Burnt Hill Farm adds Tae Strain counter

A winery is one thing. A 12-seat chef’s counter inside the working kitchen is something else entirely. That’s the shift at Burnt Hill Farm in Clarksburg, Maryland, where chef-partner Tae Strain has launched a new tasting-menu experience built around the farm, the vineyard, and his Asian American cooking. The point is not just dinner. It’s to make the whole property feel like one system — vines, livestock, produce, grain, cellar, and kitchen all feeding the same idea. ### What actually opened? Burnt Hill’s new Chef’s Counter is a 12-seat restaurant tucked into the farm’s hilltop kitchen, just outside Washington. Guests sit close to the action and get a front-row view of service, which makes this feel more like being invited into the engine room than booking a standard winery meal. The evenings. ### Who is Tae Strain? Strain is the chef-partner behind the counter, and his background is a big part of why this opening stands out. He previously cooked at Momofuku CCDC and spent the past few years building his own produce-driven Ggoma Supper Club around Maryland and D.C. Burnt Hill gives him something bigger than a pop-up — a permanent place where the menu can be shaped by the land in real time. ### What kind of food is he cooking? The menu is described as Asian American rather than narrowly tied to one cuisine, which matters because the whole project is about personal expression filtered through Mid-Atlantic ingredients. Burnt Hill says the courses evolve constantly and reflect what those from the Chesapeake region. Basically, this is not a generic “farm-to-table” script with a few soy-based accents dropped on top. ### Why does the farm matter so much? Because Burnt Hill is trying to close the loop between agriculture and hospitality. The property is a 117-acre regenerative farm and vineyard, with livestock, orchards, heritage grains, produce, and roughly 50,000 grapevines feeding the broader operation. That gives the kitchen a different sense of where food and wine come from and why they belong together. ### Why add a counter instead of a bigger dining room? Scarcity is part of the appeal, but intimacy is the real point. A 12-seat counter lets Strain serve a menu that changes fast, explain dishes directly, and pair them tightly with Burnt Hill’s estate wines. It also pushes the winery further upmarket. Instead of a production-driven destination meal. ### Is this new for Burnt Hill? Yes and no. Burnt Hill opened to guests in 2025 after a long buildout, and from the start the team signaled that food would be central to the project. Earlier coverage even hinted that a small chef’s counter would come later. So this opening is new, but it also looks like the completion of the original plan rather than a sudden pivot. ### Why does this matter beyond one farm? Because the D.C. region has plenty of ambitious dining rooms, but fewer places where the restaurant, farm, and winery are this tightly integrated. Burnt Hill is betting that people will drive to rural Montgomery County for something more immersive and harder to copy — a meal that only really makes sense on that land, with that cellar, and with Strain in the kitchen. ### Bottom line The new counter makes Burnt Hill Farm easier to understand. It is not just a scenic winery with food attached. It is trying to become a serious dining destination where the farm is the pantry, the vineyard is the pairing program, and Tae Strain is the reason to book the seat.