At BelleWood’s cafe, bite into comfort food with apple flair

The focus is on comfort food at BelleWood Acre’s Country Cafe.

For breakfast there’s biscuits and gravy, and for lunch there’s hamburgers or Lynn’s homemade chili — a customer favorite that uses a recipe created by John Belisle’s dad.

“Everybody likes the chili,” says Belisle, who owns BelleWood Acres with wife Dorie.

The apple orchard is at 6140 Guide Meridian Road, about five miles north of Bellingham.

During fall, its busiest season, BelleWood Acres is packed with families visiting its orchard, cafe and store for a taste of the farm experience with snow-topped Mount Baker as a stunning backdrop. It’s a pretty scene from inside the airy cafe, too, when the bay doors are open to a mountain view combined with corn stalks, pumpkin patches and sunflowers in the fields.

It doesn’t hurt that its apples, including the always popular sweet-tart honeycrisp, are perfect for cooking or snacking. Oh, and let’s not forget its honey-roasted peanut butter, another popular item.

Because it’s BelleWood, apples pop up on the menu at the Country Cafe a bit more than they likely would in other eateries.

The BelleWood omelet has apple in it. Diners can get a side of the orchard’s apple sauce. Its apple hog sandwich is a ham and cheese with, you guessed it, apple slices.

The BelleWood salad features its apples and its apple cider vinaigrette. Another customer favorite is the chicken, apple and curry soup.

And then there are its apple cider doughnuts, which require a bit of patience.

“The line is not long for nothing,” Belisle says.

If you want to wet your whistle with an adult beverage, BelleWood offers that, too.

The farm has a distillery that uses its apples to produce vodka, gin and brandy. You can order a gin cider frost, which is a slushy made with BelleWood’s apple cider combined with its gin.

“The customers go nuts over it,” Belisle says of the gin.

So did the International Review of Spirits, which gave the gin a score of 94 points and awarded it a gold medal.

The adult slushy goes down refreshing and smooth. Prefer something warm? Try the hot spiced cider with BelleWood’s brandy.

And, yes, there’s apple pie.

Country Cafe is open daily for breakfast, lunch and early dinner. It closes at 5 p.m.

Details are at 360-318-7720 and bellewoodfarms.com.

This story was originally published November 11, 2015 at 3:01 AM with the headline "At BelleWood’s cafe, bite into comfort food with apple flair."