The Vermont cob-smoked bacon and pork, buttered pancakes and freshly brewed coffee, and the hamburgers made from local beef are familiar, but the location and façade have changed.

The Farmer's Diner has been reborn, still pushing its landmark motto: food from here.

With the backing of investors, visionary Tod Murphy has opened the latest incarnation of the much-publicized eatery, in what the farmer-turned-entrepreneur hopes is a prime location: Quechee Gorge Village.

The new Farmer's Diner is still using products from within a 70-mile radius of its premises, which is the idea at the heart of his vision: to provide good old-fashioned food grown locally, helping build markets for farmers in the process.

The Quechee establishment is the second stab at that idea. The Farmer's Diner in Barre, which originally opened in July 2002, abruptly closed its doors in August 2005. The staff was laid off and the experiment, which had drawn media coverage by food writers from around the nation, came to an end. But while some thought the closure hailed the demise of the innovative model restaurant, Murphy insists it was edifying.

"A restaurant matrix is really simple," he said. "You've got 30 percent cost of goods, 30 percent labor, 10 percent occupancy, 6 percent overhead … and in Barre we had 45 percent labor, and there was our profit."

The Barre staff spent roughly 25 hours every week cutting potatoes. Equipment was available to make fast work of fresh vegetable preparation, but the kitchen was cramped. At the front of the house, he said, a lack of seating contributed to the demise of the first go-round of what he and backers still hope is a model for future spin-offs.

With Worcester Dining Car number 787 (circa 1946) attached to a rustic post-and-beam barn from Woodstock, the new restaurant has the ultimate diner-barn facade and the size of the kitchen space, Murphy said, is comparable to the whole of the Barre site.

"That was the one big thing we walked away learning was we needed scale," he said. "We couldn't do 50 seats again."

Murphy looked at sites in Burlington and Lebanon, but the scenic, touristy Route 4 was eventually selected as the ideal venue. "It's a great opportunity for low-cost entry," Murphy said.

The Barre diner was an egalitarian place, serving good, local food at a reasonable price. Senatorial hopeful Bernard Sanders was a frequent patron, and "Wendell Berry described us as the democratically priced restaurant," Murphy said. (Berry is a Kentucky writer who pioneered the notion of small-is-better agriculture.)

In William Least Heat-Moon's late-'70s travel memoir, "Blue Highways," a roadside diner's worth was judged by the number of calendars hanging on its walls. Calendars notwithstanding, the worth of Murphy's venture has always been predicated on its use of local fare: 65 cents from every purchase dollar, according to the revamped Farmer's Diner Web site, is spent on regional products.

The new-and-improved diner menu offers beef from the Royal Butcher in Braintree, potatoes from Chappell's in Williamstown, and milk and ice cream from Strafford Organic Creamery.

Vermont Smoke & Cure, another Farmer's Diner Inc. enterprise described by Murphy as the diner's "half-sister" company, will supply the maple-smoked bacon and sausage that is now in area supermarkets. "(All the pork) we can buy locally goes into the Farmer's Diner bacon — it's somewhere between 20 and 50 percent," he said.

Maple syrup comes from Ray Morvan, a New York City native who settled in Northfield 14 years ago. "I came to Vermont and went logging," he said. The former commercial painter now lives comfortably off the grid, tapping more than 5,000 maple trees every season. His farm, Sweet Retreat, supplies Murphy with fancy medium dark and B-grade syrup for the diner and the smokehouse.

Morvan, who yokes four oxen for his farm operations, supplies syrup in food-grade stainless steel, spigot-controlled barrels. "It's much cleaner," he said, "being able to just tap it like that," and, he says, it makes a difference in the flavor of his product.

"They're going back to a lot of local products lately," said Arthur Young of Bradford. For more than 10 years, the 75-year-old has produced a dark honey he likens to maple syrup, thanks to bees cozying up to local stands of Japanese knotweed that flower in the fall. Young's honey is showcased at the Farmer's Diner, in addition to other local venues.

One menu staple that hasn't changed is the inclusion of Jack Lazor's rich organic Jersey yogurt and cream. Lazor, who runs Butterworks Farm in the Northeast Kingdom, said Murphy, is an asset to Vermont's farming community. "He's a huge gift, but I don't think it's recognized enough."

As Murphy planned his reinvention of the diner, he said he thought about setting up shop in a more populous urban area. "We had a big investor in Boston who really wanted us to quit struggling in Vermont and come down," said Murphy. But in the end, he decided against it.

"It's a great, larger community, and we got a lot of feedback — what worked, what didn't work. You know there's a lot of patience for us from customers to make it work, so I don't think we'd have had that in Boston."

But the diner is only the beginning. Murphy still has dreams of creating a regional franchise based on the Farmer's Diner, and he wants to create a foundation that would aid local farmers in supply chain development for the broader marketplace.

"My hope is that this expands and more people can do local food at a family price-point," he said, "and that's not gonna happen unless we talk about how we're doing it, what are the obstacles, what do we learn — we don't need to go to school again and again on this kind of stuff."

The newly expanded diner management team includes Chris Bailey, the diner's controller. He said, "Barre showed the attractiveness of the brand." But "branding," said Murphy, is secondary once you step over the threshold.

"If you're here, you know you're in the Farmer's Diner," he said. "What we really want to do is tell the stories of the farmers who supply us inside."

Originally published online here: http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060917/NEWS/609170359/1002/NEWS01