The Real Coconut Grove
Kerala, India
Staying at Philipkutty’s Farm is a luxuriously exotic yet rustic experience. You’ll eat sumptuous Indian feasts in a thatched pavilion. You’ll sleep in a waterfront villa on a peaceful backwater island, cooled only by the breezes off the lake, with bananas, mangoes, nutmeg, coconut, vanilla, and pepper growing around you. At the same time, you’ll be poling in simple vallam country boats around the calm silvery waters of Vembanad Lake with a local farming family as hosts Ana and Vinod Mathew, his mother, Aniamma, and their son, Philip. You’ll walk the raised stone dikes by which they’ve reclaimed this 18-hectare (45-acre) organic farm from the palm-fringed lake, and eat hearty home-cooked meals with the family. You can even organize a culinary vacation that includes daily cooking classes. It’s great exposure into the heart of southern Indian culture.
Aniamma’s cooking is one of the main attractions here. She happily invites
guests into the family’s kitchen to watch her and Anu cook. The Mathews follow a Syrian Christian diet, featuring a lot of fish, farm vegetables and fruits, rice, duck, chicken, rice based breads (appams and iddis), and chutneys.
Some of her specialties include fried karimeen (pearlspot fish), fish molee, grilled freshwater prawns taken from the farm’s own canals, roasted duck, curd curries, and red-hot Kerala fish curry. And you simply must try toddy, a unique local liquor made right on the farm from the fermented sap of coconut trees.
The farm has only five villas, so guests get a lot of personal attention and interaction from the family if they want it. The furnishings are gracious antiques, yet the bathrooms are completely modern. You’ll even have a small refrigerator in your villa to keep cold drinks handy. Clay-tiled floors and varnished wooden ceilings give guest quarters the rustic look of a typical Keralan backwater bungalow; each villa is ringed by its own small veranda its “sit-out” painted in a traditional crimson color. There’s no television, no room service, no in room phones but then, those would only disrupt the homey, tranquil experience of staying at Philipkutty’s Farm.
Puthankayal Island, Pallivathukal, Ambika Market, Veechor (& 91/482/927-6529 or 91/482/927-6530; www.philipkuttysfarm.com)
Maverick Farms
Back to the Land
Valle Crucis, North Carolina
This small upland vegetable farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina began supplying produce to local restaurants in the mid-1970s, during the earliest days of the back-to-the-land movement. Several decades later, however, the operation faced encroaching real estate and the same economic uncertainties as many other small family farms until the owner’s daughters Hillary and Alice Brooke Wilson came to the rescue in 2004. Enlisting like-minded food fanatics Tom Philpotts, Sara Safransky, and Leo Gaev, they dedicated their new enterprise to ideals like “experimenting with human-scale farming techniques,” “transforming food and farming practices,” and “reclaiming the pleasures of eating and sharing meals in a culture overrun by industrial agriculture and flavorless food.” Registering themselves as a nonprofit educational enterprise, they wanted a fresh brand to suit their new lofty purpose and renamed their cooperative Maverick Farms.
Maverick still sells vegetables to local restaurants. But now they also run a local CSA (community supported agriculture) program; mentor young farmers; set up camps to introduce teenagers to farming; build a passive solar greenhouse; offer occasional three-course organic farm dinners; and run a small bed-and-breakfast operation from the three bedrooms of their two-story, 125 year old gray frame farmhouse. Guests are welcome to lounge on the wraparound porch or in hammocksdown by the creek, but they can also help in the gardens or the orchard, weeding or gathering eggs or harvesting herbs, fruit, and vegetables. (You can use your farm labor to pay for part of your room or arrange other kinds of barter as well.) Paying guests help underwrite the farm’s activities, but they also allow the Maverick mavericks to share their vision with curious visitors.
The farm dinners, served in the roomy large-windowed dining room, are wonderful events with live music, linen tablecloths, and candlelight. Menus feature the best organic ingredients, either from the farm itself or from neighboring growers. Some past dinners have had a Tuscan theme, with rosemary focaccia and rabbit pâté or butternut ravioli with sage-butter sauce; a Mexican theme, including tacos with braised chard and avocado salsa or grilled steak with chili salsa; or a harvesttime theme, featuring cider glazed pork roast with pear chutney or sweet potato flan. If a farm dinner isn’t scheduled during your stay, the Maverick folks will happily steer you toward some excellent local restaurants that serve Maverick produce, where you can experience the same interwoven web of food and farm.
410 Justus Rd., Valle Crucis (& 828/963-4656; www.maverickfarm.com).
Blackberry Farm
Cream of the Crop
Walland, Tennessee
Luxury resort or farm stay? It’s up to you. On the one hand, you can visit Blackberry Farm to be pampered in its luxurious estate guest rooms, suites, and cottages; eat your meals in either of two acclaimed onsite restaurants; lounge in the spa; or fly-fish, horseback ride, or sail in a hot-air balloon over the dreamy Smoky Mountain landscape. On the other hand, you can time your visit to coincide with demonstrations by guest chefs such as Grant Achatz, Nancy Silverton, or David Chang; take cooking classes; spend the day with the on-site cheese maker or head gardener; stroll around the fruit and nut orchards; forage for mushrooms, berries, paw paws, and wild greens; or visit pastures full of sheep, poultry, and honeybee hives.
This upscale 4,200-acre (1,701-hectare) Smoky Mountain estate includes a serious sustainable farm, where the symbiosis of livestock, crops, insects, and soil has been conceived in the most organic ways. Notice, for example, how they rotate the sheep from pasture to pasture, and move the chickens about in rolling henhouses, to aid fertilization and pest control. On-site artisanal workshops include a butcher, bakery, creamery, jam kitchen, and salumeria where the farm’s products are processed, along with meats and produce from neighboring farms. A significant portion of the food in the restaurants comes right from the farm, from handmade ewes-milk cheeses to golden-yolked eggs, from exquisite honey to apple cider, from crisp radishe and tender collard greens to hazelnuts even black truffles that have begun to grow on the roots of the orchard’s hazelnut trees.
For an intense agricultural experience, book a room in the Farmhouse, a whitewashed frame house (new, but made with wood reclaimed from older farm structures), across the road from the fieldstone Main House. Here you’ll also find The Barn, an adventurous fine-dining restaurant in a relocated 18th-century Amish barn, where chef Peter Glander creates multicourse set menus from the farm’s bounty. Glander’s cooking has been dubbed Foothills Cuisine,for the way it blends country traditions and farm-fresh produce with sophisticated culinary techniques. The Barn also contains the demonstration kitchen where cooking classes, farm demonstrations, and other culinary events take place; many of the on-site food artisans set up shop in the nearby Larder. Of course, while you’re here, you’ll also want to try out a meal in the relaxed Main House dining room.
The resort’s owner, Sam Beall, is a trained chef, which no doubt explains the resort’s emphasis on food. But Blackberry has also been his family’s farm since 1976, and his stewardship of the landscape shines through everywhere. He could have made Blackberry just another luxury resort. Instead he has let the farm flourish around it and that’s what makes his place so special.
1471 West Millers Cove Rd., Walland (& 800/648-4252 or 865/984-8166; www.blackberryfarm.com)
For more information please visit Frommer’s travel.
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Kerala, India
Staying at Philipkutty’s Farm is a luxuriously exotic yet rustic experience. You’ll eat sumptuous Indian feasts in a thatched pavilion. You’ll sleep in a waterfront villa on a peaceful backwater island, cooled only by the breezes off the lake, with bananas, mangoes, nutmeg, coconut, vanilla, and pepper growing around you. At the same time, you’ll be poling in simple vallam country boats around the calm silvery waters of Vembanad Lake with a local farming family as hosts Ana and Vinod Mathew, his mother, Aniamma, and their son, Philip. You’ll walk the raised stone dikes by which they’ve reclaimed this 18-hectare (45-acre) organic farm from the palm-fringed lake, and eat hearty home-cooked meals with the family. You can even organize a culinary vacation that includes daily cooking classes. It’s great exposure into the heart of southern Indian culture.
Aniamma’s cooking is one of the main attractions here. She happily invites
guests into the family’s kitchen to watch her and Anu cook. The Mathews follow a Syrian Christian diet, featuring a lot of fish, farm vegetables and fruits, rice, duck, chicken, rice based breads (appams and iddis), and chutneys.
Some of her specialties include fried karimeen (pearlspot fish), fish molee, grilled freshwater prawns taken from the farm’s own canals, roasted duck, curd curries, and red-hot Kerala fish curry. And you simply must try toddy, a unique local liquor made right on the farm from the fermented sap of coconut trees.
The farm has only five villas, so guests get a lot of personal attention and interaction from the family if they want it. The furnishings are gracious antiques, yet the bathrooms are completely modern. You’ll even have a small refrigerator in your villa to keep cold drinks handy. Clay-tiled floors and varnished wooden ceilings give guest quarters the rustic look of a typical Keralan backwater bungalow; each villa is ringed by its own small veranda its “sit-out” painted in a traditional crimson color. There’s no television, no room service, no in room phones but then, those would only disrupt the homey, tranquil experience of staying at Philipkutty’s Farm.
Puthankayal Island, Pallivathukal, Ambika Market, Veechor (& 91/482/927-6529 or 91/482/927-6530; www.philipkuttysfarm.com)
Maverick Farms
Back to the Land
Valle Crucis, North Carolina
This small upland vegetable farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina began supplying produce to local restaurants in the mid-1970s, during the earliest days of the back-to-the-land movement. Several decades later, however, the operation faced encroaching real estate and the same economic uncertainties as many other small family farms until the owner’s daughters Hillary and Alice Brooke Wilson came to the rescue in 2004. Enlisting like-minded food fanatics Tom Philpotts, Sara Safransky, and Leo Gaev, they dedicated their new enterprise to ideals like “experimenting with human-scale farming techniques,” “transforming food and farming practices,” and “reclaiming the pleasures of eating and sharing meals in a culture overrun by industrial agriculture and flavorless food.” Registering themselves as a nonprofit educational enterprise, they wanted a fresh brand to suit their new lofty purpose and renamed their cooperative Maverick Farms.
Maverick still sells vegetables to local restaurants. But now they also run a local CSA (community supported agriculture) program; mentor young farmers; set up camps to introduce teenagers to farming; build a passive solar greenhouse; offer occasional three-course organic farm dinners; and run a small bed-and-breakfast operation from the three bedrooms of their two-story, 125 year old gray frame farmhouse. Guests are welcome to lounge on the wraparound porch or in hammocksdown by the creek, but they can also help in the gardens or the orchard, weeding or gathering eggs or harvesting herbs, fruit, and vegetables. (You can use your farm labor to pay for part of your room or arrange other kinds of barter as well.) Paying guests help underwrite the farm’s activities, but they also allow the Maverick mavericks to share their vision with curious visitors.
The farm dinners, served in the roomy large-windowed dining room, are wonderful events with live music, linen tablecloths, and candlelight. Menus feature the best organic ingredients, either from the farm itself or from neighboring growers. Some past dinners have had a Tuscan theme, with rosemary focaccia and rabbit pâté or butternut ravioli with sage-butter sauce; a Mexican theme, including tacos with braised chard and avocado salsa or grilled steak with chili salsa; or a harvesttime theme, featuring cider glazed pork roast with pear chutney or sweet potato flan. If a farm dinner isn’t scheduled during your stay, the Maverick folks will happily steer you toward some excellent local restaurants that serve Maverick produce, where you can experience the same interwoven web of food and farm.
410 Justus Rd., Valle Crucis (& 828/963-4656; www.maverickfarm.com).
Blackberry Farm
Cream of the Crop
Walland, Tennessee
Luxury resort or farm stay? It’s up to you. On the one hand, you can visit Blackberry Farm to be pampered in its luxurious estate guest rooms, suites, and cottages; eat your meals in either of two acclaimed onsite restaurants; lounge in the spa; or fly-fish, horseback ride, or sail in a hot-air balloon over the dreamy Smoky Mountain landscape. On the other hand, you can time your visit to coincide with demonstrations by guest chefs such as Grant Achatz, Nancy Silverton, or David Chang; take cooking classes; spend the day with the on-site cheese maker or head gardener; stroll around the fruit and nut orchards; forage for mushrooms, berries, paw paws, and wild greens; or visit pastures full of sheep, poultry, and honeybee hives.
This upscale 4,200-acre (1,701-hectare) Smoky Mountain estate includes a serious sustainable farm, where the symbiosis of livestock, crops, insects, and soil has been conceived in the most organic ways. Notice, for example, how they rotate the sheep from pasture to pasture, and move the chickens about in rolling henhouses, to aid fertilization and pest control. On-site artisanal workshops include a butcher, bakery, creamery, jam kitchen, and salumeria where the farm’s products are processed, along with meats and produce from neighboring farms. A significant portion of the food in the restaurants comes right from the farm, from handmade ewes-milk cheeses to golden-yolked eggs, from exquisite honey to apple cider, from crisp radishe and tender collard greens to hazelnuts even black truffles that have begun to grow on the roots of the orchard’s hazelnut trees.
For an intense agricultural experience, book a room in the Farmhouse, a whitewashed frame house (new, but made with wood reclaimed from older farm structures), across the road from the fieldstone Main House. Here you’ll also find The Barn, an adventurous fine-dining restaurant in a relocated 18th-century Amish barn, where chef Peter Glander creates multicourse set menus from the farm’s bounty. Glander’s cooking has been dubbed Foothills Cuisine,for the way it blends country traditions and farm-fresh produce with sophisticated culinary techniques. The Barn also contains the demonstration kitchen where cooking classes, farm demonstrations, and other culinary events take place; many of the on-site food artisans set up shop in the nearby Larder. Of course, while you’re here, you’ll also want to try out a meal in the relaxed Main House dining room.
The resort’s owner, Sam Beall, is a trained chef, which no doubt explains the resort’s emphasis on food. But Blackberry has also been his family’s farm since 1976, and his stewardship of the landscape shines through everywhere. He could have made Blackberry just another luxury resort. Instead he has let the farm flourish around it and that’s what makes his place so special.
1471 West Millers Cove Rd., Walland (& 800/648-4252 or 865/984-8166; www.blackberryfarm.com)
For more information please visit Frommer’s travel.
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