Attention, cheese lovers: Local dairy will open cafe with rooftop deck in Kansas City

Weston’s Green Dirt Farm will open a new restaurant in the East Crossroads.

Green Dirt Farm Cafe is scheduled to open at 1601 Oak St. in spring 2023.

Owner Sarah Hoffmann planned to open there last spring, but the project is complex. It will have a cafe seating about 65 people on the first floor and an event space on the upper level with a rooftop deck. It also will have a production facility for its popular cheeses and it will bottle a new product — sheep’s milk.

Hoffmann had her third child in 1998 and decided to leave her job as an academic physician. She soon moved to a farm in Weston.

She had grown up in a U.S. Navy family that moved frequently but always to a small farm.

“We had lots of animals and sometimes even a commercial operation,” she said. “My dad sold sweet corn and tomatoes to local restaurants in Annapolis, Maryland. He’s quite the entrepreneur, my dad.”

As a teenager she helped out in her aunt’s gourmet cheese shop in New Jersey, and her aunt also became a role model as one of the few women who own small businesses in Hoffmann’s world.

In 2002, she started working on a plan for a “humane, environmentally sustainable” sheep dairy.

She didn’t know how to milk sheep or make cheese, so she spent six years learning about the industry. She visited dairies and cheese makers, took weeklong cheese making classes at the University of Wisconsin, and made cheese with cheese makers in France.

Hoffmann launched Green Dirt Farm in 2008.

Her award-winning cheese products are now sold online, in some local grocery stores and at The Better Cheddar shops, as well as at specialty cheese shops and some grocers across the country. Restaurants also are customers.

Six of Green Dirt Farm’s cheeses were awarded ribbons at the American Cheese Society conference and competition in July. Their signature cheese, Dirt Lover, brought home a first place award in the American Originals category.

“We’re particularly proud that Dirt Lover was recognized as an original recipe,” she said.

In December, Food & Wine featured Green Dirt Farm and its Dirt Lover cheese in “The Best Cheese in America: These are the Top 50 U.S. Cheesemakers.”

She opened Green Dirt Farm Cafe in Weston in 2016. It offers such items as club sandwiches, Reubens, The Cuban, the “Ruby, Don’t Go Bacon My Heart” (with Ruby and Aux Arcs cheeses, jam and crumbled bacon on sourdough bread) and “The Stoney One” (with turkey breast, garlic peppercorn cheese, stone-ground mustard, pickled green tomatoes and greens on farmhouse bread. It also has salads, soups and cheese boards.

“It’s a very cheese-centric menu and every item on the menu features our cheese in some way or another,” she said.

The new cafe will have a bigger kitchen, so she will expand the offerings. Its executive chef will be Oscar Arevalo, who is currently Green Dirt’s head cheese maker. Hoffmann plans to hire 12 to 15 employees.

The 13,650-square-foot, two-story building was formerly the Vee Village auto center.

“It’s a very up-and-coming area. There’s lots of great beer down there but they definitely need some cheese. Cheese and beer go together,” Hoffmann said.