Take a walk around Island Lake, Mono Cliffs, or the Bruce Trail to work up an appetite. Then visit restaurants like the Bluebird Cafe, the Taphouse, and farm fresh roadside markets like Lennox Farm.
Our team enjoyed making this film for the Dufferin Board of Trade, promoting Dufferin County as a special place to Live and Work.
Full video transcript:
Michelle and I purchased the restaurant in February of 2019. We wanted to make sure that we kept everything the exact same, but also bring our flair and hospitality and create a five star experience for everybody. We farm about 500 acres. We grow three main vegetables. We grow rhubarb, brussel sprouts, and English pod peas. We are roughly about 45 minutes away from the GTA. We mainly focus on local cuisine, local beers, local wines, local music. We have a small community, but we’re very supportive community. Recently we’ve started a few different experiences on the farm. We call them Field to Fork Tour and Dinner Experiences. Our guests come and they get to take a tour of the farm, harvest some vegetables, and then have a catered four course meal in the field. It’s a really amazing experience. Each of our dinners is prepared by a different chef. Every dinner is different and unique. We contract brew our beer out of Stonehooker, but everybody else is in Georgetown, Caledon, Orangeville, Mono. Not one of our beers is more than 45 minutes away, including our stuff. We have live music every Friday and Saturday. We’re looking into doing open mic and karaoke and trivia style nights. To support local and support our neighbors is of the utmost importance to me. We use only the finest quality ingredients that we can find. It makes a big, big difference, our scratch kitchen, and our five star experience. Every single dish is made to order when it’s ordered by our guest. Nothing is pre-made. We serve everything from fresh pastas, to fresh seafood, certified angus steaks, wood fired pizzas. On the farm, our market’s become really, really popular, especially with tourists going towards Collingwood. And every year, we have more and more visitors who become regular customers. They love coming to the farm, being able to see us bring in the produce straight from the field and talk to us about what we’re growing and what we’re doing. So it’s really great to be able to connect with them. I would say about 60% of our business right now is actually tourism business, especially in the summertime. We have a really nice patio and people are looking for that craft experience, that local experience. A lot of tourists come to Dufferin County for so many different reasons. We have the theater right across the street, a lot of hiking, a lot of beautiful trails in the community. Dufferin County is an amazing place to live, work and raise a family. We have lots of amazing community organizations and businesses. It’s a wonderful place to raise, raise kids. It’s a beautiful area. There’s lots of things to do. We are so, so grateful to this community. We love this community. We wouldn’t be here without them. And so we try every opportunity we can to give back. We use a lot of different local people here in town. We’ll go shopping at the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings for our vegetables. We’ve actually combined a couple of desserts using Wicked Shortbread cookies with chocolate from The Chocolate Shop to make amazing cheesecakes. The Bluebird would not be here if it wasn’t for local support or tourism support. We are working really, really hard to make sure that we are providing the community with access to local, fresh and healthy food. One of our core values is community. We believe that by working together and supporting each other, we will all grow.