Quattro’s Farm Store: Where Flavor and Community Meet

On any given afternoon at Quattro’s Farm Store in Pleasant Valley, Joyce Quattrociocchi is behind the counter doing what she has always done: feeding people — deliberately.

There are no marble counters, no curated pyramids. A smoker hums quietly and deliciously in the back. Fresh sausages — made from her father-in-law’s Italian recipes — rest in the case. A regular leans in to ask whether today might be a good day for short ribs. “It’s always a good day for short ribs,” Joyce says.

She is quick, warm, and decisive. And she does not sell anything she hasn’t tasted herself. “I’ve literally eaten everything in this store,” she says. “If I don’t like it, it doesn’t stay.”

That standard applies to everything here — the olive oil in her sauces, the poultry raised on their farm, the bread that disappears in hours, the bone broth simmering in the back.

People often ask why she doesn’t open another location. “I like to be hands-on,” she says. “If you keep growing, you lose it.” Lose what? “The intimacy. People come in, and they know us. We know about their lives. It’s not just shopping. It’s talking about what you’re cooking for Sunday.”

Joyce and her customers swap recipes across the counter daily — a suggestion for roasting duck becomes a conversation about herbs; someone returns the next week to report on a new way they braised short ribs.

She calls it exactly what her father-in-law always called it: a farm store.

The Girl From the Last Farm in the Bronx

That instinct — to know exactly what’s on the table — began long before Pleasant Valley. Joyce grew up on eleven acres in the Bronx, which she believes was the last working family farm in the area. Today, the land is covered by apartment buildings. Back then, it was soil, cousins, and Sunday pasta.

“You don’t realize how lucky you are,” she says. Sunday dinner was at three o’clock. Macaroni first. Always.
“I don’t know if it was just Italian tradition,” she says, smiling, “or because they had to feed a lot of kids. You fill them up with pasta. Then you make a piece of meat.”

Her grandmother rolled the dough by hand, cut it into ribbons, and laid it across bed sheets dusted with cornmeal to dry. “Like nothing,” Joyce says. “Every week.”

There were arguments. There was laughter. Someone stormed off. Two minutes later, they were passing bread again. Years later, while working at the farmers’ market, an older Italian woman said something that stayed with her.

“She told me the problem today is people don’t eat dinner together anymore,” Joyce recalls. “Therapy used to happen at our dinner tables. You laughed, you cried, you fought.” Joyce nods. “And then you made up.”

She runs her store as if that table never disappeared.

The Birds

If Joyce grew up on vegetables and macaroni, her husband Sal grew up on poultry. His grandparents ran a live bird market in Yonkers before moving north in the 1940s to start their own farm, which the family eventually devoted entirely to birds. Sal’s mother (pictured above) worked that farm into her nineties.

“She wrangled her own turkeys,” Joyce says, still impressed. “She wasn’t afraid of anything, and she loved her birds.”

Today, Quattro’s raises chickens, ducks, geese, pheasants, and several varieties of turkey. Every five weeks, flocks of 500 chicks — tiny, noisy, and full of promise — arrive to be raised by hand: hand-fed, hand-watered, and carefully watched.

When ready, the birds are processed in the family’s inspected slaughterhouse.

“Nothing leaves our farm,” Joyce says. “Everything is done here.”

Because they don’t freeze birds early to control size, the chickens grow week by week. In winter, some reach seventeen pounds.
“I’m not kidding,” she says, laughing.

In summer, customers ask for smaller birds for the grill — quartered or spatchcocked. “It’s funny to see the repetition,” she says. “People cook differently when the weather changes.”

She notices those rhythms instinctively. She always has.

A Union at Union Square Market

Joyce met her future husband Sal at the Union Square Greenmarket. Her family’s produce stand — Migliorelli Farm — stood directly across from his family’s poultry stand.

“All day, across from each other,” she says. When she decided to move upstate and join Sal’s life and farm, she told her brother she was switching sides. “I said, ‘You’re losing a worker,’” she laughs.

She crossed the aisle — and never really left the market. She still sells at Union Square on Saturdays. Her daughter, Maria, now runs the stand there and also sells at the Rhinebeck Farmers Market.

“At a farmers market, you sell what you raise,” Joyce says. “People ask me, ‘Can you bring steak next week?’ I say no. There’s a beef farmer there.” It’s a code she respects. No duplication.

Sauce, Stock, and the Scruffy Baker

If the farm provides the birds, the store runs on sauce, beautiful meats, and bread.

Joyce makes puttanesca. She makes bolognese. She makes a Neapolitan sauce. She makes her mother-in-law’s sauce and her mother’s sauce — meatless, bright, deeply familiar.

“And then I make an Italian pot roast sauce,” she says. “And soups. We do our own stocks. Bone broth. ”The bone broth has a following. “They fly,” she says. “I’m constantly making them.”

There is no filler.

“If someone doesn’t want to cook, at least they know there’s no crap in there,” she says. “It’s olive oil. It’s good ingredients.”

Even in summer, when the store runs hot and the ovens make the air heavy, they’re roasting. They cook their own roast beef. They roast and smoke their own farm-raised turkey. The smoker hums year-round. Prepared meals are frozen for easy reheating. “You finish it at home,” she says. “It’s real food.”

And then there’s the Scruffy Baker. He delivers four loaves a week. Only four. He mills his own organic grain. He bakes slow sourdough loaves that sell out in hours. “He texts me, ‘Not baking this week,’” Joyce says, laughing. “And people get mad.”
He once entered the Dutchess County Fair as a joke and walked away with four awards. “Now everyone wants his bread.”

Inside the shop, baking has quietly become a family affair. Maria has begun baking chocolate babkas that sell out almost immediately. Joyce still makes giant chocolate-chip cookies and anisette toast from her grandmother’s recipe. Heaps of produce from her brother’s farm Migliorelli’s arrive daily, keeping the shelves stocked with fresh vegetables.

When the weather warms, another small ritual returns: the soft-serve machine clicks on. “It’s a big hit,” Joyce says simply. Kids line up. Adults pretend it’s for the kids. They even have pup cups.

Four loaves. Babkas cooling. Sauce simmering. Vanilla spinning into paper cups.

Nothing here is accidental. Everything has passed through Joyce’s hands — or at least her palate.
“If I wouldn’t eat it,” she says, “it’s not in here.”

The Butcher Counter

Butcheress Jess first started working in the store in 2012, while still in school, taking what seemed at the time like a simple job behind the counter. Over the years she learned the rhythms of the shop — the customers, the cuts, the standards Joyce keeps for everything in the case.

When Joyce suddenly needed someone to keep the butcher counter running, Jess stepped in. What began as helping out quickly revealed itself as something more lasting. She had the instincts for it — steady hands, curiosity, and a deep respect for the craft.

Now Jess runs the butcher counter, making fresh Italian sausages from Joyce’s father-in-law’s recipes and managing the smoker in the back. “We have a reputation to follow,” Joyce says.

The poultry is theirs, and the beef comes from carefully chosen vendors. They carry high-quality Midwest beef — grass-fed, grain-finished, Choice, and Prime. “It’s really good meat,” Joyce says simply. So good, in fact, that Joyce’s advice for cooking it borders on minimalist philosophy. “Salt and pepper,” she says. “That’s all it needs.” Their ground beef is especially prized; chuck forms the base, but Jess adds filet and prime rib trimmings to the grind. “It’s really flavorful,” Joyce says. “That’s why.” The pork is chosen deliberately — properly fatty. “We want fatty pork,” she says. “That’s flavor.”

Everything in the case has been considered, tasted, and approved — and now passes through Jess’s hands first. At the counter, she moves easily through the work: tying roasts, grinding beef, talking customers through cuts the way someone once talked her through them. The craft, Joyce says, has simply found its next set of hands.

Small and Mighty

The staff is small but efficient. “It’s just Jess and me,” Joyce says. “Maria helps a few days a week.”

The energy is nurturing, Italian, familial. Customers debate short ribs. They talk about Easter dinners, snowstorms, and Sunday cooking. They stay longer than they meant to.

Joyce doesn’t want sleek. She doesn’t want to be scaled. She sees online ordering as the thief of warm shopping — of conversation, of that moment when someone asks, How would you cook this? “We don’t need all the commercialism,” she says. “What matters to us is the store — and the people who walk through the door.”

Once a month, she and Sal drive north to their cabin near Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks — higher elevation, thinner air, quieter mornings. “When we bought it, I told him if we’re buying this, we’re using it,” she says. “My grandfather always said you have to make time to have fun.” They go for a few days at a time. They fish. They hike. They sit by the water. “It’s like a drug,” she says, laughing. “If he doesn’t go up, he’s in a bad mood.” It’s their reset.

Then she comes back down. Back to the birds. Back to the sauces. Back to the counter.

“That’s our job,” Joyce says. And she does it beautifully.

Joyce’s Pasta e Ceci: A Simple Farmhouse Pasta from Quattro’s Farm Store

If you ask Joyce Quattrociocchi what she cooks when she wants something deeply comforting and unmistakably Italian, the answer is often pasta e ceci — pasta with chickpeas. It’s the kind of dish that has lived on family tables for generations: humble pantry ingredients slowly simmered until they become something far greater than the sum of their parts.

At Quattro’s Farm Store, Joyce talks about food the same way she cooks — simply, instinctively, and without fuss. Olive oil, garlic, chickpeas, tomato paste, and good pasta come together in a rustic, brothy sauce that feels both nourishing and deeply satisfying.
And, true to Joyce’s style, there’s one rule she stands by: don’t obsess over timing. “I don’t time my pasta,” she says. “I just taste it to see if it’s done the way I like.”

Pasta e Ceci (Pasta with Chickpeas)

Ingredients | Serves: 4–6

• 2 (14-ounce) cans chickpeas
• ¼ cup olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 4 tablespoons tomato paste
• ¼ cup thinly sliced celery
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• 1 pound pappardelle (Joyce likes the very wide Delverde)

Method

1. Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat.
2. Add the crushed garlic and cook gently until fragrant, being careful not to burn it.
3. Stir in the tomato paste and sliced celery, mixing well.
4. Strain the chickpeas over the pot, letting the liquid from the cans fall into the pot with the olive oil and garlic. Do not add the chickpeas yet.
5. Fill the two empty chickpea cans with warm water and add that to the pot.
6. Let the mixture simmer for about 15 minutes.
7. Add the chickpeas and cook another 20 minutes, allowing the flavors to deepen.
8. While the sauce cooks, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pappardelle until tender.
9. Joyce doesn’t watch the clock when cooking pasta — she simply tastes it until it reaches the texture she likes.
10. Drain the pasta and serve with the chickpea sauce spooned generously over the top.

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Photos courtesy of: Sabrina Eberhard and Quattros Farm Market

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