Fresh local foods, tastefully served

‘Serve Just Enough.’’ “Use What’s Left.’’

Those are a couple of phrases that stared down at us from the reproduction of a vintage World War I poster on a wall in the restaurant at How On Earth, an organic food store on Route 6 in Mattapoisett. The poster is one of the items for sale, along with locally made knick-knacks and pottery, photos of local interest, and other posters like this one from the US Food Administration, advising how to use food during wartime.

The poster’s words impart advice that seems to embrace the ethic of How On Earth, a place that lives by what it preaches — grow, buy, and eat local.

The store opened in spring of 2007 and about a year ago, owners Michael and Margie Baldwin decided to create a restaurant, carving out a space that seats about 40.

Getting dinner here means weekends only; the restaurant is open just Friday and Saturday nights. But a small café in the store is open for lunch daily and serves breakfast items as well.

Chef Colin Bradley has been cooking since he was 19, toiling in places like Top of the Hub in Boston and Tremont 647 in the city’s South End, while attending Berklee College of Music. After he finishes cooking here on weekends, he then zips off to musical gigs in places like New Bedford.

Bradley, who regularly visits the dining room to see how people are enjoying themselves, changes the dinner menu monthly, using local crops and products from Lucky Fields Organics in nearby Rochester. He gets his meats from sustainable-agriculture businesses in the Northeast Family Farm Network.

The liquor menu is beer and wine only, and even the beer is local. We had ales, pale and golden, from Mayflower Brewing Co. in Plymouth at $3.75 per bottle, and wine by the bottle starts at $19 — pretty reasonable for restaurant vino.

The menu is small, a welcome change from the pages of offerings at some larger entities. The night our party of four visited, we found choices of five entrees, six appetizers, and two desserts. And all of it good.

Bradley started us off with an amuse-bouche of thin apple slices topped with cheeses and balsamic reduction. For one appetizer, we tried the mussels sautéed with shallots, garlic, and tomatoes, deglazed with orange liqueur and served with juicy orange slices, a unique treatment of our favorite mollusk for $12. It was huge and filling.

So were the pears poached in red wine, served with smoked Gouda béchamel and baked with Swiss cheese and caramelized onion, a tasty appetizer served with crostini, for $9, ample for all four of us. The bread served here was plentiful, wonderfully chewy and thick, hailing from Artisan’s Kitchen in Rochester, a purveyor that sells a wide line of goods in the How On Earth store.

For dinner, we tried the chicken ($22), a half-bird roasted with garlic and served with rosemary mashed potato and steamed broccoli. The chicken was crispy and exceptionally juicy and bountiful, leaving a good quarter of it that we took home for later munching.

We also went with the shrimp and butternut risotto ($22), a huge dish with generous portions of fat shrimp and served with super-creamy risotto, shared by all four of us and declared perfect fall fare.

The stuffed salmon ($22) was a special this night, served with Macomber turnip hash and a lemon cream sauce, which the one having it claimed was the best salmon she’d ever been served.

Our sole tricky spot of the night was the lamb ($22), a grilled loin chop served with rosemary-stuffed tomato, cauliflower puree, and sautéed fennel and spinach. Our diner had neither told our server how he wanted it cooked, nor was he asked, so it came out too well done. But it was quickly replaced with a medium-rare plate, with a personal apology from the chef.

When it came back, it was delicious and perfectly done, with a somewhat gamy taste to the meat, owing to its organic origins. It was much preferred to more fork-tender lamb from more industrialized farms.

With hardly any room left for dessert, we sucked it up and tried them anyway, a creamy-smooth pumpkin cheesecake with hazelnut whipped cream and a flourless chocolate cake served with vanilla ice cream, each $7. They went down in a hurry, the chocolate cake a particular hit, a thick, gooey concoction that didn’t suffer at all from lack of flour.

Weekend dining at How On Earth has become popular among neighbors seeking locally sourced food, and lunches in the store’s café are very popular, with such fare as bowls of soup for $4.50, sandwiches from $7.50, entrees from $8.50, and a killer buffalo chicken and Great Hill Blue (from Marion) cheese for $9.

And the offerings here extend beyond physical visitation; the website features weekly dining specials as well as a chef’s corner tab for recipe ideas on how to cook with seasonal vegetables and meats. Catering is also available.

And when you’re done dining or waiting to be served, browse the store’s offerings. It is stocked with items from local entrepreneurs, including breads, pies, quiches, pastries, honeys, jams, and many other products. Dry goods here come from local businesses, the potato chips hail from Connecticut, the chocolate from the Berkshires, the pancake mix from Rhode Island, and the dairy case is full of area milk, eggs, cheeses, and juices.

“Buy Local Foods,’’ the World War I poster says. We couldn’t agree more.