Like many stories about Greenmarket produce gone mainstream, this one begins at Franny’s, the now-closed neo-locavore pizzeria deep in the heart of brownstone Brooklyn. Noah Robbins was eating there eight years ago when he first tried a blazing-red pepper he loved. “I was just like, This pepper is insane,” he recalls. A few years earlier, he’d launched his own company, Ark Foods, designed to grow heirloom ingredients at commercial scale, in part thanks to a fascination with shishitos. This pepper was different. He asked what it was, found out it was called a Jimmy Nardello, and, he says, “got pretty obsessed.”
Chefs and food writers, especially those who fetishize hyperseasonal produce and treat Greenmarket farmers like celebrities, tend to be obsessive about this pepper too: At Claud, in the East Village, Nardello peppers have been served with blackened swordfish. At Daniel, seared hamachi has been paired with Nardello farci. Missy Robbins has prepared them simply — charred and marinated — at Misi. On Instagram in September, Alison Roman wrote, “They are better than you think they possibly could be, I promise.” It’s even a meme. True believers also include Four Horsemen chef Nick Curtola, a former Franny’s cook and one of the chief evangelists in the Jimmy Nardello movement. He recently opined, “Jimmy Nardello peppers are about to be on every menu in NYC.”
Chef Nico Villaseñor, who previously cooked at the Fort Greene wine bar Fradei, explains the appeal: “You don’t have to do too much to them, and they’re already delicious. They’re just one of those types of peppers that are naturally so sweet.”
There was a real Jimmy Nardello; his family brought over seeds for the pepper from Italy in the 19th century. Nardello died way back in 1983, but he’d had the seeds stored in a bank. The family lost track of them until they were discovered in a seed catalogue by the wife of one of Nardello’s grandsons, which is when they began a march to Greenmarket-star status.
The peppers were grown only by small operators, however, and their short season limited their availability: “The main barrier to mass-marketing a pepper like Jimmy Nardello is not many growers grow it on a huge scale,” says Phoebe Creaghan, who works for the specialty-produce supplier Natoora. “We have reached a point where we are desperately trying to find new growers to meet demand for the Jimmy Nardello pepper within the chef community.”
Robbins — since he ate that first pepper way back in 2016 — wants to be the change he envisions. With Ark’s network of farms and growing power, he’s able to grow ten rolling acres’ worth of the peppers and harvest roughly 350,000 per week. During their next planting, Ark plans to double that amount, all with the aim of radically expanding the distribution and availability of Jimmy Nardellos, transforming them from a niche ingredient into the kind of mainstream product that casual home cooks serve at dinner parties.
In December, Ark made its first delivery of Nardellos to Whole Foods. In March, Ark’s peppers became available at the Sprouts Farmers Market chain. Now Robbins is in talks with retailers like Kroger, Wal-Mart, and Costco. “We know that people want them, that people are eating them, that chefs put them all over their menus,” he says. “We can’t grow enough.”
