Walking into Roots to River Farm on a Saturday evening feels like stumbling upon a bustling town square. Children race across the lawn while neighbors linger over gourmet appetizers and house-made sparkling red aperitivos. Steaming pizzas emerge from the outdoor oven as guests settle around communal tables and conversations stretch long into the evening. It’s hard to imagine that this thriving gathering place began with a simple love story involving a farmer, a chef, and the most amazing vegetables.

After nearly a decade of testing recipes for Gourmet magazine, chef and cookbook author Ian Knauer knew exceptional produce when he saw it. Years spent in professional kitchens and food media had trained him to notice every detail, so when vegetables from a small Solebury farm began arriving at his newly opened cooking school in Stockton, New Jersey, he was intrigued.

“When I was working at the magazine, I would sort through lemons for 20 minutes just to find three perfect ones,” he recalls. “Then suddenly, all this picture-perfect produce was appearing like magic.”

The vegetables belonged to Bucks County organic farmer Malaika Spencer. From a young age, Spencer knew she wanted to work in agriculture.

“I had fallen in love with the work of farming and the food of farming,” Spencer says. “Farming expressed the way I wanted to be in the world.”

Spencer spent years studying sustainable agriculture and working on farms throughout the Northeast before returning to Bucks County 15 years ago to start her own organic farm. It was that farm, and the extraordinary produce it yielded, that first caught the attentionof Knauer.

What began as a shared appreciation for exceptional food soon evolved into something much deeper. Spencer and Knauer began to imagine a life in which her passion for growing food and his passion for preparing it could exist side by side.

The two eventually married and started a family. In July 2025, after extensive renovation, the couple opened Roots to River’s Amara Kitchen & Tasting Room. In a rural area with few public gathering spaces, it didn’t take long for neighbors to make it their own.

Cultivating Community

Today, Roots to River is much more than a farm. It’s a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, market, cooking school, and gathering place where food serves as a catalyst for connection.

What makes Roots to River unique isn’t simply the quality of Knauer’s cooking classes or the beauty of Spencer’s vegetables. It’s the way every part of the business is designed to bring people together. Whether neighbors are picking up CSA shares, gathering for wood-fired pizza, or sharing a seat at one of the farm’s communal dinners, they are participating in something that feels increasingly rare: genuine face-to-face community.

The cooking school extends that sense of connection beyond the farm’s immediate community. Along with local home cooks, Knauer regularly welcomes corporate groups, which come not just to cook but to practice working together in a different way. In the kitchen, participants have to communicate, share space, and trust one another. As Knauer often tells visitors, “If people can work together in a kitchen, they can work together anywhere.”

That sense of connection is especially visible on Wednesdays and Saturdays, when the tasting room is open to the public. Friends and neighbors pile into their cars or walk down the country road to Amara Kitchen & Tasting Room. “They pick their kids up from school, they bring their family, they order a pizza, they sit outside or inside, the kids go and play, and they get a glass of wine,” Knauer says.

The couple’s own children, Oradel, 5, and Ellis, 1, take special delight in the community gatherings. In fact, Oradel has become one of pizza night’s biggest promoters. “She tells all of her teachers about pizza night every Wednesday, and then they come, and then she sits with them,” Spencer says.

Borrowing From Tradition

The relaxed atmosphere of pizza nights wasn’t created by accident. Spencer and Knauer drew inspiration from their time spent in Europe, where gathering with friends and neighbors for a drink before dinner is woven into daily life. During a trip to Barcelona, Spencer was struck by the city’s relaxed aperitivo culture. “People were just getting out of work, and they’d come to the bar, and it was just this casual and relaxed way of interacting at the end of the day,” she says. “It’s such a different kind of drinking culture than what we have here.”

The sparkling red aperitivo known as Amara that is now served at Roots to River traces its origins to their European travels. While Spencer fell in love with the long, lingering evenings, Knauer was intrigued by the bittersweet vermouth they enjoyed. He wondered how he could replicate those flavors using local ingredients.

The solution came in an unexpected way. “Years ago, Malaika came home from a farmer’s market with a crate of radicchio and was like, ‘Can you do anything with this, because it’s not going to make it to the next market?’” he says.

Knauer went to work. After weeks of infusion and fermentation, the result was the distinctive Amara aperitivo that transforms the vegetable’s characteristic bitterness into something surprisingly complex and drinkable. “I tried it with radicchio and a bunch of herbs that I had growing,” Knauer recalls. “The first time out, it was just so delicious.”

He immediately summoned the farm crew to taste it. “Nobody could believe it,” he adds.

More Than a Meal

What began as an experiment in the kitchen has become a signature part of Roots to River, particularly its monthly Tavolata dinners. Inspired by the Italian tradition of communal eating, the gatherings take place in the upstairs open-kitchen dining room, where guests can watch the chefs at work while sharing a meal together.

Many of the chefs who participate in these dinners bring years of culinary expertise, which enhances the experience. “The cooks who have found us and want to cook here have been attracted because of the quality of vegetables, but they all have Michelin experience,” Knauer says. “I can say that we have rutabaga and fennel, and they will create these incredible dishes featuring rutabaga and fennel.”

Even the dining tables reflect the farm’s philosophy. Crafted from a single tree harvested on the property, the long tables fit 12 guests and were intentionally designed to bring people together. “We don’t have any two-tops or four-tops,” Knauer says. “When you come, you sit with people you don’t know.”

Roots to River Project Manager Mark Valente has witnessed the sense of community at Tavolata dinners firsthand. He has seen guests arrive as strangers and leave exchanging contact information and making plans to see one another again.

For some visitors, that sense of connection is part of what drew them to the area in the first place. Kira Barrett, who moved from Manhattan, says being able to enjoy locally grown food while participating in a community built around it has felt like “an absolute gift.”

The weekly gatherings have become a cherished ritual for Meg Loos. “Having the privilege of being able to dine at Amara Kitchen every Wednesday is the absolute highlight of our week,” she says. “Fabulous humans making incredible food in a killer space. Doesn’t get much better than that.”

Striving and Thriving

While the Amara aperitivo has become a centerpiece of the farm’s communal gatherings, the vegetable behind the drink reflects something equally important to the farm: learning to work with the land rather than against it. As changing weather patterns make some traditional crops increasingly difficult to grow organically, Spencer has learned to focus on plants that are naturally suited to the region. “We can no longer grow cucumbers—the pest and disease pressure is too high in an organic system,” she says. “But something like radicchio can handle too much wet, it can handle too much cold. It’s a plant that feels like it’s supposed to be here.”

Likewise, rather than forcing an idea onto the landscape, Spencer and Knauer have built something that grows naturally from this place and the people who call it home. They have blended the best of the high-end culinary world with old-world traditions of gathering around a shared table, creating something uniquely suited to this corner of Bucks County.

“When you sit at a table and you eat with people you don’t know, now you know them,” Knauer says. “Now you’re neighbors.”

Lela Casey has been writing professionally for over 15 years. She and her family live in Doylestown.

Photograph by Jennifer Janikic Photography