Milk and Honey is such an apt name for the café that Swallowtail Farm and Creamery opened in their space at 84 Cove St. in Easy Bayside. The building and space is also where the winter farmer’s market takes place when it resumes later this fall. The neighborhood, in fact, is growing slowly beyond its gritty industrial past. Tandem Coffee is up the block; distilleries are around the corner on Anderson Street; Youngs Furniture has opened an outpost nearby selling hipster furniture, ditching the Baby Boomer drab of yore and opening soon is 87 Anderson St., the rental building built by Redfern Properties who is quickly becoming the pied piper to house Portland’s growing roster of hipster millennials.
Milk and Honey Cafe
Shoppers who are there for the farmer’s market will walk through the café’s space before entering the rear and side rooms where vendors will set up shop. But for now and throughout the year it’s the farm café that is so intriguing, an enterprise that epitomizes the delights of locally sourced home-style farm cooking.
Lauren Pignatello, who with her husband Sean own the farm, is a terrific home cook, making dishes of unapologetic rusticity, which you’d expect to come out of a steamy farm kitchen. She has, for instance, one of the largest cast iron skillets I’ve seen, often the vessel where pies, cakes, breads or stews may find themselves gurgling away into sublime farm-to-table fare.
The refrigerator and freezer are filled with her dairy products such as the farm’s rich and creamy yogurts, cheeses, butters, Jersey milk and real buttermilk, the whole-milk version separated from cream churned into butter. And plenty of put-up stuff is on shelves where various summer fruits are in Mason jars as well as her herbal mixtures that are part of Pignatello’s apothecary line.
Brunch menu, dairy case and cakes and pastries
I went there for lunch recently and had a sandwich (made, of course on her home-baked bread) that was so delicious but huge I could only eat half of it; the reminder was perfect as a snack later in the day.
Reuben style sandwich on homemade sour-dough bread with zucchini salad and dill pickle
It was her take on a Reuben done in the manner of a Monte Cristo, with corned beef, beet pesto (out of this world delicious), with ricotta salata–all of which is layered onto the farm’s whole-wheat bread and put on a panini press until everything melts into incredible flavors. Served with a zucchini saladslaw and ice tea, it was a lunch of perfection.
It’s open daily from 8 AM to 6PM. Call ahead and ask Lauren to whip up something special to take home such as cakes and pies or a delicious farm-house dinner.
Milk and Honey of Swallowtail Farm, 84 Cove St., Portland, ME 207-837-3601 www.swallowtailfarmandcreamery.com
