Batter of the bands

Plus:

• Eat to the beat: Kara Zuaro, author of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good, picks her top three New York band recipes.

Grizzly Bear throws together its pecan pie.

“Trying to find tomatillos on a Sunday night proved nearly impossible,” reads a passage from a new cookbook. “I spent four hours searching at every grocery store and bodega in northern Brooklyn.”

This might seem like a problem facing Mario Batali or Zak Pelaccio, but the man on the mission is Matt Pond, singer for the band Matt Pond PA. He needs the tangy fruit for a dinner he’s cooking with his roommate Miriam Kienle, whom he refers to as “the executive chef.” Tomatillos don’t usually figure in the popular conception of the indie-rock lifestyle—which conjures grimy bars, greasy snacks and cans of Pabst—yet it’s part of a burgeoning movement that joins two ostensibly disparate passions: indie music and gourmet food.

Now, a critical mass of band-crazy chefs, food-crazy bands, and an enthusiastic and educated audience has ushered in this seemingly strange coupling. Alex Kapranos, lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, recently published Sound Bites, a collection of essays detailing his gastronomic experiences and experiments on tour. Sam Mason, the ex-wd-50 pastry chef who’ll soon open the much-buzzed-about restaurant Tailor, is hosting Dinner with the Band, an online-only show in which he cooks for groups like Harlem Shakes and Cities on Fire. And the Meatpacking lounge APT is launching a monthly event called “The Chowdown,” which features a meal from a local chef accompanied by the sounds of a local DJ—the April 10 event pairs Italian dishes by the Little Owl’s Joey Campanaro with Italo-disco beats from Pop Your Funk’s Brennan Green.

Such a confluence doesn’t seem so odd, however, when you consider the daily life of a band on tour. “Many of them spend 24 hours a day on the road just to play a single show each night,” says Kara Zuaro, author of the aforementioned cookbook I Like Food, Food Tastes Good, which collects recipes from more than 100 musicians and comes out in April. “Sometimes all musicians have to think about is their next meal.”

The dishes she includes range widely in sophistication—the Decemberists, for example, contribute a recipe for pork loin with poblano chilies, while Death Cab for Cutie offers one for a scary-sounding veggie-sausage and peanut-butter sandwich. Yet even though some of the groups seem to lack a certain connoisseurship, Zuaro says they are all completely pumped about what they cook. For instance, the recipe for roasted bone marrow (see “Eat to the beat,” below) that she received from the New York group Battles would be at home in a chef’s cookbook or on a foodie website like eGullet. “Bones are the basics of cooking…they are what stocks are made out of and what enriches sauces,” guitarist Ian Williams opines. “To appreciate food, one needs to appreciate and understand bones.”

Of course, if simply having free time in an unfamiliar city were all it took to develop a penchant for good grub, then all flight attendants would be gastronomes. In their extremes, both music buffs and foodies engage in a similar embracing of the obscure—the tiny Thai restaurant in Elmhurst, the little-known artist or a rare recording on an arcane label—as a means of distinguishing themselves from those with run-of-the-mill tastes.

And both music and food enthusiasts have chosen passions that require intimate human interaction. “Music is a really social activity, and cooking can be too,” says Ed Droste, of the experimental folk quartet Grizzly Bear. And it seems both offer a similar type of pleasure: one that’s so enthralling as to be transporting. Justin Chearno, who plays guitar for Panthers and recently became the wine buyer for Williamsburg’s Uva Wines, sees similarities in the bliss of, say, listening to Brian Eno and sipping a fine Gevrey-Chambertin. “You hear music at the perfect time on the perfect day and you have this beautiful cinematic moment,” he says. “It’s the same with drinking wine.”

Now that the public’s passion for food has caught up to its obsession with music, once-anonymous chefs have become rock stars in their own right. When the Sundance Channel show Iconoclasts paired Mario Batali with Michael Stipe, the scene showing the pair as they strolled through the Union Square Greenmarket made you wonder who was turning more heads, the ponytailed chef or the R.E.M. frontman.

These concurrent booms make any combination of the genres a marketing double threat. But salability aside, this new partnership is ultimately about making good things even better.

“For me, it was a way of revamping old experiences,” says Anna Balkrishna, an editor for Flavorpill and the cocreator of the Chowdown. “After a while, listening to music in its usual formats—seeing rock shows, strapping on headphones—can get old and kind of impersonal.” Food, in other words, makes music taste better. And, because music reciprocates, she says, “It was only a matter of time before food got a great soundtrack.”