Restaurants Are Charging $12 for Fancy Butter. Is It Worth the Hype?

Inside Dedalus, a wine market and restaurant in Burlington, Vermont, I sat puzzled. Bread and butter were on the menu for $12, priced the same as a tempting chicken liver mousse. Unconvinced that the age-old duo should carry such a cost, I went with the cow itself: beef tartare dotted with caviar and shavings of horseradish. Still, the waiter returned to push the bread and butter. And in the end, curiosity won out; I caved.

I grew up in an America where butter has only ever been the warm-up act at a comedy show. People might notice it because it’s tossed on stage, they accept it because it’s typically free, and they semi-appreciate it because it temporarily stops the crowd from complaining that the main act is taking too long to show up. Butter is certainly never the reason one would buy the ticket in the first place. But, thanks to a handful of restaurants and creameries around the country, that’s all starting to change.

When the very fancy butter arrived, it was perched on a rustic wooden board, deep yellow and sitting opposite a loaf of olive ciabatta. The kitchen had dressed it up with coarse sea salt and a dusting of ground black pepper. This was not restaurant butter as I remembered it: a sad, foil wrapped rectangle melting into a pool next to a dinner roll.

I dipped in the knife, spread the golden fat, and took a bite. I was instantly floored. It was sweet and tangy, creamy and smooth, and lingered on my tongue. The waiter, pleased with their work, explained that only a few places in the world carried this specific brand—Animal Farm Butter, which came from a small and cleverly named dairy in Orwell, Vermont.

Unlike the cows in George Orwell’s novel, who are mistreated by a neglectful farmer and then duped by a tyrannical pig and his brainwashed henchman, Animal Farm was built on a basis of respect for their animals. In 2000, Diane St. Claire opened with a mission: make gourmet butter, stay small and maintain quality control, and provide a good life to her herd, which at the time included just three grass-fed Jersey cows, a breed that produces milk with high butterfat content.

After reading about the career of renowned chef Thomas Keller and his California restaurant, The French Laundry, St. Claire sent Keller five pounds of her butter and asked if he’d be interested in purchasing some for his restaurant. “Two days later, there was a message on my machine,” St. Claire says.

“It was far superior to anything we could do,” Keller tells me, before recalling the voicemail he left for St. Claire: “How much do you make? Because we’ll buy it all.”

Besides bold asks of Michelin star chefs, St. Claire jumped through a significant number of hoops to make her butter extra special. She gave the cows space to rest and roam and fed them what they were biologically designed to eat: grass. (Their diet was supplemented with hay year-round, and grain in the winter.) She cross-bred her American Jerseys with Jerseys from Holland (which produce more butterfat) and Jerseys from New Zealand (which are more efficient grazers). Still, she kept her herd small so she could carefully assess their health, habits, and needs. All this translated to better, albeit more expensive, milk.