We trust that this letter finds you well. Some brief news for this coming month.
The Centro store relaunch.
During the first week of November, we will finish the remodel of our store in The Opal Mine at Hernández Macias #99.
We like to invite you to a relaunch party on Monday, November 11 from 5 pm to 8 pm. If you are planning to attend, please RSVP through the following mail link so we may plan accordingly.
Our Road
As many have experienced our three-mile dirt road from the highway to our farm can be rather bumpy due to the ruts caused during the rainy season. Each year when the rains end the road is regraded. That process is now completed and one can traverse at reasonable comfort and speed. None the less we always are pleased to pick up and drop off people by the Liverpool department store for no additional cost.
The Artisan Kitchen
“You are not a regular restaurant!” A comment made by many visitors to FLS.
Most restaurant specialize on one type of cuisine such as Italian, French, Indian, Japanese, Mediterranean, Mideastern and on and on.
We? Well, we like to mix it up. Over the twenty-five years we have challenged our staff to take on cooking adventures and they always rise to the occasion. Just as we began writing this note, Victor having seen a large bucket of just picked butternut squash turned to Rosa and asked her to make some tempura for us and the rest of the staff. Moments later she delivered a plate of the tempura accompanied by a homemade spicy aioli.
This all began when we purchased our home in SMA. Victor asked his sister for recipes of their mom’s Puerto Rican cooking. In reality, there were no written recipes. His sister, Mini, learned to cook like many have, from her mother. The written recipes were composed and delivered to Maria and her children and wala!!... mofongo, malanga, pasteles, alcapurrias, arroz con pollo and arroz con gandules were being made whenever Victor visited FLS. He even managed to get gandules (pigeon peas) seeds and get our staff to grow gandules in our farm!
Our staff has acquired the skills to cook cuisine from around the world. That is the first thing that makes our farm restaurant different. Add to that Victor’s gandules experiment which has expanded into a plethora of fruits and vegetables many of which are not grown commercially in our neck of the woods. In addition to gandules and olives we now enjoy papayas, guava, loquat, prickly chayote, Florida avocados (the staff nurtured the tree for ten years), along with pomegranate, apples, peaches, pears, quince, many types of citruses as well as many vegetables. We even have blackberry, mulberry and Surinam cherry! This wide varieties of fruits and vegetables is our second advantage which is emphasizing farm to table as often as possible
The third thing that makes our restaurant different is that we do not accept walk in traffic. Visitors need a reservation. We require this because we do not have a dedicated restaurant staff waiting for people to come. We and our people are primarily farmers. If a reservation is made for lunch by two people or twenty the appropriate staff stops farming to tend to the visitors. This allows us not to have redundant staff and operate efficiently.
So, what happens when you put a crazy Puerto Rican to develop a restaurant menu or an event menu with a willing and capable Mexican staff? You get a menu that may have Thai, Italian, French Japanese, Mediterranean and many international cuisines on the same menu! Guess what? We recently were crazy enough to offer a global cuisine menu with multiple international dishes and found out that our customers truly enjoyed it. This last point is a clear differentiator for us. We can deliver multiple cuisines in the same menu and change whenever needed.
This month, all of these learnings are being applied to our menu as well as to two events.
“Not a Restaurant” Restaurant
At times, when people visit our restaurant, they are surprised that they are the only two people here. They do wonder if we are a viable business. Rest assured our place will be around for a long time and we entertain approximately 25oo visitors a year and growing. We are not a regular restaurant, indeed! We offer a culinary experience with diversity in food, farm to table (specially with our olive oil) and we are opening our entire farm for your dining pleasure, so if you want to enjoy your meal under a tree or one our terraces we are prepared to please. Here is our current menu.
Harvest Fest Thursday November 7
Creatively utilizing what we grow lies at the root of this menu which we have put together for this year’s fall harvest.
Thanksgiving November 28
We are spicing up our Thanksgiving offering by complementing our traditional menu with additional international dishes for a whole different celebration. We also encourage, attendees to come, early, stay late. For those who love to have thanksgiving leftovers, we are selling a take home meal!
Best regards,
Susan and Victor
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