When Kyle Doda first heard Betsy Simpson’s name in 2017, he was hoping to hire a summer crew member for his then 3-year-old Brookfield vegetable farm.
A mutual friend suggested Simpson, who had grown up on a nearby Braintree dairy farm. “I was basically desperate for anybody that wanted to farm,” Doda recalled. “If there was a farm kid that wanted to farm, I was like, ‘Great.'”
It gradually became clear that this farm “kid” was destined to be far more than a crew member. But neither Doda nor Simpson expected that, eight years after meeting, they’d be the married cofounders of a seasonal, on-farm restaurant.
For the Farmers’ Hand at 1000 Stone Farm, Simpson — a culinary school graduate who had left professional cooking behind — has happily returned to the kitchen. If it’s unusual to find a farm kid in culinary school, it is similarly rare in Vermont for a formally trained chef to cook regularly for the public using mostly ingredients grown on her own farm. If pressed to choose a job title, Simpson said she’d pick “farmer-chef” rather than “chef-farmer.”
Simpson, now 32, earned a four-year bachelor’s degree from the Culinary Institute of America, studying at both its Hyde Park, N.Y., campus and the school’s then newly hatched farm-to-table program in Napa Valley. After graduation, she stayed in California for two years to help run the school’s St. Helena restaurant farm before returning home to work in agriculture.
While Simpson appreciated all that she learned in culinary school, she never planned to work full time in restaurants. “I didn’t want to get stuck in a kitchen, because I love being outside,” she said.
Doda, now 39, is originally from Virginia and studied sculpture and ceramics in college in northwestern New York. After working at several farms, he decided to try his own market garden business in Vermont. He established 1000 Stone Farm on two acres in 2014, selling vegetables through a small CSA, at farmers markets, and to restaurants and stores.
Simpson and Doda’s first date happened sort of by default, they recalled. It was Valentine’s Day 2018, less than a year after Simpson started working on 1000 Stone’s small farm crew. Both were single, and everyone else they knew was busy celebrating with their sweethearts, so Simpson and Doda headed together to a Northfield pub for trivia night.
That March, while snowshoeing on the farm, they shared their first kiss. By fall, Simpson had moved into Doda’s barn loft living quarters. A few years later, on a rare summer day off in August 2021, they held their wedding on the farm.
Simpson and Doda have cultivated their relationship and the farm business in tandem. Over their years together, they have added a parcel of land with several more hoop houses for year-round vegetable production; planted hundreds of apple trees and other fruits; built a temperature-controlled mushroom facility; and expanded to raise lamb, goats, chickens (for meat and eggs) and a few beef cows.
The couple have become a fixture at the Burlington Farmers Market, where 1000 Stone Farm will mark a decade this summer. They run a four-season CSA with a peak count of 100 summer members; deliver to about 25 wholesale accounts; and have an on-farm store, which also stocks products from other Vermont farms.
They bring complementary strengths and mutual respect to the management of their many-pronged business, the couple said. “When we butt heads,” Doda said, “even if we’re being feisty about it, we still are listening.”
In November, 1000 Stone Farm opened the Farmers’ Hand, a 30-seat restaurant and tasting room that serves casual farm-to-table food and drink on Fridays and Saturdays, 1 to 8 p.m. The bright, high-ceilinged dining area boasts one wall of barnboard, another painted butternut squash-yellow and a third tomato-red. Simpson runs the kitchen with one assistant, while her husband takes orders, delivers food, and pours glasses of his farm-fermented cider and wine (from $6) behind the bar.
After a January break, the couple reopened for February and March. Though they skipped doing winter farmers markets this year to launch the restaurant, they will put the Farmer’s Hand on hiatus in April to focus on getting the summer farming season under way. They expect to reopen it in July, staffing permitting.
Restaurant traffic has been steady so far, Simpson and Doda said, but the Farmer’s Hand has to fit into the complex puzzle of their agricultural business. Opening a restaurant wasn’t what they planned when they embarked on a 3,500-square-foot barn expansion, which they intended to devote to needed vegetable storage and a cidery/winery with apple cooler space.
As project costs climbed, they searched for another revenue stream to help chip away at $500,000 in construction loans, Doda said. But, he added, they didn’t open the Farmer’s Hand just for cash flow.
On the afternoon of February 1, Simpson paused to chat while shuttling pizzas (from $18), marinated oyster mushroom skewers ($13) and roasted cabbage salads ($12) in and out of the wood-fired oven. She said it’s fun to be back in the kitchen and to welcome people to 1000 Stone Farm “rather than us always leaving the farm to bring food elsewhere.”
“It’s farm to table, but it’s also a table at the farm.” Betsy Simpson
Her husband noted that Farmer’s Hand diners savor food and drink within perhaps 200 yards of where the chicken on their plate was raised, in the same building where pearly oyster mushrooms sprout before being strewn over pizza. The restaurant also gives the couple a new way to connect with their customers.
“We’ve been feeding people in one way for so long,” Doda said. “To try to do it in this other way that utilizes these other skills we have — especially for Betsy, it’s really great.”
Doda has found it rewarding to witness his wife flexing her professional culinary muscles. “It’s really fun to see her get excited about it,” he said. “I feel like, in some ways, this project was kind of a gift to her — and to us.”
As the restaurant’s name promises, Simpson and Doda have a literal hand in almost every step of every dish preparation and in many of the glasses poured.
Doda is a cider nerd whose eyes light up when he discusses apple blends and aging methods. He started selling his dry and off-dry hard ciders by the keg to a handful of restaurants and bars in 2023, making them with classic cider and heirloom apples such as Dabinett, Kingston Black and Ashmead’s Kernel, as well as some wild apples. I particularly enjoyed the depth and tartly jammy blackberry back notes of his copper-hued Vol. 3 barrel-aged cider, fermented from the juice of Porter’s Perfection, Ashmead’s Kernel and Empire.
Almost every ingredient in the restaurant’s kitchen can be mapped back to the farm. For the tender, bronze-skinned chicken drumsticks with slaw ($16), the couple raise the chickens, cultivate the cabbage and deploy dried farm peppers in the dry rub. For the deeply satisfying goat panuozzo “pizza sandwich” with side salad ($22), they husband a small herd of goats, braise the meat with farm-grown aromatics, and layer the soft, rich hunks with their own spinach, caramelized onions and an aioli flavored with farm garlic.
A silken, bittersweet chocolate pot de crème ($9) stars farm-fresh eggs. The moist, dense carrot cake ($9), with fluffy maple-cream cheese frosting, sends storage carrots to new heights.
Among the few ingredients that Doda and Simpson do not grow is the main one in the cake and the sandwich’s chewy, fire-kissed pizza dough roll: flour from Nitty Gritty Grain in Charlotte. Doda makes the weekly batches of pizza dough, which develop a subtle tang over a multiday cold ferment. Another notable exception is dairy, which the couple sources from other Vermont farmers and cheesemakers.
On the blustery afternoon when I visited, a table of two couples from Randolph had definitely received — and enjoyed — the farm-to-table memo.
Katie Rogstad, 35, said she likes to support local and was intrigued by the housemade cider. “Being on a working farm is cool,” she said.
The group rattled off a list of dishes they had tried and found “fantastic”: the kale Caesar ($12), mushroom “crab” cakes ($15), vegetable soup ($12), wood-fired chicken drumsticks and goat panuozzo sandwich.
“The vegetables and meat are all grown here,” marveled Darryl Booth, 59.
“It’s the middle of winter, but everything felt so fresh,” said his partner, Lindsay Meyer, 42.
The table had not ordered pizza, but “we’re having a little bit of FOMO,” Rogstad admitted after seeing golden-crusted pies topped with mushrooms, roasted vegetables, or lamb with mint gremolata and feta pass them by.
“We’ll be back soon,” said her husband, David Narkewicz, 36.
Simpson and Doda plan to keep serving diners just two days a week. They have huge respect for the chefs to whom they sell ingredients, they said, and no aspirations to become full-time restaurateurs. With the Farmer’s Hand, they aim for something different, Simpson said: “It’s farm to table, but it’s also a table at the farm.”
The seventh anniversary of Simpson and Doda’s first Valentine’s Day date falls on Friday this year, and the Farmers’ Hand already has a number of holiday reservations. After service winds down at 8 p.m., Doda said, the couple should still have time to sit down to a late meal together, maybe with a candle.
“Why not?” he said with a smile. “We have a private restaurant.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Hands On | At the Farmers’ Hand, the couple behind Brookfield’s 1000 Stone Farm bring the farm to the table”
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!