Courtesy Waltz Creamery & Farmhouse Café Life’s a dance: Rebekah and Brian Waltz transform and renew the past while honoring farming traditions.
From Cows to Cones
It’s All Fresh and Family at the Waltz Creamery & Farmhouse Café in Salladasburg By Linda Roller
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t’s only a few miles away from the bustling modern world, but the trip to the center of Salladasburg is also a step back in time. Never heard of Salladasburg? Well, Katherine Hepburn and other celebrities who summered there in the forties had. At the center of this small borough still sits a large building that was there then. A bright exterior of warm brick is flanked by a large parking lot. The sign out front says Waltz Creamery & Farm House Café, established 2015. Along the side of the building, another sign nods to this building’s former life and long tradition as the heartbeat of the community. Waltz’s Creamery reincarnates the old Cohick’s Trading Post—a fixture in these parts for ninety years. “We kept the pictures, and we kept
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the sign. It’s important,” Rebekah Waltz explains. Even the sseats of the stools that Katherine Hepburn, James Cagney, and football great Red Grange sat on are mounted in the back room. The Waltz family has transformed the Cohick site, but they are as much a part of this area as the old trading post. The Waltz dairy farm, founded in 1837 and in the Waltz family for eight generations, is four miles up the road. Currently Kyle Waltz and Justice Hunsberger—a son and a future son-in-law—are the farm managers. The café feels as though Brian and Rebekah Waltz have brought the farmhouse kitchen and dining room down to town, made them just a little larger, but kept that homey, farm house feel—“a nice, happy place,” as Rebekah characterizes it.
That wasn’t easy. Initially, they thought it would take a couple of months to get the old trading post transformed into the café, but that time turned into almost a year. The building needed total renovation, and, as an older building, surprises awaited behind the walls. “I wanted a small café. It turned into a large restaurant,” says Rebekah. The facility seats eighty-four in the front and eighty in the rear. The tradition doesn’t end with the building or the renovations. The Waltz family is first and foremost a farming family, and from the start they chose to have everything as fresh and as close to the producers of the food as possible. In the beginning, they sold farm products. Now, all the pork, beef, bacon, and sausage
