These attorneys now advocate tasting plates

February 25, 2009|Lisa Zwirn, Globe Correspondent

EASTFORD, Conn. - Little in the way of dining or lodging exists in this quiet northeastern corner of the state. "The virtue of our setting is also its curse," says Robert Brooks, who with his wife, Kara, owns Still River Cafe and the surrounding wooded acres that abut the Yale Forest and winding Still River.

Just over an hour's drive from Boston (the last six miles are meandering roads, which roll up and down past farms and forest), Still River has comfy, upholstered chairs and a mostly white, calming, and uncluttered dining room. If the sun hasn't set, you'll have a lovely view of the vegetable gardens out the large picture windows. Restored chestnut roof beams and rafters are what remain of this renovated 150-year-old barn. But it's the food that is the ultimate reward for your travel. Dinner is the culmination of the couple's combined efforts - she is the chef and he the gardener - so she gets to cook what he grows.

There are other chef and gardener partners (one is Cambridge's Oleana chef Ana Sortun and her farmer husband, Chris Kurth), but few had other careers as trial lawyers. Robert, 55, practiced law in Hartford for 25 years; Kara, 39, for seven. When the couple, who live in an 18th-century home on the property, opened Still River two years ago, says Kara, "We were really marrying our two passions of cooking and gardening." Their plans took root during a vacation in St. Barths, when the couple decided to research the island's foods and turned their findings into a book, "Paradise Found: The People, Restaurants and Recipes of St. Barthelemy." What they learned about the inner workings of restaurants was invaluable, they say.

Kara spent the next two years learning how to cook professionally (which included a half-dozen stints in Dan Barber's kitchen at the highly regarded Blue Hill at Stone Barns), while Robert, mostly with the help of two sons, Robert Jr., 28, and Peter, 22, rebuilt the dilapidated barn. He also expanded the existing gardens, producing everything organically, and trucked his vegetables three times a week to local farmers' markets. "I had to prove I could grow on a commercial scale," he says. Today, Robert grows most of the restaurant's produce.

As if these challenges weren't enough, tiny Eastford was one of two remaining dry towns in the state. After the largest voter turnout in the town's history, says Robert, Still River finally got its wine and beer license in December 2005.