A Morning at Harrow Gap

Harrow Gap Orchards sits at 2,600 feet in a fold of the mountains east of Fairview, and at eight in the morning in June it might be the best-smelling place in North Carolina. Nina and Gus Harrow have farmed it for nineteen years: heirloom apples on the high rows, sour cherries and plums below, and a long hedge of blackberries they claim was a mistake that got out of hand.

The sour cherries are why we drove up. They ripen over about three weeks in late June, and for those three weeks our buttermilk chess pie carries them barely cooked, just warmed with a little of their own juice until they let go. Nina picks for us on Mondays and Thursdays; the fruit is in the pie the same afternoon. That timing is the whole recipe. A sour cherry at day three is a different, sadder fruit.

Gus walked us through the high rows to talk apples for the fall. The stack cake apples are a variety his grandfather grafted, small and dense and sharp, nothing you would eat off the hand, everything you want cooked down with sorghum between nine thin layers. He thinks the crop is two weeks ahead of last year. Willa has opinions about what that does to her October.

In August we will set one long table between the apple rows and cook dinner up there as the sun drops behind the ridge, the way we did last summer. Four courses over fire, the Harrows at the head of the table, and their own cider poured first. Details are on the events page, and the seats will go quickly, because last year they did.

Farms like Harrow Gap are the quiet half of this restaurant. The menu says our name on it, but a lot of nights it is really theirs.

The kitchen, with the Harrows