Farmhouse at Roger's Gardens Corona del Mar: Tasting Menu Reservations

At Farmhouse, regular tables can be booked through OpenTable, while the five-course tasting menu is booked by emailing manager Autumn Keith.

Farmhouse at Roger's Gardens is turning ten years old this month. The restaurant opened inside the nursery on September 1, 2016.

How to Reserve the Tasting Menu

The regular menu at Farmhouse works the way you'd expect. You open OpenTable, you pick a time, you show up and eat very good salmon among the succulents. But the chef's tasting menu, the $150-a-head, five-course experience with wine and cocktail pairings, doesn't live on any app. It's booked by emailing manager Autumn Keith directly, and the restaurant is explicit that reservations through OpenTable won't get you that seat. The tasting menu is only offered Monday through Thursday, between 5 and 7:30pm, for parties of two to six, and it disappears entirely from November 1 through the end of December.

That direct arrangement is one part of the restaurant's way of doing things; another began years before Farmhouse opened.

Where the Habit Comes From

Chef and owner Rich Mead has spent close to four decades in professional kitchens. Long before Roger's Gardens opened its doors to a restaurant, Mead was making weekly trips to the Santa Monica Farmers Market, a habit he started in 1998 and never gave up.

Farmhouse's menu features produce from farmers Mead has known since before some of his current servers were born.

What Ten Years Actually Looks Like on September 24

The anniversary itself is being marked with a single ticketed evening, not a season-long promotion. On Thursday, September 24, from 6 to 8:30pm, Farmhouse is hosting a community celebration built around dining stations rather than a seated dinner, each one staffed by a different collaborator from the restaurant's decade of relationships. The lineup includes:

• Guest chefs Cathy McKnight, Paddy Glennon, Paul Buchanon and Shachi Mehra, each running a station alongside Mead
• Local farmers Alex Weiser, Peter Shaner and Troy Regier, credited by name as the growers who've shaped the menu
• Live music and a photo setup woven into the garden setting rather than a standard banquet room
• A cap of 165 guests, with tickets priced at $200 each

The charitable partner for the night is Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County, a choice that lines up with a pattern Farmhouse has kept quietly running since well before this anniversary.

The Cocktail That's Been Paying Rent in Charity Since 2019

Most residents who've eaten at Farmhouse in the last several years have probably ordered the featured cocktail without registering what it funds. Since 2019, the restaurant has run a program called Swig for Selflessness, where fifty percent of the proceeds from one rotating cocktail each week go to a different local charity. It's not a seasonal promotion tied to a press cycle. It's been running weekly for seven years, through a pandemic, through menu changes, through however many different bartenders have worked that shift.

That's the piece that makes the anniversary dinner's Second Harvest partnership feel less like a one-off and more like an extension of something the restaurant has already been doing on a Tuesday-night scale for the better part of a decade. The milestone dinner is bigger and more visible. The weekly cocktail is the actual habit.

The Rest of the Village's Calendar This Month

Farmhouse isn't the only fixture on the CdM calendar hitting a milestone this month, and it's worth knowing what else is happening within walking distance if you're planning your September around the village. The Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce is running the 64th Annual Sandcastle Contest at Corona del Mar State Beach on Sunday, September 27, from 10am to 4:30pm, on the same stretch of sand most CdM residents already treat as an extension of their backyard.

Roger's Gardens itself is also in the middle of its own seasonal turn. The nursery's events calendar shows the Stories of the Season Christmas Boutique opening October 2, which means the same six-acre property hosting Farmhouse's anniversary dinner will be swapping out its late-summer displays for holiday decor within about a week of the party. If you're the kind of resident who times a Roger's Gardens visit around what's blooming, that overlap is worth building into your calendar now rather than discovering it by accident in mid-October.

Farmhouse's booking system, its weekly charity cocktail, and Roger's Gardens' seasonal changeovers are all part of the village calendar. Farmhouse's anniversary dinner brings together collaborators from its first decade of business.

If you've had the tasting menu at Farmhouse in the last few years, you already know the experience. If you haven't, this is as good a month as any to email Autumn about reserving a tasting menu as Farmhouse marks its tenth anniversary.

For residents thinking beyond dinner reservations, whether that's understanding what a property near the village is actually worth or simply staying current on what's changing in Corona del Mar, Connie Maxsenti has spent more than five decades watching this stretch of coast evolve one season at a time. Let's Connect — Schedule Your Free Consultation.