THE WEST
Review: Bramble & Hare
The Farm-to-Table Restaurant That Truly Farms
$$$$
★★★★★
Written by Maria Rodriguez | May 3, 2025
There’s a certain type of Boulder restaurant that wears its sustainability on its sleeve—composting bins in the dining room, a paragraph-long explanation of the water filtration system, servers who can name the pig’s astrological sign. Bramble & Hare, somehow, avoids all that and still manages to do the farm-to-table thing better than anyone else. It helps that the farm is actually theirs.
Just-farmed front range sweet potatoes
Eric Skokan (above), the chef-owner, is the sort of guy you’d expect to see wearing a chef’s coat with muddy boots. He and his wife Jill own Black Cat Farm, a 425-acre sprawl north of town where they raise sheep, pigs, chickens, and more heirloom vegetables than I can pronounce. What ends up on your plate at Bramble & Hare likely had a root system or a pulse just a day or two earlier. And yet the place never feels like it’s bragging about that. It just quietly delivers a meal that tastes like someone actually gave a damn.
The dining room is intimate in that borderline-eccentric Boulder way: small rooms stitched together with warm wood, dim lighting, mismatched silverware, and velvet chairs that might have come from a great aunt’s attic. If you squint, you could be in a Victorian parlor. If you sniff, you’ll catch a whiff of roasted lamb shoulder that reminds you this place means business.
Turkey with prosciutto, sage and chanterelles
The menu changes daily. Not weekly, not seasonally—daily. It’s a prix fixe, three-course setup, which normally feels like a trap, but here it feels more like a trust fall. You know someone picked these dishes with care, not because the duck confit photographs well, but because the ducks were ready.
The first time I came here, I got a salad of turnips. Not fancy watermelon radishes or gold-dusted whatever—just turnips. But they were salted, seared, and sitting on a pistachio purée so smooth I nearly asked if it was spun in a Vitamix blessed by monks. House-cured prosciutto draped over the top like someone’s elegant afterthought. It was one of those rare bites that forces you to shut up mid-sentence.
Pork with fingerlings and goat cheese purée
Main courses lean hearty: braised meats, wild mushrooms, crispy potatoes smashed just enough to catch the butter. One night I had a lamb neck that fell apart like pulled pork and sat in a shallow lake of tomato confit and wine reductions that clearly spent some time thinking about their life choices. Another time it was a rabbit leg wrapped in pancetta—something I hadn’t ordered but ended up staring at like I owed it an apology.
Desserts stay in the realm of “grown-up rustic,” which is to say no fondant or foam. A buttermilk panna cotta with pear compote tasted like the kind of thing your grandmother would make if she owned a thermal circulator. Even the coffee feels thought-out, brewed with the same care as everything else.
Peach salad
You will not leave here feeling wowed by the scale or blown away by the Instagrammability. What you’ll get is dinner. Real dinner. The kind where the ingredients taste like themselves, and someone probably washed soil off them that morning. It’s old-school in the best possible way.
Salmon, red quinoa
Michelin took notice in 2023 and gave Bramble & Hare one of its Green Stars, which is basically their way of saying “this place walks the walk.” Skokan has been doing that for over a decade. While other chefs post about their compost bins, he’s out there planting carrots. And yet the place never comes off as holier-than-thou. The vibe is more: here’s some food we raised and cooked for you—hope you like it.
Always busy, never rushed
Service is casual but sharp. They know what farm the sheep came from, mostly because they own it. The wine list leans Old World but smart, and if you don’t know what you want, just say the word “funky” and let them figure it out.
Bramble & Hare is not a show-off. It’s not trying to be trendy. You won’t see it trying to out-tweezer the tasting menu spots or reinvent the beet. But if you want a meal that feels connected to something deeper than a concept, where the cooking is honest and the vegetables have a point of view, this is where you go.
You won’t see a shepherd walk in with a wheel of cheese. But if Skokan showed up in overalls with a bushel of greens, you wouldn’t blink. That’s the magic of this place—it feels lived-in, rooted, real.
With a day job that requires constant travel, Maria Rodriguez is likely a frequenter of a restaurant near you, wherever you are. A seasoned restaurant reviewer, Maria has a knack for finding the best pastry in a new city, a talent that makes her popular among her coworkers.
