When I pulled into the parking lot of Philo Ridge Farm in Charlotte the other day, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to dine on a dime at its market café. After all, I squeezed into a space (which was hard to find) between a Mercedes SUV and a Volvo station wagon. A silver BMW arrived not long after I did.
I learned not to judge a café by the cars in its lot. As it turns out, it was no problem at all to eat lunch here for $12. The difficulty was deciding what to get.
Pizza was $2.75 a slice, $3.25 for the daily special topped with eggplant — lots of it — grown on the farm. Fried chicken, garnished with sprigs of rosemary and displayed in a big cast-iron skillet, was less than $3 per piece. A salad of gorgeous farm-grown vegetables was $8. I ordered a meatball hero ($10) and never looked back.
But I did keep looking up and around at the place, unlike any I’ve seen in Vermont, where I stopped for lunch in a big barn-like building at a crossroads in Charlotte. The market café is a bold combination of a Beacon Hill gourmet shop and a farmstand. The food and its presentation are so pleasing, you take two samples of Cobb Hill cheese even as you watch a fly buzz and land on each slice.
Shelves are stocked with farm produce and meat, along with value-added products from the kitchen such as chicken and beef broth, hot sauce, tomatillo salsa, dilly beans and hot peppers. At a deli counter, you can order food to eat in a large adjoining dining room furnished with communal tables. Seating is also available at a wooden bar and on a couch that faces a fireplace. Doors open onto a patio and farm fields beyond. But it was raining hard the day I was there, and the lunch crowd was eating inside.
The tables were full, so I carried my sandwich to the coffee table and pulled up a chair. The meatballs, kept hot in a pot of red sauce, were simply seasoned to highlight the flavor of the farm-raised beef. Four of them were set on a bed of sharp melted cheese that lined the bottom of a warm, crusty baguette. I wondered about eating a South Philly kind of sandwich at a 400-acre farm in Charlotte, but the meatballs and marinara went down just fine.
A couple of days after my lunch, I was dining on beer and popcorn at Zero Gravity Craft Brewery. Frank Pace, chef-owner of neighboring restaurant the Great Northern, stopped by to say hi. I asked him if he’d been to Philo Ridge Farm; he answered yes, and raved.
Pace predicted that Philo Ridge Farm could become the first Michelin-starred restaurant in Vermont. Meanwhile, you can get a slice for $2.75.
Dining on a Dime is a weekly series featuring well-made, filling bites (something substantial enough to qualify as a small meal or better) for $12 or less. Know of a tasty dish we should feature? Drop us a line: food@sevendaysvt.com.
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It might be possible that the only people going to this place might have the means and knowledge to drive to some farm in the middle of nowhere (or some otherwise bedroom community outside of one of the more precious places in the U.S.) to eat a meal. It’s just as possible that the “farm to table” movement leaves most ordinary folk out of the picture. And, it’s even possible that rick folk are kinda frugal.