Where's the beef? For The White Hart, it's at Twin Lakes Farm

SALISBURY — One local inn will soon "beef up" its restaurant menu thanks to a sister operation down the road.

Twin Lakes Farm, which is owned by the couple who bought The White Hart Inn 10 years ago, will soon supply the inn with fresh vegetables, eggs from chickens raised on the farm and grass-fed beef from cattle who graze on meadows off Route 44.

"We’re really excited," said Kendra Tobin, who runs the 200-year-old inn for owners Scott and Roxanne Bok.

Beginning Aug. 1, The White Hart restaurant menu will change to reflect the inclusion of the beef and eggs and a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including sweet corn, heirloom tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beets and beet greens, cucumbers, cantaloupes, peaches and strawberries.

Farm co-managers Katlyn Hoskinson and Tim Kinsella are running the place for the Boks, who live in Salisbury part-time (Scott Bok is co-president and CEO of Greenhill, an investment banking firm based in Manhattan).

Tobin said the beef has already been taste-tested by staffers at the inn who report that the ground beef is so good that it tastes like steak. The steak itself is juicy and delicious, she said, but leaner than the standard variety beef found in supermarkets and most restaurants.

The first shipment of beef — 3,000 pounds worth from three Black Angus raised on the farm — was delivered to the White Hart’s freezers the first week of July. The 50 free-range hens that roam the property will soon be supplemented by 30 more. They each lay an average of one egg per day.

In addition, the inn has a new executive chef, David Luscher, a Culinary Institute of America graduate who worked recently as an executive chef at a country club in North Carolina.

The Boks bought the 61-acre farm, including the main house, caretaker’s house and multiple barns, on Jan. 23, 2007, for $2.5 million. They then set about restoring the place to its former glory as a farm.

Known most recently as Fair Acres, it has what Scott Bok describes as "an amazingly colorful history." Pieces of it had been sold off over the years since John A. Dutcher first owned it in the early 19th century. According to records in the town historian’s office, Nicholas R. Van Deusen bought the property in 1857 and built the main house shortly thereafter.

In 1962, Fair Acres was bought by Everett Crosby, who managed the career of his younger brother, the legendary singer Bing Crosby. Everett Crosby died in 1966, but his wife, Florence, raised Morgan and Arabian horses there. She also had a pet monkey and built an aviary containing finches.

Florence Crosby subsequently remarried, to a man named Andelmo Ortiz. At that time the farm still totaled some 250 acres. In 1976, the Ortizes proposed to sell to developers who wanted to put an 18-hole golf course on the property with 138 single-family homes and 100 studio units. The deal fell through after the town’s Planning and Zoning Commission rejected the proposal.

The Boks own a weekend home about a quarter mile north of the farm on Twin Lakes Road. Just before Christmas 2006 they bought the nearby dilapidated Salisbury Motel and had it torn down the next spring.