On Restaurants
The first of a few essays on places I hold dear.
Welcome to the Tuesday post for all subscribers, all about one of the restaurants I love. On Friday, we’re continuing ahead in the land of kitchen shortcuts with a recipe for matcha sugar cookies for paid subscribers. As always, you can read more of my work here and check out my portfolio here.
Restaurants are funny things. We leave our houses and seek out food that someone else has made us. That’s easy enough. But we also seek places that welcome us in and make us feel cared for; like we’ve found a home away from home that is run by people who share our values and our love for food and drink and gathering.
I’ve gotten pickier about the restaurants I visit since we moved out of the city. I’m less likely to jump to try somewhere new—I want to go to my favorite spots, the ones that aren’t a quick bus ride away anymore. I want to sink into the chairs that I know well at the tables where I’ve sat many times before and peruse a menu that might have changed since the last time I was there but maybe also didn’t.
Since the first time we visited, Cellar Door Provisions has been that place for us. I don’t remember the first time I heard about it or how or where, but I remember making a reservation and showing up early enough to shop for wine next door (the excellent Diversey Wine) for a bottle to bring to dinner. We picked it because the person selling it to us (who also worked at the restaurant) had worked the harvest from which it was made.
I fell in love right then, with them and the restaurant and the wine. I knew, that first visit, that it would become one of our homes away from home. We went back, again and again. A confession: during an early visit, I took a handwritten menu home with me. It’s now framed on our wall.
We went there before the pandemic, then we ordered their food to go in the midst of it. When they closed to renovate, we waited, impatiently for them to reopen. When they finally did, we rushed back. Cellar Door is where we’ve been the last two years as the new year dawns. It’s where cooks I admire stop where they’re in town on a tour. It’s where I first started to understand natural wine.
When they celebrated their tenth anniversary late last month, we were there, drinking good wine, eating good food, and basking in the glow of that special place. To be in a place like that, celebrating ten years in an infamously brutal industry, with people we recognize from years of dinners and glasses of wine and burgers was something special. Another confession: one of these menus came home with us too.
Is any restaurant really just a restaurant? Cellar Door certainly isn’t. If I was younger, or hipper, I might call it “a whole ass vibe.” It’s got the music, the low lighting, the wine bottles repurposed as water carafes. It’s got food that hits, every single time, whether it’s something you expected or not. More than that, though, it’s got the people who remember you and smile. Cheers to another ten years of that.
See you back here on Friday for cookies! Thanks as always for reading along and making my writing dreams come true.