The Summer Menu
By Kevin Sprouse, Executive Chef
Early summer is a truly special time in the Champlain Valley– the long days, the warm nights, and the lushness of green grass still wet after a rainfall. It is also when we begin to get a taste of the summer produce to come. After months of spinach, turnips, potatoes, and carrots, suddenly we have green onions, asparagus, berries, and rhubarb. As a chef, my creativity kicks into overdrive and having new produce at their peak season is one of the best parts of working at Philo Ridge Farm.
“Summer cooking implies a sense of immediacy, a capacity to capture the essence of the fleeting moment.”
During the winter months, I get to work closely with Garden Manager Brian and the rest of our farm team to plan out what we will sell and serve in our Market and kitchen later. It’s truly a privilege to be able to walk directly from the kitchen into our gardens and see what we mapped out in Excel a few weeks earlier growing at my feet.
The work our farm team does is remarkable – they take an entire ecosystem into account when making decisions around our growing practices and have a net positive impact on the environment. Our fruit and vegetable growing and pasture-management practices reflect Philo Ridge Farm’s desire to produce all food within a regenerative agricultural system.
Most visitors might not realize all the work that our farm and livestock teams are doing behind the scenes but my job is to showcase the rewards from that work in a delicious and thoughtful way.
During the summer months, we try to do minimal preparation to our ingredients and let the flavors of the vegetables and meat speak for themselves. While lunch and dinner service are my main focus, in the background we are also busy preserving the peak flavors of the season – canning, pickling, drying – to use throughout the winter.
As we welcome the first day of summer later this June, we are expanding our hours in the Market from 9:00am to 6:00pm Wednesday through Saturday, beginning this week. You can head to the Great Room from 11:00am to 2:30pm for lunch service. We also have grab-and-go lunch and other prepared foods in the Market beginning at 11:00am.
Dinner reservations begin each night at 5pm and the last reservations are for 9:00pm. Make your reservation online here.
Our kitchen team has been working hard to develop the menu for this summer and it is going to be a beautiful celebration of the season. We hope you can come dine with us soon and take part in our farm story.