REVIEW

Here’s our idea of a perfect Vermont evening: we first drive to Lebanon, New Hampshire, pick up a growler or two of Dooryard Cider from Farnum Hill Ciders, then drive north of Woodstock, towards Pomfret, on winding dirt roads through the forest until we reach Cloudland Farm. We arrive earlier than our reservation so, on a pleasant summer evening, we sit in rockers on the porch as the kind folks at Cloudland bring us glasses.

Chicken wings cooked in chicken fat, dressed with hot sauce, sprinkled with minced celery leaves

We sip our cider while rocking on the porch, looking out at the farm, the horses, and the forest beyond, until our table is ready. Then we dine farm-to-table-at-the-farm on food grown on this farm and from nearby farms and producers. The precise mechanics of this evening are chancy, as both Cloudland Farm and Farnum Hill Ciders have very limited hours that don’t always mesh with each other. If Farnum Hill isn’t possible, we’ll stop at Gillingham’s in Woodstock, where Gillingham’s wine man has already selected a bottle designed to mesh with that evening’s menu.

With the wings came a blue cheese “dressing” that was practically all cheese – the spectacularly good blue from Plymouth Cheese.

The Emmons family purchased Cloudland Farm over a century ago. The thousand acre farm, today run by Bill and Cathy Emmons, raises chickens, turkeys, pigs, and beef cattle, all of which are used to construct the set menus each week at their farm restaurant. There’s also a farm market on site where you can purchase many of the items served in the restaurant.

Peach cobbler with buttermilk brandy brown butter ice cream

The spotless, white pine barn of a dining room is comfortable and casual. Currently, dinner is served Friday (more casual) and Saturday (more ambitious) evenings only. Chef Ira White posts his menus by Wednesday. Here is a copy of the most recent week’s menus, at the time of this writing:

We’ve dined here twice, both times on Thursday evening burger night, which they are not currently offering (perhaps it’s a summer only thing), but it’s essentially the same idea. Our last visit began with chicken wings, which were followed by the burger. We finished with peach cobbler. Everything looked and tasted farm fresh, and was prepared from scratch. The menus are designed to showcase the quality, local ingredients.

Tables are bare for burger night. Saturday evenings the white linens come out.

The back of the menu details where each ingredient originated. Here are a few examples: the beef for the burger, along with the optional bacon, the chicken wings, and the tomatoes and cucumbers served in the salad, came from Cloudland itself. The blue cheese for the amazingly good blue cheese dressing that was served with the wings, which we ate by the spoonful, came from Plymouth Cheese. The dark rye flour for the burger bun (!) came from Champlain Valley Milling. And on and on. Amazing.

We were seated next to a window one evening. Before the sun went down, this was our view (through a screen).

Reservations are generally necessary. Check their website to see what meals they’ll be serving the week you plan to visit. We should also probably warn the trenchermen among you that portions tend to the modest, which is immaterial to us. We can be hearty eaters and often write about places where the portion sizes can be practically overwhelming, so we feel we should mention this in case that’s of prime importance to you.

When you drive home from dinner, or back to wherever you are staying, we highly recommend, if you are the jittery type, following Cloudland’s directions “out,” and bring a GPS for good measure. If you do it on your own, you’ll be driving twisty, sometimes narrow, pitch black dirt roads for miles through the forest, some of which, in our experience, are barely more than a walking trail. We’ve followed our GPS both times and, while we enjoyed the experience, it involved sometimes doubling back when reality conflicted with our GPS. Presumably, Cloudland knows the least challenging routes.

LAF TRAK: 

FOOD: 

BEST THING TO EAT: Blue cheese dressing