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After 25 years telling other people’s food stories on TV, Irene Wong is spending the season at North Tabor Farm, where she’s finding new ways to cook, create, and figure out what’s next.
The bell rings at 9 a.m. at the West Tisbury Farmers Market, and a trickle of people begin to make their way toward North Tabor Farm’s table. Some of them aren’t there just for the tomatoes or eggs. They’re also there for the biscuits.
Irene Wong makes about 100 biscuits for each Saturday market, and they sell out fast. Heart-shaped and handmade, the laminated biscuits take roughly six hours to prep on Friday, and she starts baking them at 6:30 Saturday morning so they have time to cool, be packaged, and make it to the market by nine.
The biscuits have become one of the visible signs of Irene’s first season as chef in residence at North Tabor. But they are only one part of a much larger experiment unfolding inside the farm’s small kitchen trailer.
For Irene, this season is an opportunity to do something she hasn’t done before: run a kitchen of her own.
For more than 25 years, the New York City native worked in television food production, telling stories about chefs, home cooks, restaurants, and food traditions. She worked on cooking and travel shows and produced a 26-part documentary series, My Country, My Kitchen, roaming the world to profile people whose lives were shaped by food. But her relationship with cooking began long before her television career: she grew up in her grandparents' Chinese-American restaurant, surrounded by food and the rhythms of restaurant life. Later, she learned to cook by watching chefs work on camera and by cooking at home. She learned to organize a kitchen the way she organized a set for a television show: Know what you need, know when you need it, and don’t waste time.
But the television industry that had shaped her career changed. Production slowed down during the pandemic and never fully recovered. The kinds of food and travel programs she had spent decades making became less common, and Irene found herself confronting a question that many people ask at some point in their careers: What now?
Then she saw a posting for lead cook at North Tabor.
She had visited the farm three years earlier, during a weeklong trip to the Vineyard, and remembered it vividly. She recalled meeting the family and chef Gina Citarella. She remembered that the farm’s pig, Crouton, was about to have piglets. So when the position came up, she reached out to Gina.
“I don’t know, maybe I do want to take a six-month sabbatical and relocate and just do something different,” Irene remembers thinking.
So she did. She moved into the farm and, in many ways, into the kitchen. She spends roughly 12 hours a day on her feet, moving between the kitchen trailer, a walk-in refrigerator in the barn next door, freezers in another building, and pantry supplies stored elsewhere on the property. She cooks in bulk, cleans, reorganizes, and starts again.
The kitchen itself is small: a six-burner stove, a large oven, a convection oven, two lowboy refrigerators, and a few counters that quickly disappear beneath bowls, trays, ingredients, and Irene’s laptop, where she’s constantly writing and scaling recipes. And then there’s the farm itself.
We always talk about farm to table. Well, if I had to give a headline for 2026, it’s farm to deli container.
For years, Irene lived on the Upper West Side, where a farmers market happens every Sunday just outside her building. She became friendly with the farmers and made a ritual of visiting, even when she didn’t need anything. She learned to anticipate the seasons, knowing who would have ramps, who would have coriander flowers, who would have the best heirloom tomatoes.
“Who would have guessed that would really inform my knowledge about products at North Tabor?” Irene says.
At the farm, she walks among the tomato vines whenever she wants. She can pick herbs when she decides a dish needs chive blossoms. She sees the farm at sunrise and sunset, in mist and dew, with birds overhead and tractors moving through the property. Then she figures out what to do with it all.
“Okay, what am I going to do with all this zucchini?” she asks herself. “What am I going to do with all these tomatoes?”
We hear so much about “farm to table,” she says, but if she had one headline for 2026 it would be this: farm to deli container.
Most of the food she cooks is sold in eight-ounce takeout containers: egg salad, pesto, granola, onion dip, and other prepared foods designed to be carried home and eaten later. The food may be packaged in a tub, but Irene treats each container as a small canvas.
“I’m not plating food in a restaurant,” she says. “I’m plating food in a take-out container.”
Still, she wants her food to be creative and surprise people. She also has to think: “How am I going to make something that is delicious, portable, and has a good shelf life?”
Her egg salad, for instance, is not your run-of-the-mill egg salad (find her recipe here). She removes the seeds from the cucumber pickles to keep the salad from becoming watery, adds spring onions from the farm, cayenne, smoked paprika, and white vinegar for a sharp burst of acidity.
When basil isn’t yet available, she turns the green tops of spring onions into pesto, blanching and shocking them in an ice bath before blending them with pistachios, almonds, lemon juice, and olive oil. She serves it over stracciatella in a takeout container, covered with edible flowers.
The dishes are inventive, but also practical. Irene knows exactly how many eggs and spring onions she needs. Trimmings and scraps go to the chickens or into the compost. Her goal is to use everything she can, in one way or another.
Beyond cooking, which is her first priority, Irene also creates content. In fact, her social media page is how a lot of people, including me, run into her in the first place. Her background in television transfers to Instagram seamlessly. Her videos are beautifully shot, with engaging, detailed voiceovers and close-ups of food that show texture and color.
“To create the content I want takes six to eight hours to edit one reel,” Irene says. “That’s how I was trained to shoot.”
She says she won’t use an editing app because she wants complete control of the creative flow of how her story is told.
“Whether that gets the number of likes, whether the algorithm picks it up and promotes it to non-followers, well, there’s nothing I can do about that,” she says. “But at least at the end of the day, when I scroll my feed, I’m proud of the videos I’ve done because they’re true to who I’ve been my entire career.”
“I spent my whole life putting other people in front of the camera,” Irene says. She taught people how to tell stories on television, how to make eye contact with a camera, and how to talk about food with enough detail and emotion that viewers could almost taste it. Now, she is doing the same thing with her own food.
She describes her biscuits as flaky and laminated, a recreation of the canned biscuits she loved as a child, when she would peel apart the layers. She thinks about what people will feel when they open one of her deli containers. She wants the food to be beautiful, thoughtful, and a little surprising. And she wants people to know the story behind it.
These days, though, there’s less time to tell that story online. The kitchen comes first. “I can’t do social media as much as I used to,” Irene says. “I can’t shoot as much content. I can’t edit, because I just really need to be in the kitchen.”
The work has been physically demanding and, at times, isolating. Irene is in the kitchen for much of the day, and as a native New Yorker who never got her driver's license, she rarely leaves the farm. But the experience has also given her something she didn’t expect: a growing confidence in a skill she spent years practicing. Friends and family, she says, will always tell you they like your cooking. Strangers don’t have to.
When people line up for her biscuits, seek out her food at the farmers market, or tell her what they liked about something she made, there’s a particular kind of validation.
“I don’t know you, and you actually liked what I fed you,” she says. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I do know how to cook.’”
She also knows that what comes next is far from certain. She’ll return to New York in November. She loves television production, but the decision to greenlight a show isn’t hers. Starting a food business in New York is a daunting prospect that comes with high rents, competition, and the need for investors.
Maybe she’ll return to the Vineyard next year. Maybe she’ll write a cookbook — a longtime dream of hers. Maybe she’ll find another way to build a career around food and storytelling.
For now, she’s leaving the future open.
“I enjoy doing it,” she says. “Everything I do isn’t because it’s a gimmick or I’m trying to manipulate something to get something out of it. It’s because it authentically brings me joy, and that can bring others joy.”
Irene describes this period of her life as starting from scratch; and she doesn’t know exactly what she’s making yet.
“I have no idea what’s on the other side of it,” she says. “I’m just going to keep going.”
Follow Irene Wong’s season at North Tabor and see more of her food videos on Instagram @irenewongi. The North Tabor Farm farmstand on 4 North Tabor Road is open from dawn until dusk, daily.
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Herby Spring Onion Egg Salad
- Yield: Serves 4
Description
North Tabor Farm’s chef-in-residence Irene Wong started with a humble egg salad and began tinkering. The result is a bright, herbaceous version packed with spring onions, smoked paprika, cayenne, and a splash of white vinegar for an unexpected burst of tang. It’s a reminder of how a few thoughtful tweaks can make something familiar feel entirely new.
Ingredients
- 12 large eggs
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 1 heaping Tbsp Dijon mustard
- 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
- 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
- Kosher salt to taste
- 2 tsps white vinegar
- 1/2 cup finely chopped spring onions, white bulb only
- 1/2 cup finely chopped dill pickle, seeded and drained
- 2 Tbsp finely chopped fresh dill, tarragon, or chives
Instructions
- Using the back of a spoon, tap each egg at the wider base and on one side to create hairline fractures. This technique helps detach the membrane from the shell, which will make peeling easier. Place all the slightly cracked eggs into a pot and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to medium and cook for 12 minutes.
- Using a slotted spoon, transfer the eggs to an ice bath. Use as much ice as possible. Leave the eggs in the ice bath for 15 minutes before peeling. The shock in temperature will also help the shells come off more easily.
- In a small to medium-sized bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, smoked paprika, cayenne pepper, salt, and white vinegar until well combined. Set aside in the refrigerator.
- Working with one egg at a time, tap on a hard surface to crack the shell all over. Peel each egg over the ice bath, dunking the egg into the water as needed to help remove all the shells. Place the peeled eggs into the bowl of a food processor and give them short pulses until you get the desired consistency for your salad, about 10 to 12 pulses for roughly chopped eggs. .
- Transfer the chopped eggs to a large mixing bowl. If there are any large pieces, use your fingers to break them up. Add the spring onions, dill pickles, and herbs, and toss gently with your hands until evenly combined. Gently fold in the mayonnaise mixture, being careful not to mush up the chopped eggs. Taste and adjust seasonings as desired. Allow to chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes before serving.
This was a really insightful article about the connection between sustainable food practices and the way we think about preparing and consuming meals. I appreciate how you highlighted the journey from local farms to everyday food experiences, showing that every ingredient has a story behind it. The focus on reducing waste, using seasonal produce, and creating thoughtful meals is a great reminder that food choices can have a positive impact on both communities and the environment.
It is inspiring to see how creativity and sustainability can come together in the kitchen. Small changes, such as making better use of fresh ingredients and supporting responsible food systems, can encourage healthier habits while preserving the value of local resources. Articles like this help readers understand that food is not just about eating but also about culture, connection, and mindful choices.