.)

One of the latest entries into this category is WTF Coffee in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. The bar, which opened late last year, is a sleek little storefront with no seating, only narrow shelf-like bars along the walls. All the action happens at the counter, where customers choose from a long menu of beans and roasts, and half a dozen ways to have that coffee brewed, including the siphon and pour-over cone, as well as the Chemex, a modernist hour-glass, and the more popular French press.

Billing itself as a "coffee lab," WTF invites patrons to watch as their java is made on the other side of a glass sheet. (Behind all of this, one might catch a glimpse of the espresso machine.) Not coincidentally, owner Asio Highsmith, is also behind the nearby Hideout, a modern speakeasy that also draws an audience interested in old-fashioned, fussed-over drinks. A newcomer to coffee, Highsmith cast WTF as kind of café-cum-educational center, noting that all of its coffee-making devices are available online and most cost little more than $20 a piece. In a kind of anti-marketing pitch echoed at other home-style brew bars, he added that anyone could recreate their WTF experience home.

Kitchen gardens just aren't enough anymore. A small but growing number of chefs and restaurateurs are taking local to a new level, raising their own meat, keeping honey bees and tending goats to make cheese.

Chef Dan Barber and his acclaimed Blue Hill restaurants helped pioneer the trend. Both his Greenwich Village and Hudson Valley outposts draw from Barber's four-season farm at the Stone Barns Center for Agriculture, about an hour north of New York City. The seven-year-old farm, which also serves as an educational center (Michelle Obama and a group of school kids visited last September), provides the restaurants with everything from banana squash to veal. It's a model that translates best to wide-open spaces. In Aspen, Colorado, for instance, the Little Nell hotel's executive chef, Ryan Hardy, grows produce and raises livestock on his 15-acre Rendezvous Farms. He even makes his own cheese.

Artist Jennifer Rubell was ticking off a list of influences -- Duchamp, Ambramovic -- when a septuagenarian clutching a bag of baby Brussels sprouts approached, asking, "Can I take these on a plane?" Unfazed, Rubell talked over the finer points of traveling with produce. "You get all kinds of questions here," she said after the woman with the Brussels sprouts went in search of the checkout line.

It was another day at Eataly, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianch's 40,000-square foot temple to Italian food in New York, where Rubell is the vegetable butcher. The idea for the job came during a conversation over dinner with her friend Batali at his restaurant Del Posto shortly before the store's opening earlier this month. He was recalling the women who work at the vegetable market in Campo de Fiori in Rome, the way they would trim artichokes by hand and toss the peels into the fountain, how it helped create a sense of place. "Somehow over the course of the night, the idea of a vegetable butcher crystallized," Rubell said.

Although Americans' appetite for local, grass-fed beef is growing, regional livestock farmers face a nagging problem: a shortage of slaughterhouses. Now some of them are turning to mobile operations to butcher their animals on their own farms.

Kim Snyder is one of them. A former operations manager for American Express who turned to farming in 2003, Snyder, 42, raises livestock in a way the she believes is as humane as possible; her cattle and hogs are pasture- and grain-fed, and free of antibiotics and hormones. Yet when it comes time to slaughter them, she must load them into a trailer for a two- or three-hour trip to a butcher for what she said is a cruelly jarring end.

"It's like the last piece of my puzzle I can't control," she said on the phone from her Faith's Farm near Kankakee, Ill., about an hour-and-a-half south of Chicago. She has begun talking with others in the area about developing a mobile slaughterhouse that would travel the state. She said the idea has been met with interest by other farmers, some of whom share her philosophy as well as others who are simply looking to save valuable time lost by traveling long distances to bring their animals to slaughter.

"I Am Love" may be the best food movie in years. But it's not the food porn you might expect.

"I Am Love," Italian director Luca Guadagnino's strange, beautiful film is set in modern-day Milan but, from the first strains of composer John Adams' tense score and 1950s-style credits, it evokes the melodramas of an earlier era, nodding to masters like Hitchcock and Sirk. Tilda Swinton, who co-produced the film, also stars as Emma Recchi, the Russian wife of a wealthy Italian textile maker. She falls in love with a young chef, Antonio, who happens to be the friend and business partner of her son. This being melodrama, the romance comes at a heavy price.

So what does all of this have to do with food? Nothing – and everything. A crimson arabesque of prawns sets the affair in motion, and later a delicate fish broth will lead to the plot's unraveling. These dishes are exquisitely created by Milanese chef Carlo Cracco and photographed by Yorick Le Saux but they make only brief appearances. Their true force comes from the direction and virtuoso performances.