The Week After the Huckleberry Festival: What Donnelly Is Actually Eating Right Now

What does a mountain town do the Monday after its one big weekend ends?

Donnelly's Huckleberry Festival wrapped its 2026 run on August 16, three days of vendor booths, a Huck Trot 5K, a noon parade down Main Street, a Concert in the Park at Donnelly City Park, and a Sunday pancake breakfast that spilled into a Pioneer Picnic out at Historic Roseberry. The festival is the version of Donnelly that gets photographed. It is not the version that explains how people here actually eat on a normal Tuesday.

That version is stranger and more interesting than the festival lets on. Donnelly is, by the USDA's own definition, a food desert. A resident has to travel ten miles or more to reach a grocery store or a farmers market under that classification. At the same time, this town of a few thousand people currently supports two restaurants from the same chef, a new Korean and African kitchen that opened its doors in July, and a nonprofit farmers market that has been running since 2018. Donnelly's food scene exists alongside the food desert designation. The farmers market was organized to improve food access, while the restaurants offer dining options; together, they tell you more about daily life here than any festival recap will.

The chef with two buildings on the same street

Start with Chef Steve Topple, because his footprint is the clearest evidence of what is actually happening downtown. Topple runs Ragazza Di Bufalo out of the old Buffalo Gal building at 319 N Main, an Italian menu built around dishes like slow braised short rib, lobster linguine, and shellfish manicotti, plus a family hour from 4:30 to 6 p.m. with entrees at $16.50. It was his first restaurant in Idaho.

A few blocks down at 375 Main St, in a building that started life as a schoolhouse a century ago, Topple runs a second place: Casa Rossa Wine Bar, a tapas and wine bar with more than 75 varietals on the list, open Tuesday through Saturday on a limited window (roughly 2:30 to 8 p.m. midweek, opening at noon Friday and Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday). Chef Topple's own site describes Ragazza as "more than just a place to eat, it's a cozy, elegant escape," and that framing matters here. Topple runs two restaurants in buildings a few blocks apart: a fine dining Italian spot and a wine bar built into a former schoolhouse.

That range of dining options is worth noticing in a town Donnelly's size.

A new arrival with a different menu

While Topple was building out his second building, a different kind of restaurant opened four blocks away. As Valley Lookout reported, Tasty Seoul took over the former Ivory Donut space at 454 W. Roseberry Road after the bakery closed in February, and held its grand opening on July 1 with free Korean pancakes, known as jeon, for anyone who walked in. The menu runs Korean staples like bibimbap and soondubu stew alongside African dishes, plus a bingsu shaved ice dessert and several gluten-free options.

Donnelly's dining options for years leaned toward exactly what you'd expect from a highway town between Boise and McCall: pizza, pub food, casual American. Tasty Seoul adds a family-owned Korean and African option to the dining mix. Whether diners take to it is the kind of thing only a few more months will tell, but its arrival is worth noticing.

The market that exists because the food desert is real

None of this explains where people actually buy groceries, and that's where the Donnelly Farmers Market comes in. It was founded in 2018 by two local residents specifically to improve access to fresh produce for Donnelly and Cascade, two towns the USDA had already flagged as needing better food access. It runs out of Donnelly City Park, next to Donnelly Bible Church, on Wednesday afternoons through late September, with more than 30 vendors selling everything from produce and eggs to yak, bison, and venison, plus a rotating slate of baked goods. Fifteen-plus volunteers keep it running. It accepts SNAP and EBT and offers free fruit for kids and incentive programs for seniors.

This is not a boutique farm stand selling heirloom tomatoes to weekenders. It is closer to the town's actual grocery store, operating one afternoon a week because that's what a volunteer-run nonprofit market in a food desert can sustain. The restaurants get to be aspirational. The market has to be functional.

What a normal week in Donnelly actually looks like

Strip away festival season and the week settles into a rhythm that looks something like this:

None of this requires a festival to happen. It is simply what exists on Main Street and Roseberry Road right now, in mid-August 2026, for anyone who lives here and needs dinner on a Tuesday.

Why the contrast is the actual story

It would be easy to write this as two separate stories: a food desert designation on one side, a growing restaurant scene on the other. But the two are connected in a way that's easy to miss if you only pay attention during festival week. The farmers market exists because the grocery gap is documented and real. The restaurants offer dining options alongside the market. Both facts are true at once, and neither cancels the other out.

For anyone who already calls Donnelly home, that combination is probably not news in the abstract. You already know you're driving to Cascade or McCall for a full grocery run and walking to Main Street for dinner. What might be new is seeing it laid out as a pattern: one chef running two restaurants a few blocks apart, a new international kitchen, and a Wednesday market carrying the actual weight of food access for everyone in between. The festival crowd sees Donnelly for three days in August. The rest of the year is the version described here, and it's arguably the more interesting one.

If you're weighing what life here actually looks like beyond the festival photos, whether you're settled in already or thinking about how Donnelly fits into the wider Valley County picture, Sadie Noah has spent years watching towns like this one change one restaurant, one market season, and one building at a time. Reach out for a conversation about what's happening on the ground here, no matter what stage you're at.