Cloudland Farm: A True Farm-to-Table Feast in the Pomfret Hills

The dinner starts before you ever sit down. The drive up Cloudland Road — four miles of winding gravel climbing through the pastoral hills of Pomfret, with the Green Mountains unfolding in every direction — is so spectacular that the farm's own website counts it as part of the experience. And then you arrive at Cloudland Farm Restaurant, and it gets better: black Angus cattle and calves in the pastures, laying hens and turkeys pecking around the barns, and a dining room where nearly everything on your plate was raised or grown within sight of your table.

Cloudland Farm is a diversified working farm that has been in the Emmons family since 1908 — more than a century of the same family working the same hillsides. Today Bill and Cathy Emmons run an operation that raises black Angus cattle, laying hens, Cornish-cross meat chickens, turkeys, and pastured pigs, alongside vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Every animal is raised without hormones, antibiotics, or animal by-products, a philosophy the farm held long before it was fashionable.

The on-farm restaurant is the heart of it. Dinner is served on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, by reservation only, and Chef Mike Borraccio builds a fixed multi-course menu each week from the most local and seasonal ingredients available — Cloudland beef, pork, or chicken at the center, produce from the farm's own fields, everything made from scratch. The menu changes daily and is posted on the farm's website each Tuesday, so regulars plan their visits around what sounds best. Book early: the farm notes that it is often fully booked four to six weeks out, depending on the season.

The room itself is part of the draw. In summer, guests dine on the porch as the light fades over the pastures, swallows swooping overhead; in winter, the fireplace takes over and the whole experience turns deeply cozy, the kind of evening where nobody is in a hurry to leave the table. The restaurant is BYOB, which keeps the evening relaxed and affordable despite the white-tablecloth quality of the cooking. It is the rare special-occasion dinner that feels like being invited to the farm itself rather than served at a restaurant that happens to be on one — jackets are optional, appetites are not.

Lunch, in a sense, is available too — at the Cloudland Farm Market. The market sells the farm's natural Angus beef (steaks, roasts, stew beef, ground beef, sausages, jerky), pastured pork, and pickles, plus local maple syrup, Vermont cheeses and teas, handmade goat's milk soaps, and Laura White pottery. It is open Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. and to dinner guests on the evenings the restaurant is open — the place to take Cloudland home with you.

One of the farm's most charming details is that the Appalachian Trail runs right through the property. Hikers pass through on their long march from Georgia to Maine, and while the farm can't offer formal tours — the farming schedule is too busy — visitors are welcome to photograph the farmland and animals visible from Cloudland Road as they drive through. The working farm is the attraction; the Emmons family just asks that you enjoy it from the road.

Timing your visit is worth some thought. Summer brings the porch, the long light, and the full glory of the gardens and pastures — the Cloudland of postcards. But winter might be the sleeper pick: the fireplace, the hearty cold-weather menu built around the farm's own beef and pork, and the four-mile drive up Cloudland Road transformed into a snow-globe corridor. Either way, the farm market's rhythm stays the same — Friday and Saturday afternoons, plus dinner evenings — so plan your shopping around your meal.

The farm's address is 1101 Cloudland Road, Woodstock, VT 05091, though the land sits in the hills of Pomfret, a few minutes' drive from Woodstock village. That location is ideal: it pairs naturally with a day exploring Woodstock's shops, Billings Farm & Museum, or the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, and it's a short drive from Saskadena Six, the local ski area, making it a perfect après-ski splurge in winter. Call (802) 457-2599 — reservations are required, and the confirmation text you receive the night before matters, so reply to it.

A word on expectations: Cloudland is not a theme park version of a farm. It is a real, working, muddy-boots operation where dinner depends on what the fields and pastures produced — which means the menu you dream about online may not be the menu you eat, and that's precisely the point. In an era when "farm-to-table" is printed on menus in cities a thousand miles from any farm, Cloudland Farm is the thing itself: a century-old family farm that happens to serve one of the most memorable dinners in the Upper Valley.

If dinner doesn't fit your schedule, the farm still rewards a visit. The market's take-home beef and pork, the maple syrup, the cheeses and teas, the handmade soaps — these are the souvenirs that actually get used. Stop at the Woodstock farmers' market on the Green on a Wednesday afternoon in summer and you may find the Emmons family selling there too, a reminder that this farm feeds its community seven days a week, not just on dinner nights. Make the reservation. Drive the four miles slowly. Eat what's in season. And on the way down, stop at the market for steaks and maple syrup — your future self, grilling at home in February, will thank you.