By admin 
There’s not much in Browns Valley, but what’s there is special.
That’s the message Paul and Stephanie Ladeira are sending at Blue Ruby Farm, a farmstay in the rural community east of Marysville. The farmstay offers three rooms Thursday through Sunday, with nightly dinners cooked by Paul.
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Ladeira has been in fine dining for decades, cooking in esteemed kitchens on the East Coast and ultimately coming to the Bay Area and working at Chez Panisse. He still works as a private chef in the South Bay during the early part of the week.
The concept of the farmstay is modeled after Italian agriturismi, where guests stay on farms and enjoy farm-to-table meals. Ladeira experienced them in 2008, on a trip with fellow chefs and farmers. Traveling from southern Tuscany through Umbria to Rome, they visited several farms that were preserving heirloom varieties of grains, nuts and fruits. In many cases the farms were quite old.
“For example, one of the farms that was near Rome, his grandfather bought the farm from Napoleon,” Ladeira said.
He was inspired not only by the enduring foodways, but also by how that culture was reflected in the quality of the food being grown.
“I was really enchanted by this aliveness in the food that was grown there. I realized at some point later on that if I wanted that level of quality, I was going to have to probably grow it myself,” he said.
The Ladeiras let the idea of creating their own farmstay experience percolate for a number of years. They knew it would be an expensive proposition. It would turn out to be a logistical struggle as well.
In 2016, they took the plunge, selling their Oakland home to fund the project. They began looking at properties in Mendocino, Amador and Placer Counties. The main obstacle they encountered was the county planning departments not grasping their concept.
“We would go to talk to someone, and they would say, ‘oh, you want to do a bed and breakfast?’ And we would say, ‘no, it’s not a bed and breakfast.’ And they would look at us kind of puzzled, and then they would just tell us all the reasons why we couldn’t do it,” Ladeira said.
In general, licensed bed and breakfasts are only permitted to serve morning meals, hence the name. However, California has a classification for farmstays, small-scale accommodations of up to five rooms on an agricultural property. The issue was whether the county had adopted this property type in its plan.
When Blue Ruby’s Yuba County property came on the market, the Ladeiras were intrigued.
“I saw pictures of it, and I was like, wow, this place looks amazing,” he said. Even more amazingly, Yuba County had farmstays in its plan. The Ladeiras purchased the property in 2017.
Getting the farmstay off the ground was not a slam dunk. The Ladeiras faced financing issues when the pandemic struck, and they had an 11th hour change of contractor due to illness. Ultimately, the structure was completed in 2022.
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Ladeira had studied permaculture, and set about shaping the land to capture and slow waterflow. He’s growing a variety of fruit trees, as well as other produce in beds in the front.
“A lot of the way I farm is quite lazy. I spent a lot of time learning what was already here: fig, mulberry, chestnut. I will often get seeds from places and from breeders where they maintain some of their wild genetics. For example, I’ve got this wild cherry tomato from Honduras found on the side of the road, and now it just grows everywhere. I have wild broccoli rabe and wild chicories that I throw all over the place,” he said.
Even so, he can’t grow everything, so Ladeira hit up all the local farms and ranches to source from them. It all ends up on the plate.
When we visited, the inn was full, and one party, a couple from Grass Valley, was joining for dinner. As Stephanie entertained the guests, Paul prepared dinner, methodically puttering in the kitchen all afternoon. Ladeira is of Portuguese descent, and leaned into that heritage for the night’s meal.
While guests chatted and enjoyed local wines, he served an amuse bouche of a pasteis, a sort of fried empanada, filled with shredded braised rabbit and olives both from his trees and from another local farm.
For a first course, Ladeira served an artfully composed salad of hand-pulled mozzarella from a nearby farm, beets, shoelace-thin asparagus, pea puree and olive oil from local producer Apollo. Ladeira uses a mister to spray the plate with housemade rose vinegar to give a whiff of funky brightness without shocking the palate.
For the main, Ladeira cooked sirloin steaks from Yuba Valley Ranch, just down the road, over an open flame grill in the backyard. (“Paul likes to cook in as many places as possible,” quipped Stephanie.) This he sauced with a combination of caramelized onions, wine, brandy, beef jus, parsley and mustard.
Accompanying the steak were marble potatoes that had been poached in clarified butter and tallow, then slow fried and finally quick fried, breaking down the internal starches into a molten texture, served with a green garlic puree.
For dessert, Ladeira dug deep into his Portuguese roots, fusing two traditional desserts into one. For the base, he made a simple rice pudding perfumed with rose petals. On top he poured the batter for a pao de lo, made by whipping whole eggs and sugar until fluffy then combining in a little olive oil and flour. The resulting cake becomes layered, with a custardy bottom and a cakey top.
Come Saturday morning, the Ladeiras have one more local treat in store, taking guests to nearby Oregon House bakery Artisan Lavinia for its remarkable pastries.
Farmstays at Blue Ruby Farm are $325 per night for the king room and $300 per night for a queen room with a two-night minimum. Dinner is $120 per person plus beverages. The wine and beer list features local wineries and brewers.
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