The Green House Restaurant of Wilmington brings their feast to where it’s grown, on the farm.
In early October, inside a greenhouse on Red Beard Farms, restaurant staff from the Green House restaurant set up three rows of long tables and were topping them with bright white tablecloths and a thin loose-weave burlap runner scattered with shiny green leaves. At each of the 80 settings was a large white plate topped by a printed menu, on top of that a smaller plate, then a soup bowl.
Outside under the roof of an open-air shelter, which would have looked much more normal if a truck were parked there, Chef Mauricio Huarcaya and his kitchen staff were stirring a large pot of butternut squash soup. They formed a line and walked to the greenhouse, where Huarcaya ladled soup into the bowls, the next cook dropped a spoonful of crispy shallots in the center, the next placed leaves of cilantro on top using a tweezer and the last drizzled a circle of coconut cream. The guests, who had bought tickets ahead of time, sat down.
Huarcaya introduced himself to the crowd and rushed back to the outdoor kitchen.
Before the dinner, Huarcaya spoke with Morgan Milne, owner of the Willard-based farm (and the red beard,) about the menu, what would be in season and plentiful enough to feed all the guests. For Milne, the dinner was a great opportunity to give those guests a tour and show them where on the farm the vegetables, that would later show up on their plates, were grown.
Wilmington is bursting with butternut squash in October, so butternut squash soup recipe was a natural first course. For the next dish, Milne supplied farm-raised shiitake mushrooms, which were turned into a conserva served on grilled focaccia with sunflower cream cheese, pea shoots and jam made from the farm’s bumper crop of small, bright-orange ají dulce peppers.
Freshly dug radishes and muscadine grapes added crunch and sweetness to the salad; bunches of fresh basil went into a tangy, intensely flavored sorbet. Sweet potatoes were caramelized and sweetened with sorghum, a grain. Hoppin’ John included fried Red Beard okra and scallions. For dessert, Huarcaya made a pumpkin trifle.
Huarcaya is not vegan; the Green House is the first place where he had to create a vegan menu. “It’s definitely a challenge,” he says. “Our average customer is not vegan, so I want to cook to showcase the product and not scare guests away with flavors they don’t know.”
Like most vegan chefs he uses aquafaba, the water left after cooking chickpeas, to make food that would usually require an egg or some dairy, like his ranch dressing, which was on the salad.
Milne and Huarcaya said the dinner brought new faces to the farm and the restaurant, because diners wanted an experience.
“The staff had fun,” said Huarcaya. “I had the most fun. And I think the guests got to see all the different people involved to create one dish.”
This story originally appeared in the Winter 2023 issue.
