The Orchard House

I have this little fantasy about new restaurants.  An aspiring foodie resists the siren song of their culinary muse for years while struggling to convince themselves that the 9-5 gig is reason enough to get up every morning.  Sooner or later, however, the Big Epiphany happens.  Maybe it’s a near-death experience.  Maybe it’s losing that nine-to-five gig.  Maybe its an insightful spouse or friend who says, “Follow your dream!”  Or maybe, in the case of Kris Thompson and Sherri McCoy, it’s just wanting a place where friends and neighbors can hang out and watch the grapes grow.

Restaurants have been started for far worse reasons than friendship — and I suspect the restaurant biz has ended more than one.  In the case of Kris and Sherri, who had known each other since they were 17, opening a restaurant of their own seemed a natural enough evolution of a friendship that started in a restaurant, back when they worked as servers at a place owned by Sheri’s family.  From that time on, their friendship led them into a variety of entrepreneurial schemes – one of which was owning a drive-thru coffee shop, which they ran for eight years and expanded into an espresso machine sales and repair venture on the side.

Demanding though it was, the coffee kiosk was successful.  It did, however, have a singular disadvantage: if friends wanted to visit, they had to circle the shop in their cars.  The solution, of course, was to open a restaurant.  So when Cookies Famous Potato House on Sunnyslope Road in Caldwell went up for sale, Kris and Sherri did the only logical thing for two people who were used to “jumping in and committing, and then figuring it out”: they bought it.

The Orchard House — whose checkered past as an edifice includes ‘60s apartments (I’m seeing shag carpet and “harvest gold” appliances”, a winery, a boat shop, and a Mexican bar — opened on June 4, 2008.  While many restaurants start with a culinary concept and work forward through menu, ingredients, and décor considerations, Sherri and Kris essentially reverse engineered the process.  In a sense, the restaurant’s location has defined its culinary mission.

In a bucolic setting of rolling vineyards just above the Snake River, The Orchard House’s Sunnyslope Road location is nestled amidst wineries and orchards in what is arguably southwest Idaho’s less shi-shi version of the California Napa Valley.  Sherri and Kris began developing their culinary chops with what they defined as “a basic all-American menu” and a refusal to simply go through the motions.  “Our onion rings have been a huge deal, but we use real onions, and we fry them in rice oil, which is more expensive but has zero trans-fat.”  They take the same approach with another diner classic, finger steaks, which starts with hand-cut flat iron steak that is certified Angus beef from local supplier Tri-Cities.

In fact, it is an almost fastidious refusal to accept conventional wisdom about what constitutes a well-known menu item that characterizes The Orchard House approach.  Before Kris and Sherri added eggs benedict to their breakfast line up, they ate at a lot of other restaurants and researched the Internet.  Then they challenged their young kitchen staff to keep tweaking the ingredients and preparation until they’d achieved what their taste buds remembered as being the best of the best.  “We’re even picky about our coffee, since we used to be in that business.  We went to a very old coffee roaster in Portland, K&F, and settled on their Asante blend.  We don’t serve Folger’s.”

Another hallmark of The Orchard House menu is its focus on local produce.  With plenty of vineyards and orchards nearby, it didn’t take long for local wineries to suggest pairing wines and foods that could be highlighted in wine dinner events.  “Wineries would suggest foods that went well with their wines, and we would do research on recipes that would feature those foods.”  In following the logic of these local connections, The Orchard House culinary mission emerged as “fresh, local, seasonally inspired cuisine”.

Today, The Orchard House leads an almost double life.  By weekday, it’s a cozy little diner where friends and neighbors meet for meals that are comfortingly familiar, but entirely local and uncompromising in their preparation.  On Friday and Saturday nights, however, it is an aspiring Idaho wine country dinner destination with a menu that includes prime rib, honey glazed salmon, and chicken piccata.  And beginning this month, the restaurant will inaugurate the first of its wine dinner series.

While Kris and Sherri might blush at so lofty a mission, the unstated goal of The Orchard House is to be the culinary embodiment of what Sunnyslope is all about.  “We want people to come here and see how beautiful it is.  We have an acre of land, and you can sit and enjoy the scenery, have breakfast on the patio in the morning and a prime rib dinner in the evening.  Most people who come here aren’t in a hurry to go anywhere, so the atmosphere is very relaxing.”

Sure, it may seem like a long drive from Boise to Sunnyslope, but there is an enchantment about this part of the Snake River plain that makes it a great little getaway.  And at the end of that drive is a great little place to hang out, eat an honest meal, jawbone with wine and fruit growers, and just relax.  And just think, one of these days you’ll be able to say, “The Orchard House?  Sure, I knew it back when it was just a local secret.”