A farm-fresh family-style gathering, North Carolina style
A summertime celebration at Summerfield Farm’s Rascal’s Ridge
If you’re a really serious food person, it’s not the wedding dress, or the playlist, or the photographer you’re going to obsess over. It’s the feast.
There are destination restaurants all over the country luring couples with locavore cuisine, elegant wine pairings, and homemade cheeses. But the Iron Hen Cafe and Catering & Events, in Greensboro, North Carolina, takes things to extremes.
The Iron Hen does receptions all over the Greensboro area–they’ll cater your party in an 85-year-old legitimate theater, a 1780s log home, or under the chandeliers and twinkle lights of a 1940s dairy barn. But for an experience they’re calling plow-to-vow, you’ll head to Summerfield Farms, owned by the Iron Hen’s mother company, the Fresh.Local.Good food group. The property sits on 1,000 acres of rolling Carolina countryside complete with a farm, grazing animals, and a renovated barn, and they can put together pretty much any kind of wedding you like, from biodegradable paper plates at picnic tables to a candlelit dinner featuring grandma’s china and white linens.
The bridal party can prep in the farm’s two cabins, and there’s a lovely assortment of party places—the Back Porch, which can accommodate 150 guests, Rascal’s Ridge, where they’ll set up a long feasting table and illuminate the scene with “weeping willow” lights, and The Barn, originally the hub of the working farm and now a showplace of contemporary design with plenty of room for dancing. You can kick off the whole evening with drinks and a tractor ride—call it a mobile cocktail hour.
As for the food? Forgive us if we salivate over such re-invented regional treats as pimento cheese and bacon on a crostini, crab cakes served with Cajun remoulade, grits and greens, and barbecued pulled pork. Particularly when it’s accompanied by a Firefly Arnold Palmer, spiked with sweet tea-flavored vodka and served in a mason jar.
There are plenty of accommodations in all price ranges next door in Greensboro, but if you’re looking for quirky, the Star Hotel, about 40 miles away, is a pretty adorable inn that will put up your horse for free, should you be traveling with a steed (bring your own bucket and feed). Now that’s what we call genuine hospitality.
