Blue Hill At Stone Barns Center | Westchester, NY
Plan a perfect day of farm-to-table eating at Stone Barns
Autumn is our favorite time of year to spend a Sunday at Stone Barns, the bucolic Westchester farm and education center. While it's still warm enough, take a ramble around the property to admire the changing leaves and build up an appetite for a life-changing farm-to-table experience at the center's Blue Hill restaurant.
Get There: It's a 30-mile drive to Pocantico Hills, but you can take a 45-minute train ride from Grand Central to Tarrytown, then a cab to Stone Barns.
Get Around: Check the board outside the gift shop for the day's events and tours. Or follow our favorite route: Walk past the four-season greenhouses and livestock shelters. Follow the "PIGS THIS WAY" sign into the woods, turn right at the gigantic compost heaps, and you'll find gangs of Berkshire pigs rooting in the mud. Next, loop around to the back pasture, past the grazing cattle and newborn piglets. Follow the fence past the vegetable gardens and cross the road to visit the beehives, mobile chicken coops and chatty turkeys. Don't get too close to the sheep or Stella, the farm's badass sheepdog, will give you an earful. Finally, head back to the Norman-esque barns to see how all of this comes together on the plate.
Get Fed: Dinner reservations at Blue Hill at Stone Barns's formal dining room fill up quickly, but on Sundays the restaurant serves a four-course lunch ($68) until 2 p.m. Or, show up at 5 p.m. sharp to snag a seat at the bar, where you can put yourself in the hands of the Farmer's Feast ($125), a leisurely sampling of what's best from the farm that day. Be it naked baby carrots or a sprawling Berkshire-pork tasting, whatever chef Dan Barber decides to serve you will change how you see restaurants—and the farmers who supply them—forever.
Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, 630 Bedford Rd., Pocantico Hills; 914-366-6200 or stonebarnscenter.org