Fern and Fire opened in the fall of 2019, in a converted feed store on Mill Road, with one wood-fired hearth, twenty-four seats, and a single rule: cook only what the farms send that week.
We work with twelve partner farms within an hour's drive — Letterbox Farm in Hudson for our chickens and eggs, Hawthorne Valley for the dairy and cultured butter, Sparrowbush in Hillsdale for the heritage grains, Migliorelli for the fall brassicas, Soul Fire and Rise & Root for the leafy weeks of summer. The trucks arrive on Tuesday mornings. By Tuesday afternoon, the menu for the week is written. By Wednesday evening, we are pouring the first amuse.
The trucks arrive on Tuesday. By Tuesday afternoon, the menu is written.
The hearth is the second author. Built from refractory brick and fed by apple and cherry wood from Montgomery Place Orchards, it is the only heat source in the kitchen. Everything passes through it — the embers braise the carrots, the side wall roasts the lamb, the cooling stones finish the fish. We don't have a sauté line. We have a fire, and we have a clock.
The wine list runs to about eighty growers — almost all small, almost all working in some shade of low-intervention farming. We pour by the glass from Channing Daughters in Bridgehampton and Hermit Woods in New Hampshire, and we keep a deeper cellar of Loire reds, Jura whites, and Slovenian skin contacts for those who want to follow a course further.
We don't have a sauté line. We have a fire, and we have a clock.
We are not interested in being a destination. We are interested in being honest about a place — what it grows, who grows it, and what a fire can do with both.