From the Farm

The Copper Hen started with a chicken. Specifically, a Rhode Island Red that wandered into Sarah and Tom Aldridge's backyard in 2015, back when they were still working desk jobs in the city. They kept it. Then they got five more. Then they bought the land.

The farm came first. Thirty acres in the Hudson Valley, half-wooded, with a creek that runs cold year-round. They started with chickens and a kitchen garden. Then came the pigs, then the goats, then the greenhouse. They sold eggs at the farmers market on Saturdays and cooked for friends on Sundays. Those Sunday dinners grew from six people to twenty to sixty. Someone said they should open a restaurant. They said that was crazy. Then they did it anyway.

The building is a converted barn on Rural Route 7, halfway between Hudson and Claverack. Tom did most of the renovation himself, keeping the original beams and stone foundation. The wood-fired oven was built by a mason from Vermont who learned the craft in Tuscany. It is the heart of the kitchen. Everything passes through it or near it. The bread, the chicken, the vegetables, the desserts. Even the butter gets a minute near the flames.

Sarah runs the kitchen. She never went to culinary school. She learned to cook from her mother, from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, from the farms themselves. When you grow your own food, you cook differently. You cook what is ready, not what you planned. The menu changes not weekly but daily, sometimes between lunch and dinner, depending on what came in from the field that morning.

The vegetables are the stars. People come expecting the chicken, which is extraordinary, but they leave talking about the beets. Or the kale salad. Or the roasted carrots that taste like candy because they were in the ground until that morning. We do not have a walk-in full of produce from a distributor. We have a garden fifty feet from the kitchen door.

The wine list is small and leans natural. The cider is pressed from our own apples. The bread is sourdough, baked every morning in the wood oven from flour milled in the Catskills. We make our own butter. We cure our own bacon. We do not do this because it is trendy. We do it because it tastes better and because we can.

We are open Wednesday through Saturday for dinner, and Sunday for brunch. We are closed Monday and Tuesday because the farm needs tending and so do we.