Organic café lets visitors enjoy 21st-century fare in a 19th-century setting

Lunch, if it happened at all, might have consisted of roast beef and wheat bread for Augustus Belin when the duPont bookkeeper lived on the gun powder company’s grounds in the mid-1800s.

Chances are Belin’s mouth would start watering if he walked into his living room today.

His family’s home is now The Belin House Organic Café, which recently opened at the Hagley Museum, serving up farm fresh food from a menu crafted by Chef Dan Butler.

Butler, a Wilmington native whose restaurants include Deep Blue Bar and Grill and Toscana Kitchen + Bar, said the decision to partner with Hagley was an easy one to make.

He roamed the museum grounds as a child, he said, and spent time exploring the mills, canoeing in the river and playing hockey on the Brandywine.

“Hagley is part of the fabric of Wilmington,” he said. “It’s just such a beautiful and important feature of the area.”

The museum had a sit down restaurant, but decided on a self-service model for the revamped café to cater to museum customers and local employees looking for a quick lunch, said Meg Marcozzi, public relations coordinator.

Hungry patrons not visiting the museum can catch an express shuttle from the visitors’ center to the restaurant and grab fare to take back to their offices or eat in the dining room. Menu items range from $1 snacks to $8 sandwiches.

The café’s strategy is simple: customers can pick up freshly-made sandwiches, salads, wraps and snacks, or even a glass of ice-cold lemonade, from a refrigerated case.

“It has to work for museum-goers, so it has to be quick,” Butler said.

But he had Hagley employees and local workers in mind when he designed the menu.

The food, like the chicken Caesar sandwich or asparagus with lemon vinaigrette, is all healthy fare, Butler said, ideal for customers who visit frequently.

Most of the food comes from local farmers, he said, and organic or sustainably grown produce is selected whenever possible. Some of the produce, like peas, melons, peppers and herbs, is grown in a vegetable patch a dozen steps from the restaurant’s door.

People seek out farm fresh food these days, he said, so keeping up with the trends makes sense for a restaurant at the birthplace of DuPont, a company that prides itself on innovation. But there are challenges to offering farm fresh fare on a seasonal menu, he said.

“It’ll be interesting to find out what we can do locally in mid-December,” he said.

As part of Butler’s agreement with Hagley, Toscana will also become caterer for the museum’s special events business.

The museum recently expanded its special events offerings to include social functions and weddings, Marcozzi said, and Hagley members can now host a chateau country wedding in the Soda House or Library.

Cooking for special events at Hagley is exciting since it gives Butler a home base for his 20-year-old catering business, he said.

But whether he’s assembling a turkey sandwich or baking a few hundred vol-au-vents, Butler said it’s hard to find a better backdrop for a good meal than Hagley’s 235 acres of history and scenery.