One of the best parts of being a restaurant owner is all the food; the delicious, exciting, local food. We make it a priority to get as much as we can as local as we can. Maybe we are extra special lucky here in Vermont since there is so much food growing, making and creating going on around us. Even in our long winters there are storage vegetables and a greenhouse down the road that operates year round. People up here obsess about their seed catalogs. I had a long discussion last night over the bar about the virtues and mysteries of hanging tomato plants.

As the year begins to warm up it’s difficult not to get excited about the foods that become available, even if only very briefly. Fiddleheads and rhubarb are this week’s excitement. We’ve even had some early local asparagus. We went to pick up cheese from Twig Farm yesterday and were given two gorgeous, enormous duck eggs. (And the cheese, oh my, this was the first time we’d had their Mixed Drum – so delicious) If you really pay attention to what’s fresh and local it hard not to become some sort of ‘foodie’, because things you might never dream of trying taste so good when they are fresh out of the ground. Let me tell you, I had an epic battle over brussels sprouts for many, many years and in the blink of an eye a fresh brussels sprout from Golden Russet Farm changed everything. I was never a big goat cheese fan and Twig Farm and Blue Ledge Farm completely changed that prejudice. Come to Vermont and try something new, we’re just entering the growing season and we’ll make no promises about what you’ll be able to get, but that’s the fun, you have to wait and see and try what’s in front of you.