My tires crunched early-season snow last December as I watched darkness close in on denuded apple trees and rolling hills. I was searching for Cloudland Farm, Pomfret’s only restaurant, excited to taste what the farm-focused kitchen would be serving when vines had shriveled and fields were tucked away for the winter. After about four miles of ascending dirt road, a butter-yellow post-and-beam building glimmered out of the night.
Inside, the ceiling soared above my seat next to the cozy brick hearth. I was slathering warm bread with butter and sipping maple-sap soda when a bowl of root vegetable soup landed on the table. Tinted dusky rose by beets but mostly made with Gilfeather turnips, the silky potage was garnished with toasted pepitas, frizzled leeks and a swirl of green herb oil. As with most dishes at Cloudland, nearly every component was grown on the property.
Next came agnolotti, served with cream sauce and cubes of winter squash and garnished with parsley flakes. The dish was an add-on to the three-course prix-fixe menu ($70) and worth getting: Pasta is a particular specialty of Cloudland’s chef, Mike Borraccio, 34. Born in Michigan, he grew up in an Italian restaurant family. A beloved family photo shows baby Borraccio lying on a stainless-steel prep table while his relatives roll pasta around him.
Cloudland Farm sits on 1,000 acres a world away from metro Detroit, in a spot known for its spectacular foliage. The Emmons family has operated the farm since 1908. Vermont has an abundance of restaurants that have kitchen gardens or work closely with farmers on sourcing and a few eateries that are intertwined with working agricultural operations, many of which are nonprofits. But Cloudland is something surprising: a well-oiled, for-profit meat-and-produce operation with a restaurant led by a chef seasoned at big-city eateries. The restaurant is BYOB, so its earnings are from the food alone and not from alcohol.
The model is unusual in other ways, too. Cloudland, which often books up six weeks in advance and serves between 60 and 70 people an evening, is open Thursday through Saturday in summer and fall and just Friday and Saturday in winter and spring. Having fewer services allows Cathy Emmons, 56, to manage the farm, preserve food for her own family and run the restaurant’s day-to-day operations. When they’re short a server, she fills that role, too. Her job, Borraccio noted, often takes her from 4 a.m. until sunset or beyond.
For him, the schedule allows time to relax and renew the creativity required to dream up new fare. Borraccio strives to avoid making the same dish twice and says that, in more than five years, he’s rarely done so. Even from one day to the next, items can differ dramatically. On August 21 of this year, the appetizer was a chilled summer squash soup with garden relish and herb oil. The next evening, it was grilled corned beef, made with meat from cattle raised on the farm, accompanied by chimichurri and pickles. At this point, Cloudland’s archive of prix-fixe menus has more than 600 entries, each a snapshot of a single day.
Borraccio also has the freedom to work on special projects. When he’s not too busy, he operates what he refers to as “Italian-ish” pop-ups called FiumeRapido after his ancestral homeland in Italy. These have most often been held at Wolf Tree in White River Junction, a 2025 James Beard Award finalist for Outstanding Bar.
Many of Cloudland’s faithful customers now seek out Borraccio’s cooking wherever it might land. The list of fans includes Mitchell Davis, a food journalist and consultant who previously lived in New York City and worked for the James Beard Foundation for 27 years. Now residing just across the New Hampshire border, Davis has sampled Borraccio’s food at several pop-ups and at the farm.
“When we moved to the Upper Valley, I was looking for the best restaurant experiences I could find, and I was a little disillusioned,” he recalled. “A lot of people told me I should go to Cloudland.”
There, he found Borraccio preparing items from the farm and garden with discipline and skill. Served a portion of chicken wings with “almost nothing on them,” Davis recalled his surprise and pleasure that the chef allowed the ingredient to speak for itself. “Everything we had that night was delicious and seemed more sophisticated than some of the other stuff I’ve seen” in the region, he said. “Some people would see the simplicity or restraint as a negative, but I see it as a positive, because it shows he can cook.”
Under the care of his family and their extended Italian friend group, Borraccio grew up eating plenty of Italian American comfort food and the Midwestern casseroles favored by his stepmother, as well as regional Italian specialties such as tripe and rabbit. A lack of snobbery combined with a use-it-all ethos gives his cooking breadth and depth.
One pop-up menu, from late April, began with potato chips and caramelized onion dip and also featured gnocchi with pork sausage, pecorino, browned butter and garlic. Borraccio prepares steaks, offal and oxtail with equal aplomb. “Chicken livers, chicken hearts … People go crazy for it,” he said.
In 2021, when Emmons was interviewing folks for the head chef position at Cloudland, she intended to hire a local rooted in the community. “We were looking for someone who wanted to be a long-term part of Cloudland. We are basically a family,” she said of the restaurant staff. When all of her Vermont interviews fell through for different reasons, she reluctantly posted on a national job board, and Borraccio, who was then in Arizona on a road trip, applied.
“My friend, who’s an ex-FBI agent, was like, ‘Well, Cathy, did you check his socials?’” When she did, Emmons loved what she saw. Beyond pictures of food and “restaurant stuff,” she said, she noted that “the people around him were always smiling. They looked happy.” The interview went so well that she offered him the job on the spot. A few days later, when he accepted, she “literally jumped for joy,” she recalled.
On the night of my December visit, Emmons was waiting tables and came by to drop off my entrée. On a large white plate, slices of medium-rare rib eye were arranged atop halved purple potatoes and Roma beans, sauced with black-garlic beef jus and topped with fried cabbage leaves. The plate was pretty without being fussy and showed off the range of the farm’s preserved and stored ingredients.
According to Borraccio’s records, 72 percent of the food served at the restaurant is from the farm, and an additional 20 percent comes from a pair of farms nearby. True to his heritage, he explained, the last 8 percent is “oil and lemons.”
After 15 years of operating a restaurant, and more than five with Borraccio on board, Emmons has dialed in how much produce to grow to supply the needs of her family, the restaurant and the farm store, which is located in the restaurant building. Emmons and her husband, Bill, didn’t set out to open an eatery, she explained. But after adding a kitchen in order to produce valued-added items such as jerky and beef stew from their meat, using some of the same equipment to operate a restaurant seemed like a way to keep the farm viable through the seasons and the years. So far, she said, it’s working.
Kristen Ashley, who lives in Hartland, has been friends with the Emmons family for years. She and her husband discovered Cloudland when they were searching for exceptional beef to buy and have been regular visitors to the restaurant since its inception. These days, they make sure to stop by monthly.
“All of the chefs have been wonderful and a little different,” Ashley said, “and Mike is really special. His level of creativity and sophistication is amazing, and when you overlay that with the fact that everything’s grown on the farm, it’s really impressive.”
My December night last year ended with a browned butter tart topped with Cloudland currants, whipped skyr and a drizzle of honey. Now that winter is approaching again, Borraccio is preparing for a season of cooking with storage crops, items he’s stashed away in the freezer and the meat that stays available year-round. The goods might show up on the menu as a rainbow root-vegetable terrine, savory bread pudding, cabbage cooked in beef tallow or Gilfeather turnip fritters.
“It’s very cyclical,” he explained. “You get comfortable with the broad strokes, and after a year, it’s fun to go back [and revisit ingredients]. I do kale salads two or three nights a year, and two or three nights is plenty.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Chef’s Special | At Cloudland Farm, Pomfret’s only restaurant, Mike Borraccio takes farm-to-table dining to new heights”
This article appears in September 30 • 2026.
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