The 70% Solution

Don't call it a comeback. Actually, it is. Tod Murphy, of Farmers Diner fame, is opening Farmers Diner 2.0 this August. Latest details are in yesterday's Valley News, which does not have this article on line, but the gist is in this earlier story. Farmers Diner, as you may recall, garnered a lot of buzz in its initial iteration as a diner in downtown Barre, VT, that served all local produce. (They were pretty serious about their 70-mile radius--I know that they opted not to work with an upstate NY vendor on food-mile grounds.) Last summer, they closed. Now, rather than a diner in a town best known for a quarry, Farmers Diner is a 125 seat venue with a liquor license at an Quechee Gorge Village, an "Antique Mall" on a busy tourist strip, and the all-local requirement has been scaled back to 70% of every food dollar. I wish this venture well. If the leaf-peepers learn something about local and sustainable between rounds of mini-golf and visits to the Antique Mall, good. It would be churlish of me to recall that when I was small, the site of Quechee Gorge Village was an, um, cornfield.