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The fall harvest has arrived, and on Nov. 8, Becky Herbert embraced the season with a farm-to-table dinner at her Farmhouse Cafe showcasing the finest crops of the moment. Working her magic with butternut squash, carrots, kale and potatoes, Herbert created a four-course meal based on some of her customers’ favorite menus.
The event marks Herbert’s recognition as Best Chef in the 2025 Hollister Freelance Best of San Benito poll. It also honors the cafe’s wins in the Best Healthy Eats and Best Vegetarian Restaurant categories.
“We were actually nominated for nine categories,” she said, “and this is our ninth year in business. I was so excited to win a few. I usually have a partner in these dinners, but I decided to prepare this one on my own to celebrate.”
It was also a chance for Herbert to revive her once-annual Fall Harvest dinner, a tradition featuring local produce from Coke Farms and Phil Foster’s ranch, two of her favorite sources of ingredients.
“Between the two,” she said, “there is such a huge variety. They still have the late summer produce, but then they have all the fall items. And they’re starting to get all the root vegetables. So they are easy stop-and-shop places.”
Herbert said she enjoys working with locally harvested fruits and vegetables, which she thinks is one of the things that draws people to her food.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said. “It’s peak season, and the flavors are deeper. The spinach has more texture, and the basil really tastes like basil. And there’s more nutrition in it because it’s just out of the ground.”
Ellen Boyd regularly drives in from Morgan Hill with her husband to attend the dinners and has been a customer of Herbert’s for around 10 years.
She first met Herbert when she was selling produce at the Mountain View Farmers Market, and then, after finding the local choices “unacceptable,” began having customized food boxes delivered through her Community Supported Agriculture program.
“What she had was all organic,” Boyd said, “and there was a beautiful website where you could order what fruits and vegetables you wanted, not like a lot of places that are potluck. And when she started doing meal prep, that was perfect for a healthy lifestyle.”
Herbert designed the Harvest Dinner around some of those meal prep offerings. From a rotating menu of items, customers can order beef, poultry, fish, and vegetarian dishes through the Farmhouse Cafe website on Wednesdays through Fridays. The food is then delivered on Mondays or available for pickup at the cafe.
“We make a lot of pot pies,” Herbert said. “We offer vegetable, chicken or turkey and an Italian beef one that people love. We do seafood chowder and a lot of lasagna bolognese, as well as butternut lasagna, chard and walnut lasagna, all kinds of different ones.”
The most recent offerings included marinated tri-tip with an Italian herb sauce, garlic mashed potatoes and baby broccoli; chicken, artichoke and spinach lasagna; and crab cakes with a lemon aioli accompanied by rice pilaf, carrots and broccoli. The vegetarian option was a tofu taco bowl with potatoes, zucchini and peppers accompanied by a Lebanese bean salad.
Herbert has also decided to incorporate more meal prep offerings into her Farmhouse Cafe menu, as well as offer items in bulk to go, such as her No. 1 seller, chicken salad, and breakfast burritos.
Boyd favors Herbert’s Italian dishes, particularly the lasagnas, while her husband enjoys the classic meatloaf. They have the meals delivered to their front door.
“I really appreciate her,” Boyd said, “and she makes our lives so much easier. If you’re trying to have a healthy lifestyle, that’s the way she cooks. So it kind of takes away the thought process. Just buy it and you’ve got your meal.”
The Farmhouse Cafe Harvest Dinner
The first course was a harvest salad topped with pomegranate seeds, walnuts and an extraordinary crumbled blue cheese from Point Reyes Farmstead . It was bound together with a slightly tart and creamy dressing.
The second course was an elevated comfort food, a hearty autumn vegetable pot pie stew featuring butternut squash, parsnips, carrots, kale and lentils in a cream sauce, topped with a square of puff pastry. Lightly seasoned and earthy, a little pepper added a subtle accent of heat that mingled well with the sage-infused sauce.
The third course offered a choice of lightly breaded chicken or salmon. Both were served with a Tuscan sauce, blending herbs, tomato, cream, Parmesan cheese and lots of chopped sun-dried tomatoes, accompanied by a choice of fingerling potatoes or rice orzo pilaf. The sauce was accented with a few red pepper flakes, which gave it a subtle heat, and the dish, overall, was a masterpiece of flavors and textures.
The final course was an apple butterscotch crumble, with Phil Foster’s apples, oats and butterscotch, topped with vanilla ice cream. I was not expecting how flakey the crumble itself was, and the light overtones of cinnamon added a nice balance to the sweetness from the apples.
The meal was accompanied by two fine wines selected by Mike Kohne of Crave Wine Co., a crisp chardonnay-like 2023 Buxy Montagny Blanc Buissonnier and a 2023 Calera Central Coast Pinot Noir.
Farmhouse Cafe
615-D San Benito St, Hollister
For information about food deliveries or catering, call (831) 265-7247
Hours:
Tuesday through Friday: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Closed Saturday through Monday.
Farmhouse Cafe’s social media pages: Instagram and Facebook pages.
Email recommendations for future Eat, Drink, Savor articles to roberteliason@benitolink.com.
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