This farm is the secret workhorse of PEC, providing The Royal Hotel and other local restaurants with produce, meat and even baked goods year-round.
Just off the Skyway Bridge, along the coast of the Bay of Quinte, 680 acres of fields are bursting with every crop you can grow in Ontario. Rapini, Swiss chard, carrots, cucumbers, eggplants, ginger, zucchinis, every herb imaginable, an entire garden dedicated to tea, cut flowers, multiple varieties of trees, including a sugarbush, and rows and rows of grains. All of that is part of Edwin County Farms, and much of it ends up on the menu at The Royal Hotel in Picton. Both businesses are owned by the Sorbara family.
“Our farm’s primary objective is to supply enough food to the hotel that it can develop a full menu drawing from what’s in season and available,” says Lucas Sorbara, one of the co-owners and managers of the farm.
Family operation
The Sorbara family, anchored by Kate Sorbara and former Ontario MPP Greg Sorbara, purchased Edwin County Farms in 2004 from a four-generation farming family that hadn’t actively used the land in 20 years. Initially, the plan was for a family cottage and small garden. But Kate, who grew up on a farm, soon became more ambitious and decided to restore it to its agricultural potential. The family started with barley, spelt and rye in the fields, added cattle and a sugarbush and kept expanding the operation. Large 50- to 60-person dinners followed, culminating in a Thanksgiving in the barn for 120 people. At that dinner, Greg looked around and said, “if we had a hotel, this would be a lot easier.” And the seed for The Royal was planted.
Chef Albert Ponzo, who was coming off a decade-long stint as chef at Le Sélect Bistro, came on board in 2017 to begin research and development, before the hotel and restaurant opened in 2022. In the interim, the family and Ponzo took a trip to Blue Hill. Previously part of the Rockefeller estate in Hudson Valley, N.Y., Blue Hill at Stone Barns is led by chef Dan Barber, has earned two Michelin Stars and is part of the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. It’s often credited with the resurgence of farm-to-table dining in North America. When touring the property, the group kept saying “this is what we’re going to do.”
“The whole time I was thinking ‘who’s going to do this?’” says Nick, one of Greg and Kate’s sons and co-manager of the farm with Lucas. “By the end of the trip, I decided it was me.”
Nick and Lucas Sorbara oversee Edwin County Farms’ 680 acres of diverse crops that supply The Royal Hotel and other local restaurants year-round. Nick manages the market garden and silviculture, while Lucas manages the broader operation, including cattle and grains. Photos by Ash Nayler.
Market garden to table
Nick left his career as a film producer and began immersing himself in the world of market gardens. His focus is the market garden and silviculture, while his wife, Claire Telford, is dedicated to growing and making organic tea served at The Royal’s restaurant, as well as lotions and soaps for the hotel’s guests through her label Telford Basics.
The market garden started with a few acres of beds and old greenhouses and nurseries they bought from farms in neighbouring towns, rather than building new ones. Since the hotel was still a few years off, Nick was selling his yield to restaurants in Toronto, including Terroni and Giulietta. “But they didn’t want just five radishes, they wanted five cases of radishes,” Nick says.
He realized they would have to scale up their operation, and scale down their distance. Edwin County Farms now rarely supplies food to restaurants in Toronto, focusing mainly on the needs of The Royal. In peak season, between 600 and 700 diners pass through the restaurant each day. In one week, diners eat up to 1,000 heads of lettuce.
“We wanted to supply the hotel year-round,” Nick says. “We’re not in every dish, but we’re its No. 1 supplier.”
Field of dreams
Nick’s brother, Lucas, joined the family farm full-time in 2021, leaving his job as a high school English teacher in Richmond Hill, Ont., to manage the cattle, sugarbush and fields. Among that responsibility are rows and rows of grains, including spelt.
“We are taking what was once one of the great farms in the area, that supplied produce to canneries for Heinz, and we’ve slowly reclaimed or restored the original agricultural capacity,” Lucas says.
Initially, Lucas, who is dedicated to regenerative and organic farming, was growing spelt as a way to manage the fertility of the fields. After tilling a field, he plants spelt and then underseeds it with a forage crop such as hay for the cattle. It used to be sold off to Ottawa Valley Grain and CIPM Farms.
Recently, Lucas purchased his own mill that he runs out of his garage. He is able to turn the spelt berries into flour that is handed over to Sarah Villamere, the pastry chef at The Royal, and crafted into a delicious, nutty loaves of sourdough spelt bread, as well as galettes. That bread also pops up all over the County on tables at Theia, The CAPE and Beacon Bike + Brew.
“The hotel needed flour and I had the grain, so I bought a semi-commercial mill and started grinding,” Lucas says. “It’s all ground to order, usually the night before, so it’s as fresh as possible.”
The Royal’s pastry chef Sarah Villamere, shown above, transforms Edwin County Farm’s freshly milled spelt flour into nutty sourdough loaves and galettes served at the hotel and restaurants across Prince Edward County. Photos by Jonnny CY Lam Photography.
Ebb and flow
There’s a natural push-and-pull between what the restaurant needs and what the farm can grow, in the right quantities and in the right conditions, at the right time. Every year, in November, Nick, Lucas, Villamere, Ponzo and other chefs from the restaurant all sit down together to discuss what they each want to grow in the coming year.
“We’re trying to put every ounce of what we can produce on that menu to really showcase what farm-to-table really means,” Nick says.
Then they get started growing very early in the year, whatever the weather. Tomatoes, for example, are planted in February in an unheated greenhouse, allowing the restaurant to serve tomatoes in June — earlier than most Ontario farms are harvesting the crop. Ponzo then takes those tomatoes and uses them to make Sicilian-style pesto using crushed tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and a little bit of basil.
Ponzo, with his Italian background, is always pushing Nick to grow out-of-the box herbs such as nepitella, a fragrant herb from the mint family that he uses in a lamb pappardelle.
There’s some trial and error, of course. The gem lettuce, for example, is a hardy variety that works well in salads. But it took a few years of experimenting until they landed on gem lettuce. It’s topped with parsley, chives and a vinaigrette that is slightly drizzled (never tossed) allowing the leaves to keep their shape and avoid wilting.
There are some items that Ponzo wishes he could get his hands on that just don’t grow well no matter how hard they try. Arugula with its peppery taste adds a delicious zest to many dishes, but Nick says that it’s difficult to grow in Prince Edward County. “We used to struggle to grow large quantities and there’s just only so many hours in the day,” he says. “You have to pick your battles.”
A few of the crops don’t make the cut. Ginger, while one of Nick’s favourite crops to grow, isn’t easy to work into many dishes. It pops up in a few desserts here and there. Instead, the farm saves it for the Picton Farmers’ Market, another passion project of the Sorbaras.
What’s on the menu
Ponzo is frequently at the farm seeing for himself how things are growing, and looking for inspiration.
“My favourite kinds of dishes are the ones where you’re able to taste the ingredient,” says Ponzo. “Most Italian cooking is farm- to-table, it’s local ingredients that are available at that moment, picking vegetables at the height of their freshness and flavour.”
Every two weeks in the high season, Ponzo and his restaurant team get together to discuss what they’re going to swap in or out of the menu and craft new dishes. There’s always a daily vegetable dish and dessert, based on what’s in season, on the menu.
Even in the middle of winter, there are items from the farm, such as Tardivo di Treviso radicchio, which Ponzo uses in winter salads. “It starts growing in the ground and then the roots are harvested in the off-season,” says Ponzo. “Then that root grows in sand in a dark room and sprouts in January and February.” Belgian endives are also harvested around that time of year.
Since opening The Royal in 2022, Ponzo and his fellow chefs have crafted a catalogue of dishes, knowing what the farm can grow and what has been popular with diners in prior years.
If they’re going to add a new dish to the menu, it takes two to three weeks of testing. Because of the short season for a lot of this produce, that testing period often means a dish is worked out just as something is going out of season, and won’t end up on the menu until next year.
This year, Ponzo has been testing a fish broth with radish tops. After several weeks of testing, the dish still felt like it was lacking an element. “The window for radishes is very short and we didn’t get a dish this year,” Ponzo says. “We’ll peck away and we’ll get it. That’s the challenge of developing with seasonal ingredients.”
The Royal diners won’t get to try this broth anytime soon, but when it shows up on the menu in 2026, it will be the culmination of years of development and growth. It started with Edwin County Farms growing radishes, perfecting the most flavourful radish and its greens, a year of recipe development, then the perfect plating for a guest —just like every other dish on the restaurant’s menu.
Edwin County Farms
2590 County Rd. 15, Picton
edwincountyfarms.ca | 647.406.6373 | @edwincountyfarms
The Royal Hotel
247 Picton Main St., Picton
theroyalhotel.ca | 613.961.2600 | @theroyalhotelpicton
