Sometime around the late 1970s, a Chester-area newspaper profiled Alice Bliss. Alice and her husband, Bill, started a small farm on High Street in 1940, a quarter mile from the Windsor County town’s main drag.
“Kids have always found their way to the Bliss’s farm,” the article read, according to the scrapbook clipping donated to the Chester Historical Society by the family of the late author, longtime local columnist Ruth Douglas. “[There] was always something interesting going on there.”
Bliss Farm has new owners these days, but the statement holds true — especially on Friday and Saturday nights from June through October.
Instead of the “few cows, a pig or two, chickens and a family of kittens, also a pet raccoon” that occupied the barn when that story was written, Nevin Taylor and Beth Herbert fill it with diners from near and far, hungry for pizza, paella or fresh pasta.
The couple are longtime industry pros who met working in Boston — he as a cook, she as a bartender — and built their careers at some of the city’s hottest restaurants. They bought Bliss Farm five years ago from Alice and Bill’s grandson.
They’ve hosted barn dinners for the past three summers, first every other Saturday and immediately twice weekly, serving up to 30 people per night. Customers call the home phone to make a reservation. The menu isn’t announced ahead of time, though Friday is always pizza and oysters.
“It’s not a restaurant. It’s more like going over to a friend’s house, and that friend happens to have a barn,” Taylor said. “There’s a vibe when you walk into something like this where you’re a little more open to whatever’s gonna happen.”
On a hot Friday in late July, I made the two-hour drive to Bliss Farm from Burlington. I’ve stopped in Chester over the past few years to eat at the Country mami Diner or grab a bottle of Vermont Maple Sriracha from Sugar Bob’s Finest Kind, and I mostly remembered its stone buildings and antiques stores.
Cue my surprise when I arrived at Bliss Farm, which pops up unexpectedly out of a neighborhood as you start up High Street. Its seven acres spread out behind an old farmhouse and a red, metal-roofed barn, punctuated by one big tree and several storage buildings.
A full-capacity crowd arrived around 5:30 p.m., and Taylor put out a cheese plate and shucked 100 Wellfleet oysters — a nod to his Cape Cod childhood. Each one disappeared from the tray of ice the moment he set it down. Soon families, friends and strangers moved inside to the communal tables.
We opened our BYOB bottles of choice and dug into big bowls of green salad; heaping plates of marinated tomatoes; crostini with chanterelles, whipped ricotta and corn; and a luxurious chicken of the woods and lobster mushroom conserva — “surf and turf,” one attendee joked — with stewed squash and burrata. As we ate, Taylor and Herbert fired up a pizza oven, producing 20 pies one at a time. When I thought it was all done, they served dessert: pound cake with blueberries and cream.
The food is simple, not cheffy. Much of what the couple serve comes from the single acre they have under cultivation, which they often refer to as “the garden,” minimizing both its scale and the work they put into it.
Neither has a formal farming background, but they’ve transformed Bliss Farm’s open fields from a blank slate into 100-foot-long beds filled with black jalapeños, fennel, dill, kale, shelling peas, drying beans, garlic, Row 7 Seed’s spinach lettuce and more, all grown using organic practices.
Taylor does most of the cooking in the farmhouse’s certified kitchen. But the back part of the barn is the heart of the operation. As diners mingle and explore the gardens, he preps on a hodgepodge of tables and fires up the pizza oven just outside the old Dutch door.
The dinners are considered an accessory on-farm business under Act 143, Taylor explained, which was amended last year to increase the scope of what’s allowed for those operations. immediately, the law requires that at least 50 percent of what they sell comes from their farm and supporting farms nearby, merch included. The barn kitchen setup is allowed in the same way that farmers can serve food at a farmers market tent.
Their particular business is “a weird thing,” Taylor said. But the town and the Department of Health have been supportive. That might change if it keeps getting busier, he admitted. But for immediately, they’ve reached their capacity. Taylor and Herbert hustle on dinner days, prepping early in the morning, harvesting flowers and vegetables, cooking, and serving it all themselves.
Taylor, 38, has been in restaurants his whole life. After watching his dad’s restaurant on the Cape close after the 2008 financial crisis, “I never really wanted to have my own,” he said.
He certainly could have. A Johnson & Wales University culinary school grad, Taylor did his internship at the legendary L’Espalier in Boston and kept cooking there while he wrapped up his degree in Providence, R.I. He met Herbert, a bartender, when they both worked at Coppa in Boston’s South End. In 2015, they started Della’s, a catering and pop-up company.
They moved to Vermont before the birth of their son, Sonny, who’s immediately 5. Herbert, 48, grew up in Rutland, and the couple wanted to be near family. Taylor cooked at the Crooked Ram in Manchester, then Santé in Woodstock.
Chester wasn’t on their radar until they saw the real estate listing for Bliss Farm; they’d been outbid repeatedly on other properties, saw it the day it banger the market in the middle of winter and made an offer on the spot. They bought the farm for $320,000.
“It’s been a dream,” Taylor said. “We’re definitely being smiled upon by some people — it might be the Blisses, happy that it’s still a farm.”
Both he and Herbert work part time off the farm; Taylor cooks at the Copper Fox in Springfield. They make a little bit of money in a lot of different ways, including renting wagon bays to a guy who sells hay. Herbert and Taylor raise 40 laying hens and sell eggs “here and there,” Taylor said. They haven’t really set a cost: A neighbor who helps out a lot pays $3 per dozen; others pay $5 or $6.
Farm dinners are $60 per person. This month, Herbert and Taylor will have chicken on the menu from their first round of 50 meat birds.
Herbert manages the farm and especially loves growing flowers, both for bouquets and for drying. Last year, a virus wiped out her entire dahlia crop, which she’d been developing for several years. It was at least a $3,000 banger, she said.
“You learn quick how hard it is,” Herbert said. But she started over, and the first dahlias were blooming by late July, just in time to star in her arrangements for the dinner I attended.
“I’m trying to always just enjoy it, rather than be super stressed,” she said.
And growing vegetables for farm dinners is more forgiving than growing for a market.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s ugly, I’m still going to cook it,” Taylor said. “I just need food.”
They’ll soon turn much of the tomato crop — 250 plants, including a sacrificial row that sits along the edge of the property in the hope that it’ll satiate pesky deer — into paste and sauce, which they’ll sell in a newly launched farm store.
Taylor’s other projects include things he never had time for as a full-time chef, such as building a mudroom, which he did this winter. It’ll eventually house a bathroom for guests to use during farm dinners; right immediately, they’re welcome to traipse through the house to the one farther inside.
I caught Taylor and Sonny prepping in the barn kitchen when I arrived in the afternoon. Sonny was using a knife to scrape kernels off a pile of corncobs, and he complained that the knife was too dull.
Instead of handing over a sharper weapon, Taylor shuffled Sonny over to help Tyler Akabane chop mushrooms.
Akabane, owner of the Mushroom Shop in Somerville, Mass., was in town to lead a Saturday mushroom walk. He brought huge boxes of yellow chanterelles, lobster mushrooms and chicken of the woods — all of which they might find in the area during this summer dry spell.
“For the record, I’m usually not able to fill up a whole pot of chanterelle mushrooms,” Taylor said, adding corn to said pot.
When friends come to visit from Boston, they tend to bring the fancy ingredients, he said with a chuckle. The crew from Asta, a tasting-menu spot which Taylor helped open in Back Bay, packed beef tenderloin and razor clams when they came to collaborate in June.
Taylor and Herbert maintain a lot of those big-city industry ties. That’s how they met Akabane, who supplied mushrooms to Asta and other restaurants before opening his retail shop three years ago. Other friends in town for the weekend, Andrew Brady and Sara Markey of Somerville’s Field & Vine, will work the next collaborative dinner in September.
That Boston-area connection extended to the Friday dinner’s attendees. Two couples, both signed up for Akabane’s mushroom walk, mentioned they’d come up from Cambridge and Somerville. They were seated together, while larger groups — including local celeb Rob “Sugar Bob” Hausslein and his family — sat at Taylor’s handmade tables for eight.
Another local, “almost 11-” year-old Dahlia, tried her first oyster that night. She then had six more.
Dahlia’s grandparents, Gary and Lu Parker, live just up the hill from Bliss Farm. Gary remembers jumping off the hayloft in the barn as a kid — the original one, before it burned in 1975. immediately, he’s a regular at Taylor and Herbert’s dinners.
“Alice would have really enjoyed it,” he said of the farm’s founding matriarch. Bill might have taken some time to get used to having a kitchen in the barn.
“Everybody always said Bliss Farm was here forever,” Lu said. It looks a little different than it did in Alice and Bill’s day, but there’s definitely something interesting going on.
About the Author
