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 specifically because the grocery gap was real enough to organize around. Donnelly's food scene is not growing despite the food desert designation. It is growing as a direct response to it, and the shape of that response tells 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. This is not a chain trying to capture drive-through traffic on Highway 55. It is one person betting on two buildings, a few blocks apart, on the theory that a town this size can support a fine dining Italian spot and a wine bar built into a former schoolhouse at the same time.

That bet is not obvious. Most towns Donnelly's size get one destination restaurant if they're lucky. Getting two from the same operator, within walking distance of each other, says something about how much of Valley County's second home and vacation traffic actually funnels through this stretch of Main Street rather than staying up in McCall.

The new arrival taking a different bet entirely

While Topple was building out his second building, a different kind of restaurant opened four blocks away. 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.

A family-owned Korean and African restaurant is not the kind of business a town this size gets by accident. 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 is a bet that the crowd passing through Roseberry Road, or living here year-round, wants something none of the existing kitchens were offering. Whether that bet pays off is the kind of thing only a few more months will tell, but the fact that someone made it at all 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 exist because enough people, whether year-round residents or second homeowners coming up from Boise and beyond, are willing to support a fine dining Italian menu and a wine bar in a former schoolhouse in a town this size. 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 buildings on a bet about foot traffic, a new international kitchen testing whether the town wants something different, 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.