Ore Hill in Kent: Tasting Menu Dining That Celebrates Local CT Farming

Andrew Dominick April 11, 2026

When Swyft opened in Kent at the very end of 2017, it was met with instant fanfare. Right out of the gate, they did things most taverns couldn’t, firing up perfect sourdough Neapolitan pizzas, creative small plates, and nearly every ingredient was homegrown by their own Rock Cobble Farm, located a few miles away in South Kent.

It didn’t hurt that they also had a name chef and partner and a well-known owner in philanthropist, Anne Bass.

The restaurant being inside of a historic and respectfully restored circa 1781 house didn’t hurt either.

*The grounds of Ore Hill & Swyft are maintained by Rock Cobble Farm. Herbs are grown on site and they certainly look after those apple trees, too.*
*When the building was renovated and restored in 2016, the original posts, beams, and frame were preserved and original materials were matched during construction.*

But the full name of the restaurant when it debuted was “Ore Hill & Swyft” and a promise of two concepts under one roof. Swyft would be casual and approachable. Ore Hill would be its more intimate, fine dining side. Both would be farm-focused.

In 2022, I covered all the changes at Swyft. By then, chef-partner Joel Viehland had moved on, and Bass had unfortunately passed away, but she ensured that Swyft, Ore Hill, and Rock Cobble Farm would continue on by operating with a CFO and board of directors that lets the good folks who work in the restaurant do what they do.

Towards the end of said article, there was a tease about Ore Hill that read:

“But what is coming, hopefully in the very near future, is Ore Hill. One of Bass’ wishes when Swyft opened was that the back part of their historic Revolutionary War era digs—that’s now being used for private parties—would feature a tasting menu a few nights per week.”

Almost exactly a year after that piece went live, Ore Hill wasn’t a promise anymore. In April 2023, Ore Hill was a reality.

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Despite receiving an instant bit of credibility by being named to The New York Times’ annual “The Restaurant List” as one of “the 50 places in the United States that we’re most excited about right now,” Ore Hill still had some work to do, namely, a chef to stick around and put their stamp on it.

Right before the NYT list, however, they hired celebrity chef and multi-time James Beard Award semifinalist, Tyler Anderson, as culinary director at both Ore Hill & Swyft.

Fast forward a couple years and a couple chefs later and Ore Hill has their guy in Ryan Carbone.

For Carbone, a Cheshire native, this is his homecoming.

“I studied political science in college up in Boston, but I really, really disliked it, so I transferred to the CIA, then spent 10 years in Chicago, nine-and-a-half of those years, I cooked in Michelin starred restaurants Longman & Eagle and Dusek’s Tavern, each had one star,” Carbone says. “Then I was at the Tied House under Debbie Gould, who won James Beard in the early 2000s—I got promoted to executive chef when she left.”

Even though he has an admiration for Chi-Town, Carbone and his partner moved back to this area to be closer to family, so he took an executive chef position at a Manhattan location of Pizza Friendly Pizza while simultaneously assistant general managing Olly Olly Market in Chelsea, both for the hospitality collective 16 On Center.

*Hay smoked sea scallop, green apple, radish, hazelnut, and spruce*

*Vegetables, as you might guess, are prominently featured like in this one; Norland potatoes, chestnut mushrooms, black trumpet aioli, red currant, and elderflower.*

“I learned how to cook and make pizzas growing up in Cheshire; my first job was dishwashing at a pizzeria there,” Carbone says. “So, that company (16 On Center), moved me out to Manhattan because they loved what I did and I loved what they did. But I wanted to be in a more traditional restaurant, so I went to one of Clare de Boer’s spots, Jupiter.”

Roughly a year after he began his stint as chef de cuisine of Jupiter, Carbone applied for the vacant executive chef position at Ore Hill.

“Tyler Anderson called me and was like, ‘Did you mean to apply here?’” Carbone recalls. “Tyler has a lot of history in Chicago, too, so we realized we have a lot of mutual friends from there. We ended up on the phone over an hour. I had a few more interviews and I’ve been here since August 2024.”

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Now settled in, Carbone and the Ore Hill team have a clear menu focus that celebrates the seasons at Rock Cobble Farm where their farmers and botanists grow upwards of 350 different fruits, vegetables, and flowers, plus, their own herd of Randall Lineback cattle that produce dairy and beef, all of which can mostly source both concepts. Heck, even the plants and flowers that adorn the dining tables and act as décor are from Rock Cobble. The firewood used in Swyft’s pizza oven? That’s from the farm, too.

Ore Hill’s goal, Cabone explains, is to be a sustainable farm to table restaurant despite the struggles of farming in New England.

“We talk often about how difficult it is to be farm to table here,” he says. “There are tons of wonderful chefs who have really cool restaurants doing farm to table, but in reality, the situation is in New England for five months every year, there’s not much grown. I had this idea that this is what we wanted to work towards when I started here. We have a great team, both in front of house and back of house and we said this is where we want to be. We have a robust preservation program that’s grown over the last year-and-a-half, so we’re able to put on this menu, items that are still grown locally within Litchfield County, kind of all year long, so we have a lot of ingredients that are fresh, lots of root vegetables right now that are delicious, although limited in variety. We’re trying to capture things at height of their season and figure out different ways to preserve and reutilize them in other seasons. It shines through a lot in this menu. Rock Cobble predominantly where our ingredients come from, but also Conundrum Farm, Earth’s Palate, Fort Hill. Our sustainable farm trout is from the Hudson Valley and so is the foie gras. For us, the first tier is our farm; beef, dairy, cheese (we have our own cheesemaker). Flours are milled at Wild Hive Farm for our bread and pizza. We occasionally stretch out to Pennsylvania, but we stay as local as possible, mostly 15-20 miles from here.”

*Homemade cultured Randall cattle butter + Ore Hill’s own sourdough make an appearance early in your meal for the bread course.*

*No, this isn’t dessert, but rather, a palate cleanser. Carrot sorbet w/fennel granita.*

While this current menu will obviously change, and it’s gone through a few iterations since Carbone took over, what guests will experience through the food served at Ore Hill is the restaurant’s relationship with Rock Cobble Farm and the region.

And when you dine here on a Friday or Saturday, you have two different tasting options. One is prix fixed where you can choose one of three dishes in your first, second, and third courses, and for dessert, it’s one of two. The second is a chef’s tasting, carefully picked out for you by Carbone that he calls “a flowing experience that works together” with a few extra bites and a fun take home snack thrown into the mix—we won’t spoil it for you as to what those are.

Because of the seasonal spin on things, what you see here right now isn’t what you’ll see later in the year, a few mainstays during the tasting are a welcome cup of iced lemon verbena tea—because when the farm hosts guests, that’s what they’re served to welcome them—and a showstopper of a beef tartare.

To achieve the crunch atop the pork belly, Carbone uses one part potato chip, one part poached, then fried onion, and one part pork skin. The skin, he reveals, is first removed, gets a confit bath, then it’s dehydrated and “puffed out.”

“The tartare has been a constant since we like to focus on the Randall cow, a historical New England breed with good meat, good dairy, and they were once close to extinction when there were about seven individual cows left,” Carbone says. “An advocate came in and he took over to breed them and bring them back. We have about 85 on our farm and they’ve made quite a comeback. We feature their beef, especially in our burger at Swyft. The tartare has pickled ramp bulbs inside the raw beef, fermented ramp greens in the middle made into aioli—it tastes like a garlicky seaweed—and we grow citrus in our greenhouses, so Meyer lemon zest, Osetra caviar that’s farmed in Idaho that we get from Wulf’s Fish in Boston, and caramelized cream done in our pizza oven, frozen, and grated over the top. We ask people to eat it in one bite.”

One (of many) courses of the tasting that we hope sticks around, even if the components on the plate change seasonally, is their suckling pig pork belly that’s sous vide with fennel and blood orange for 12 hours, hard seared to develop a crust, topped with fennel jam, and finished off with potato chips, poached then fried onions, and crispy pork cracklings. The winter vegetable on the plate are carrots, done three ways; grilled over charcoal, raw and quick pickled with last year’s blood orange vinegar, and as a sauce after carrots have been salted for two days and emulsified with butter and fresh blood orange juice.

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As far as beverage pairings are concerned, you can opt into wine pairings, carefully curated by sommelier James Hopkins, or you can order per glass or by the bottle, but if you prefer cocktails, Ore Hill has its own set mixed up by Swyft’s bar manager, Madeline Schneider.

Soon, think around May, Carbone is ready to progress his iteration of Ore Hill and put a new seasonal menu change into effect.

“The team takes January off, then we do a full menu flip in February and ride this out until we see more local stuff,” he says. “We had a baby at end of December, so in January when we closed, I was figuring out how to be a dad to a newborn. I also had a lot of time to think about food and stare at the spreadsheet of things I had preserved. I’m inspired by what’s in house and what’s coming in, and I have an awesome cookbook collection that I read over and over and over again, and I had amazing mentors. This is fun for to do. The team is hungry and they’re excited to try new things, to learn, and it keeps it interesting for us.”

3 Maple Street, Kent
860.592.0404, orehillandswyft.com