Dinner in the Grove

You walk in from the edge of the grove as the light goes, between rows of orange trees toward a single long table laid down the center aisle. There are linen napkins and low lanterns and string lights strung tree to tree, and the smell — leaf, blossom, the green pith of the fruit overhead — is part of the meal before anything is served. This is a long-table dinner in a working Redlands orange grove, staged only on a handful of dates each season, and it is the most considered way to eat in citrus country.

The menu philosophy

The kitchen builds the menu around the orchard and the farms that surround it, which means it changes with the calendar and never strays far from where you’re sitting. A winter dinner might open with a blood orange salad — the fruit cut into bleeding ruby segments, dressed simply, eaten within sight of the trees that grew it — move through a course of citrus-cured fish, and close on a Valencia tart bright enough to cut the night chill. Nothing on the table travels far. The conceit of farm-to-table dining gets stretched thin in most places; here the farm is the dining room, and the distance from branch to plate is measured in steps.

Best season

Come in winter, during the navel and blood-orange harvest, roughly December through February. That is when the grove is at its most beautiful and the menu at its most local — the trees hung with fruit, the nights cool and clear, the citrus at the center of every course rather than gestured at. The California Department of Food and Agriculture tracks the harvest windows that the kitchen plans around, and a winter seating catches the orchard exactly when it has the most to give.

How to book and what to wear

Reservations are essential and dates are deliberately limited — these dinners run a few times a season, by advance booking only, and they sell out. Watch for date announcements and reserve the moment they open. Dress for a working orchard after dark: it is a linen-napkin dinner but the floor is gravel and earth, the temperature drops fast once the sun is down, and you will want a warm layer and shoes you don’t mind getting dusty. California Grown is a good starting point for finding the region’s farm-dinner and grove-event traditions if you want to make a season of it.

Why it’s worth the planning

Because it is the rare meal that could not happen anywhere else. The grove dinner takes the region’s defining ingredient and its defining landscape and puts you down in the middle of both, for one evening, with the trees overhead and the fruit on the plate. The advance planning is part of the pleasure — a dinner you have to wait for, in a place you have to walk into, on a night the orchard chooses.