When someone places a shot glass filled with beet soup in front of you, you take a sip. When you remember the beets were grown less than a mile away, you take another.
Last Friday’s “Knolci” dinner marked the second time in two years that Dolci, Middlebury’s student-run pop up restaurant, hosted a three-hour, four-course meal prepared with ingredients from the Knoll, the college’s organic farm. The Knolci in October 2023 was challenged by summer floods, and this fall’s harvest was limited after severe drought. Regardless, Knoll interns and Dolci chefs curated an impressive evening of “grazing” on local food for lucky lottery winners and their plus-one companions, totaling in approximately 94 hungry students.
Guests entered Atwater Dining Hall to find it transformed from a spot for lunch between classes to an eatery fit for fairies. Two bouquets of fresh Knoll flowers waited at our table beside a pitcher of mysterious pink liquid. The beverage tasted like a melted popsicle, but classier. My tablemates and I turned to our menu cards for answers: It was a shisho and lime seltzer, a drink made with syrup from shisho leaves.
Our first snack of the evening was the aforementioned chilled beet soup “shooter” made with coconut cream. We clinked our tiny plastic glasses together, saying “cheers” to what would likely be the most nutritious, deepest magenta “amuse-bouche” of our lives.
“We were trying to figure out ideas of what to do with the beets, because it was one of the main things [the Knoll] could give us,” Dolci President Numi Moreno Calderon ’26 said.
She had thought about serving bowls of soup, but said the shooters were an easy solution to expedite service without stuffing guests full too early. Knowing the quantity of what came later, I was grateful for the pacing.
Charcuterie boards for the whole table to share were unveiled next: Camembrie, la luna and riley’s cheese from Blue Ledge Farm, grapes, and pear slices cornered the arrangement. Crackers made with herbs from the Knoll surrounded a pot of Champlain Valley Creamery’s smoked queso. Globs of whipped honey butter were dispersed throughout and a dish of magneta-hued beet hummus was placed to the side (beets were clearly in no kind of shortage).
“You have to think of the balance,” Moreno Calderon said. “You need a cracker and a dip, and you have a lot of cheese, so then you need something sweet to balance it out and to add some freshness.”
While the queso took center stage on the board, most of my table’s portion remained by the end of the course. For me, the sweet and smooth honey butter was the star of the show.
Then came the salad: Knoll-grown kale leaves, honeycrisp apple chunks, sweet potatoes, watermelon radish, goat cheese, dried cranberries and pumpkin seeds with a dijon maple dressing thrown together in one big bowl. Family style, we passed it around the table and scooped our own ideal proportions of crunchy, flavorful ingredients.
The main course, a Korean-style bibimbap dish of cucumbers, carrots, Knoll-grown spinach, shiitake mushrooms and egg over a bed of rice, was served with sides of miso kimchi and gochujang sauce from Pitchfork Farm. The entrée, while delicious, felt out of place for what had until then felt like a light, spice-free garden party. Knoll intern and Dolci board member Kayden Lemee ’26 explained that cooking Asian cuisine is a common result of working with the Knoll because they grow a lot of Asian style vegetables, like the Korean shisho leaves that went into the pink drink.
For dessert, servers brought out a rosemary elderberry shortbread tart paired with rosemary honey ice cream. Dolci chefs made both themselves, infusing the sweet treats with the herb. The ice cream, which had to be made pint by pint, took almost 12 hours in total.
“After making the cream base, we toasted a decent amount of rosemary and steeped that into the ice cream for 10 to 15 minutes on low heat,” Lemee said. For the pastry, the team finely chopped the rosemary and added it directly into the dough.
The dish was darned with rosemary leaves and a fresh Knoll flower on top. While the tart’s rosemary flavor was overpowering, the ice cream’s flavoring was perfect and its texture creamy.
Knolci is a rare opportunity for students to understand the hard work their peers and Associate Director of the Knoll Megan Brakley put into growing produce, Lemee and Moreno Calderon said. While a small part of its harvest contributes to dining hall meals, most is donated to local nonprofits like Helping Overcome Poverty’s Effects (HOPE) or the Open Door Clinic in Middlebury.
“People go to the Knoll and everything, but there’s not enough opportunities for people to enjoy the program that’s down there,” Moreno Calderon said. “I think being here in Vermont, it’s really important to highlight the agricultural scene.”
The next time you’re stargazing, eating pizza or playing cards at the Knoll, remember that you could be only paces away from a young crop growing into what will someday be enjoyed in the form of a luscious beet, carrot or spinach shot.
Madeleine Kaptein '25.5 (she/her) is the Editor in Chief.
Madeleine previously served as a managing editor, local editor, staff writer and copy editor. She is a Comparative Literature major with a focus on German and English literatures and was a culture journalism intern at Seven Days for the summer of 2025.
