This fall, a number of outdoors-loving restaurants across the country are raising the bar — and, in some cases, the barn — on farm-to-table fare by bringing the table to the farm for dinners under the stars. Pack a jacket and get ready to dig in at our five picks for October.
Nestled in the foothills of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, this Forbes Travel Guide Four-Star inn is also a working farm that sources its own produce, honey, eggs and artisan cheeses. Dine outside, overlooking the farm’s grazing pastures, Thursday–Sunday evenings in October. These are Hammer Nights, when Executive Chef Joseph Lenn of Four-Star restaurant The Barn at Blackberry Farm serves guests just-picked seasonal cuisine (think farro and fall squash salad) in Yallarhammer Pavilion, pictured above.
The Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes
Celebrate the grand opening of the Five-Star Ritz-Carlton’s Whisper Creek Farm on October 12 at a “Slow Down” farm dinner featuring one of their chefs’ specialties: Argentinian barbecue. The farm is a 7,000-square-foot fruit and vegetable garden that will provide the hotel’s chefs and bartenders — and even its Four-Star Ritz-Carlton Spa, Orlando — with hyperlocal, organic ingredients. The next farm supper, a “Pigs & Pinot” wine dinner on November 9, is proof that down-on-the-farm doesn’t have to be entirely down-home; prestigious single-vineyard pinots will accompany your seven-course meal.
The Four-Star Capitol Grille at Nashville’s Five-Star Hermitage Hotel lends Chef Tyler Brown to an Outstanding In The Field dinner at Bells Bend Neighborhood Farms on October 7. If you don’t have tickets for Sunday’s event, know that Outstanding In The Field will host farm dinners in 18 other locations around the country this fall, though Nashville’s event is unique in that Chef Tyler will be preparing dinner with ingredients he grew himself.
This Four-Star Boston restaurant leaves Boylston Street for Apple Street Farm once each month to celebrate the freshest seasonal ingredients with a four-course, wine-paired meal in the fields. This month brings the fall harvest dinner, served October 19 and 20. We’ll whet your appetite with a morsel from September’s Apple Street Farm dinner: pit-roasted Apple Street Farm pig in spiced vegetable ash rub with sugar pumpkin, roma beans and salsa verde.
Elway’s Cherry Creek
Chef Aaron Youngblood of Elway’s Cherry Creek — one of the best steakhouses in Denver, along with Elway’s Downtown in the Four-Star The Ritz-Carlton, Denver — is heading north to Mazzotti Farms on October 13 for a four-course showcase in the corn field. His menu won’t be the only thing reveling in flavors of fall; as a guest, you’ll enjoy a hayride and a souvenir pumpkin from the same patch that supplied the pumpkin-and-green-bean dumplings you’ll eat with your third course of braised pork shoulder.
