Tennessee native lists favorite things about local favorite attraction
The Apple Barn Cider Mill and General Store is a popular, iconic destination in Sevierville Tennessee, very close to the Pigeon Forge line.
I love going there for the shopping, apple treats and especially the winery.
Plus, two local favorite restaurants are on the property – Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant and Farmhouse Grill.
So, if you love sweet, specialty wines, apple butter, apple pies, apple fritters, apple cider and heck – anything apple-flavored, you should schedule a trip to the Apple Barn in Tennessee.
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What can you do at the Apple Barn?
Put simply, the Apple Barn has a selection of restaurants, stores and shops on-site, where you can snack, dine or shop. Some of my favorite things to do there include …
1. Dine at one of the restaurants
If you’re planning a visit to the Apple Barn, be ready to eat.
The entire property offers delicious snacks like apple dumplings, apple pies, apple donuts and more.
But if you’re ready to eat a full meal, Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant and Applewood Farmhouse Grill offer delicious Southern meals.
Pro tip: Don’t arrive too hungry because wait times may be long for these popular restaurants.
2. Start your Christmas shopping
Apple soap? How about apple cider? Or apple pancake mix?
Check, check and check.
While I enjoy visiting any time of the year, fall is a good season to visit and start your Christmas shopping.
It’s easy to find unique gifts, home decor or souvenirs that have mass appeal at the Apple Barn General Store or the Christmas and Candle Shop.
3. Try a few cider tastings
The Apple Barn is a great place to enjoy fresh apple cider and hard cider.
The folks at the Apple Barn begin to pick most varieties from the apple orchard to make fresh cider in September and continue through October.
So, you can get fresh apple cider at The Cider Bar along with souvenir mugs, fried apple pie or their famous apple stack cake.
4. Enjoy some wine tastings
If cider isn’t your thing, they also have an on-site winery. But the products are made with apples instead of grapes.
The Apple Barn Winery features seasonal flavors, and fall is a great time to catch favorites such as Apple Cranberry or Apple Peach.
The wine tastings are free but remember to tip your server.
They are also part of the Rocky Top Wine Trail.
5. Get some ice cream
If you enjoy locally made ice cream, this is certainly your spot.
The Apple Valley Creamery is an old-time ice cream parlor with an antique soda fountain.
They offer scoops of ice cream, banana splits, sundaes, floats and other baked goods.
Of course, the baked goods are all made from scratch.
The Apple Barn history
I also enjoy knowing that the Apple Barn is historic. For instance, the Apple Barn was a real barn that was built back in 1910.
The Apple Barn as it is known today was established in 1981, according to their website. The Mullendore family owned the barn in 1910, and the family farmed the land for generations.
In the 1970s, Bon Hicks and Bill Kilpatrick bought the farm as an investment and “gentleman’s farm”.
The Kilpatricks planted a few apple trees on a whim and soon began making cider.
In the 1980s, the property expanded to include the Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant, run by restauranteur Jim Huff. The partnership later included Stokely Hospitality.
What is the difference between the Farmhouse Restaurant and Farmhouse Grill?
Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant is the original on-site Apple Barn restaurant.
The Applewood Farmhouse Grill was later established in 1995 to meet the growing demand for on-site dining.
Overall, the two restaurants are very similar. And they both have delicious food. Fried chicken is also a popular choice as is the Applewood smoked ham.
Both offer a complimentary serving of apple cinnamon muffins, apple fritters, apple jam and an apple julep.
They also both offer breakfast, lunch and dinner.
They are both famous for offering country classics and farmhouse specials.
You’ll see many of the same menu items between the two places, although there are small differences here and there.
If you want to compare menus, check out the Restaurant menu here and the Grill menu here.
Parking and what you should know
The Apple Barn is a great place to visit, and some of my favorite things about it are the free parking and no admission fee to enter. The on-site restaurants and stores include:
- Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant
- The Apple Barn General Store
- Cider Bar
- The Cider House
- Candy Factory
- The Creamery
- Apple Barn Winery
- Christmas & Candle Shop
- Applewood Farmhouse Grill
On my last visit, I was told you can bring a bottle of wine to the restaurant, so be sure to go to the winery first before you dine.
Also, remember to put your names down early if you plan to dine there since wait times can be long.
The Apple Barn is located at 230 Apple Valley Road in Sevierville, TN.
For more, visit applebarncidermill.com.
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An Honest Review of Applewood Farmhouse From a Local
Located on the Pigeon Forge-Sevierville line, along the waters of the Little Pigeon River, sits Applewood Valley, a series of orchard-related stores, shops and restaurants with consistent themes built around the on-site orchard.
In a region known for neon excess, it’s certainly a nice change of pace – charming and classic. It’s a throwback to the agricultural history of the region that manages to successfully participate in the Smokies tourism trade.
One of the two main restaurants onsite is the Applewood Farmhouse.
Serving homestyle classics in a large farmhouse, the Applewood sits near the top of the down-home niche in the Smokies.
Several establishments are competing for your down-home dining dollars in the Smokies. The Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant, part of the Apple Valley complex, may well be the best of the bunch.
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The history of Applewood Farmhouse
In 1986, a pair of apple-orchard farming families reached out and partnered with canning giant Stokely – which has roots in the region dating back to the 1700s – on the Applewood Farmhouse.
The venture was a rousing success. As a result, it has grown into the Apple Valley complex you see today with two restaurants, the Apple Cider Barn, a Christmas-themed store, a creamery and an inn at the top of the hill.
Overall, the complex wouldn’t be a bad place to base your vacation.
For instance, we saw people walking down from the valley to the river for some swimming, and I was sorely tempted to get out of the car and go for a plunge myself.
Today, the Farmhouse is a quaint eatery spread across several rooms.
With seating overlooking the orchard, the compound or the river across the way, the setting is ideal for downhome country cooking.
What’s on the menu?
It’s exactly as you’d expect. Breakfast is heavy with farmhouse classics like pancakes, various items with gravy, omelets and skillets.
Lunch and dinner are also filled with what you’d call country classics, like fried chicken, meatloaf, turkey and dressing, chicken and dumplings and more.
Each meal comes with a choice of soup, side and dessert.
Everyone also gets apple fritters with homemade apple butter and an Applewood Julep – which is not alcoholic.
Sides include fried okra and grilled corn on the cob which was a big hit at our table.
The pros
The food is pretty much the ideal of this style of cooking.
There are, of course, chains across the country that “specialize” in this kind of cooking as well as several competitors in Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge and Sevier County.
I’d be hard-pressed to say I’ve found anything outside of a little mom-and-pop that does country-style cooking better.
The is fresh flavorful and well prepared. It’s affordable and you will get a portion size that will fill you up.
Our waitress almost automatically offered to box up our included desserts just because she said most of the diners were too full to eat their dessert on the spot.
By the way, in our experience the waitstaff is exceptional.
They are always just super bright and friendly despite being quite busy.
The cons
Sadly, the profit margins on down-home cooking are slim.
That means there are places where the quality of ingredients will be lesser, but that’s a problem across the genre and I thought it was the least noticeable at the Farmhouse.
Overall, I just don’t have a lot of cons.
Pricing and location
Most of the meals are right in the $20-$22 range, so it’s a good value for everything that is included as well as the experience of farmhouse dining.
Located on 240 Apple Valley Road, the complex is located just on the Sevierville side of the Pigeon Forge city limits.
The Farmhouse Restaurant is just down the road from the inn and next to the giant barn. You can’t miss it.
The Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant is a somewhat underappreciated destination in the Smokies.
Located just inside the Sevierville City limits, the complex offers an impressive amount of agritourism and is an excellent family destination in the mountains.
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An Honest Review of the Applewood Farmhouse Grill, From a Local
The Apple Valley complex, located on the Sevierville-Pigeon Forge line, is a multi-purpose facility.
It is designed to fill all of your apple-based tourism needs.
In addition to the hotel, the Apple Valley Creamery, the Christmas and Candle Shop, the Apple Barn and the Cider House, the complex is bookended by a pair of sit-down restaurants – the Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant and the Applewood Farmhouse Grill.
For years, scholars have wondered about the phenomenon of two very similar restaurants that are so close together.
Maybe, they speculated, the Grill has a significantly different menu from the Restaurant. Or perhaps the Restaurant serves old-timey, down-on-the-farm style meals while the Grill serves new-fangled, down-on-the-farm style meals.
In this article, I will settle for posterity, exactly what purpose the Applewood Farmhouse Grill serves.
The Applewood Farmhouse Grill is the second of two restaurants on the wider Apple Barn complex. While you might assume significant differences between the two, the Grill is just a slightly adjusted version of the Restaurant.
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About the Applewood Farmhouse Grill
Apple Valley is built upon the foundations of an actual working farm and orchard.
The Farmhouse Restaurant began life as a home on the orchard in the 1920s.
It was converted to a restaurant in 1987.
The Applewood Farmhouse Grill opened less than a decade later, on the other side of the complex, maybe 500 yards from the original restaurant.
The main purpose of the Grill was to serve the overflow crowd from the Farmhouse Restaurant.
The menu
As expected, from its stated purpose of serving Farmhouse Restaurant overflow customers, this sister restaurant’s menu is much like the one just down the road.
It’s heavy on country classics like fried chicken, meatloaf, chicken and dumplings and chicken pot pie.
Each meal comes with apple fritters and apple butter – which can be purchased at the Apple Barn but not in the restaurants.
You also get an apple julip drink, essentially a small variety of juices mixed. It’s not alcoholic.
Most entrees come with a choice of soup, mashed potatoes, and a choice of sides.
Sides include beans, greens, fried okra, mac and cheese and other country classics.
Also, if you want something a little less country and a little more rock and roll, there is a blackened chicken alfredo pasta.
However, the majority of options are going to be certified down-home cooking.
If you want something with a little kick, the Nashville Hot Chicken Mac and Cheese is probably your best bet.
The pros
It’s a little like that greatest hits album “50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong.”
If a restaurant is doing enough business that it essentially opens a copycat just down the road, you can assume it’s going to be good. And it is.
At this point, I’ve tried the majority of the menus and haven’t been disappointed.
In this type of downhome-style restaurant, I’m almost always left wanting more spice and flavor, and I still do at the Applewood family of restaurants, but at least the spice and flavor are noticeable. But it’s nothing that can’t be helped with a dollop of hot sauce.
The Grill has some items you can’t get at the Farmhouse.
There’s a sirloin steak, the aforementioned pasta, and a grilled chicken salad.
The Grill also has to-go ordering.
The cons
There’s a little bit more on the Farmhouse Restaurant menu in terms of country cooking compared to the Grill.
For example, the pot roast, the turkey and gravy and the chicken livers don’t make the journey from the Farmhouse to the Grill.
The Farmhouse also has a chicken cordon bleu that I feel thematically would be better served at the Grill.
In general, I don’t have a lot of cons.
The music selection is not what I’m looking for, but I suppose that’s more of a me thing.
Country radio hits are probably appropriate for the Farmhouse eateries.
Pricing and location
The Farmhouse Grill is an affordable option.
Meal prices range from $19.99 to $23.99 at the time of this writing and include substantial serving sizes.
In fact, I don’t think you’re going to find a significantly more affordable menu at a sit-down restaurant in the region.
The Grill is located on Apple Valley Road, right as you pull into the valley complex.
Be aware the road starts at four lanes but quickly drops to two.
The right-hand lane is a turn lane that peels off before you reach the valley.
When you make the turn onto Apple Valley Road, you’re going to want to get in the left lane.
The Applewood Farmhouse Grill is a fine choice for downhome style dining, especially if the slightly superior Farmhouse Restaurant has a wait.
The food is good and plentiful and it’s also affordable. It makes for a fitting part of a visit to the Apple Valley.
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