At weddings and other lavish affairs, “farm-to-table” can sometimes feel like another decorative flourish: romantic, tasteful and conveniently difficult to verify. For Dee Wagner, however, it describes the often complicated work that begins long before the first platter reaches the table.
Wagner is the founder of Dee Wagner Events and Roux Catering, a Marin-based wedding and event catering company that has sourced from local growers for more than 30 years, including Star Route Farms in Bolinas and vendors at the Marin Farmers Market.
“For me it’s integrity more than anything—a commitment to do things the harder way, not the easy way,” Wagner says. “I’m always thinking about the seasons: what’s coming in, what’s going out, what’s showing best right now.”
That means constructing menus around the realities of farming rather than merely decorating a fixed menu with the word “seasonal.” Weather changes. Harvests arrive late. Crops bolt unexpectedly. Wagner must translate those agricultural variables into dishes that satisfy a client’s expectations, budget and their emotional connection to food. To wit, her menus begin with a lot of questions.
“I start by trying to understand what folks want to feel, and what they want their guests to feel, when they’re experiencing the food at their event,” Wagner explains. “There’s a lot of emotion wrapped up in food—what people love, what they can’t stand, what brings them joy, what takes them back to a joyful moment in their life.”
Seasonality enters the conversation soon thereafter. Will Wagner refuse to serve asparagus in August? “Absolutely,” she says. “But I’ll also tell them why.”
The essential structure of a menu generally remains intact between consultation and event. The vegetable beside the short ribs may change, or an herb might yield to something more vibrant. Often, the surprise becomes what Wagner calls “a bit of lagniappe”—an unexpected extra inspired by something irresistible at the market.
Before one large Earth Day event, an abrupt temperature change caused cilantro plants to bolt, producing flowers and seed pods. Wagner responded by transforming the planned pasta pesto into flowering cilantro pesto, then incorporating the cut plants into the buffet’s floral arrangements.
“The flavor is remarkable—floral, herbal, with a sweet undertone you don’t get from the leaf alone,” she notes.
Marin’s many microclimates make patience another necessary ingredient. When persistent fog delayed Triple T Farms’ cherry tomatoes by a month and a half, Wagner temporarily sourced elsewhere. Once the farm’s Toybox tomatoes arrived, however, she switched back, serving them fresh and roasting and preserving the surplus.
She exercises similar patience with Sanzuma, a small San Rafael school farm whose hillside location creates a limited growing season. “The people who work that land have such love and respect for what grows there that you can taste the difference in the produce,” Wagner says.
That same conviction—that care can be tasted—extends beyond high-end celebrations. In April 2020, Wagner founded NoHungerHere after the pandemic closed the communal dining room at the St. Vincent de Paul Society in San Rafael. Volunteers prepared more than 5,500 meals using donated funds.
Today, the organization remains integral to Wagner’s work, allowing wedding and corporate clients to connect their celebrations to a wider community mission.
“I approach the food we create for unhoused individuals exactly the same way I approach any other client: with care and intention,” she says.
That may be Wagner’s clearest definition of farm-to-table: not a provenance printed on a menu, but a continuous chain of respect—from the people who cultivate the soil to those who prepare the meal and, finally, to everyone invited to the table.
For more information, visit deewagner.com and nohungerhere.life.
