Food is a Present Thing

Bordered and bifurcated by the Willimantic and Natchaug rivers, Willimantic is a unique confluence of history, culture, fortune, industry, and agriculture. First settled in 1717, and officially part of Windham, founded in 1693. It’s early fishing and agriculture heritage was upended in the 19th century by the textile industry and the town became known as “Thread City”, a thriving industry. When the mills left the town was defeated but not beaten.

The industriousness lived on in the residents and in the multitude of immigrants lured by work at the mills. From Europeans to Hispanics the culture is rich and diverse. And the tremendous growth of Eastern Connecticut State College and UConn over the last 20 years has only added cultural in uences and intellectual capital.

Many who have long called Willimantic home, including restaurant proprietor Andy Gutt and his team, have been helping to bring the town back to glory. In November of 2009, then 25 years old and a fresh Eastern graduate, Andy opened CafeMantic which quickly became a favorite local spot. They were also a pioneer in the now ubiquitous farm-to-table dining. It wasn’t so much of a thing at the time, but it was what seemed right to Andy and his team. A bit off the beaten path they’ve always been liberated to do things their own way.

Willimantic is now enjoying a boom of dining, drinking, and shopping experiences. “To be on the food scene here is actually so interesting,” Andy maintains. “We have lots of bodegas around here, right. You can buy tripe and pig snout and cactus and all kinds of interesting ingredients. And then we have the Willimantic Food Co- Op, which is like a radical Whole Foods. To me it's like the perfect place to have a hospitality venture.”

“However, from our mission statement to our story, we recognize where we are and are so proud of where we are. Our industrial past is very present. Amazingly we're also dotted with these little farms everywhere. Lebanon has one of the largest concentrations of agriculture per acre in Connecticut. It's a huge town land-wise.”

Amidst the challenges of 2020, Andy and his Executive Chef Tyler May made the decision to evolve CafeMantic into a full-fledged seasonal dining destination. Stone Row Kitchen & Bar was born, named after the tenement neighborhood where they’re located. They serve elevated, yet accessible food featuring a range of tastes and inspirations. The menu follows a seasonal flow fed by local farms, butchers, and fishers as you would expect. Their inspiration ranges from re-creating new experiences to simply getting tired of cooking the same things over and over.

The team is headed by Executive Chef Tyler May and Chef Dustan Cole, both bringing outstanding credentials. New York City was a beacon for both chefs. After completing a culinary program in high school and while attending Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Chef Tyler spent time at WD-50, with famed Chef Wylie Dufresne. Tyler notes it “was probably the best culinary experience that I've ever had.” He followed that up with long stints at 22 Bowen’s in Newport and then at Chuck & Augie’s, the restaurant at UConn.

(clockwise from top left) A 1930's oak office desk, displaying an abundance of wine in the dining room, is an heirloom passed down from Andy's great grandfather; Chef Cole salts black sea bass caught off Long Island; Pan seared duck breast with a maple parsnip puree, watercress, and roasted cranberries; Brandon Jones charring cedar planks for a Smoked Rum Old Fashioned with Waypoint Spirits Rum and hand chipped ice. 

“We've been making up our own rules for over a decade. We're not trendy out here. We're not competing.” —Owner Andy Gutt 

Chef Dustan Cole also spent years in New York at Momofuku and at a Michelin star restaurant in Nolita, Uncle Boons Thai. “It was a great restaurant. RIP. The place was packed seven days a week and couldn't survive,” he notes. But he is happy to be back home with family nearby.

“Our menu is about accessibility,” says Andy. “However, we're a restaurant, so don't try this at home. We push the envelope a bit. That's what makes people come to restaurants like ours. We want customers to say, "That's the best of such and such I ever put in my mouth. How do you do that?"

Chef Tyler’s inspirations come from experience. “For me, it's maybe a dish I've eaten, and I just want to put my own spin on it, make it fun and interesting. WD-50 helped me with that a lot, doing all the different techniques and playing with textures. Take feta cheese, it's soft and crumbly, but add a few ingredients, put in a dehydrator and all of a sudden it becomes really crispy. Then you have a strawberry salad with crispy feta on top.”

Seasonality is indeed a priority. Andy notes that, “We're looking forward to the spring. But then come fall, we're looking forward to the winter!”

In season now is Black Sea Bass from the freezing cold Atlantic. Dustan says. “We sear the fish skin side down in butter. We serve it with bok choy, glazed sweet potatoes, nori sesame, and charred lemon vinaigrette. The cold, nutrient rich water really helps. And we’re getting a lot of our oysters in Cape Cod right now. The cold weather really brings you the best oysters as well.”

Andy chimes in, “Right, right. However, something I find remarkable from a local agriculture standpoint is because of passive solar greenhouses we are also getting local year around. I would say one of the largest smallest farms we use, meaning we buy as much as they can possibly sell us, is Sweet Acre Farm in Lebanon. They established themselves around the same time I established myself. We've kind of grown up together in that way.”

Nonetheless, Dustan is really excited for spring. “I'm just waiting for Spring. We work pretty closely with a lot of local farms, and I remember last spring when the buckets of fresh herbs and micro greens, just the small things. Just seeing green the first time in what feels like months. That's such a good feeling.”

The short ramp season in Spring is a big favorite for all of the team. They let nothing go to waste. Chef Tyler explains, “We try to use everything from ramps. We clean 'em up, anything that's bruised, we'll pull it off. I like to make ramp salts or a ramp vinegar and just let those sit around. Nice little garnish on a dish.” Dustan notes, “Ramp season is so short, and we wish it was longer. We'll take as many as we can, we'll pickle as many as we can and try to extend that season, because we want ramps on the menu as long as possible. If you want fresh ramps on the menu, that's only two weeks!“ “Right,” says Andy. “We like ramp butter in January.”.

Chef Tyler, like many experienced chefs, also loves preserving, “Trying to preserve that fresh flavor from the season's best tomatoes and having that in the middle of winter. That's something awesome you look forward to. We'll do a tomato salad every season but always change it up. We’ll do tomatoes and burrata, tomatoes and peaches. We save all that trim and store it in the freezer. Then we'll make a tomato water for crudo or something. It's really nice. Or we take all those bits, and we dehydrate 'em, crush 'em up, dehydrate 'em again, and make some tomato powder which is another way to get that really strong, concentrated flavor into a dish. Yeah.”

Summer also brings more interaction with the community. Chef Tyler notes that, “In the summer we like to go to the Willimantic Farmer's Market on Saturday, we’ve met so many people there, providers like Kindred Crossing or for example, Spiral Arts Studio. They had a lot of really of cool dishes they make and so we started using their plates. Then they started custom making plates and shapes sizes for us. We get really local here.”

Dustan is motivated by change. “Well, when we first started, we had salmon on the menu and it was kind of one of those things, people like salmon, it's pretty accessible, and they loved it. Then one day I was like, "I'm just really sick of cooking salmon." And I kind of went off, the salmon's not really local. We should have New England seafood on the menu.”

“Chef, let's do a different fish!” They talked to the fish guy at The Fish Market. “They’re great, they go down to Stonington every day and get fresh fish and scallops and whatnot. ‘What can we get this time of year?’ And we're like, how about some monk fish? So, we put together this really nice Thai-inspired coconut soup with it. A nice piece of seared monk fish on top. People loved it! We served a lot of monk fish that summer just because we were totally bored.”

He continues, “I feel like my biggest philosophy is let's do something new, let's do something exciting, keep people on their toes. Let's switch it up as much as we can. You get a little pushback from the regulars, but then they start to taste some new things and they're right on board with it.”

The collaboration between Chef Tyler and Dustan permeates the entire restaurant. Andy elaborates, “When we're collaborating, when we are bringing new ideas to the table, we ask is that Stone Row? Kind of balancing the expectations of the customer because you walk into a restaurant with a set of expectations, right. The familiar flavors, yes, those are important. But we have to be able to be somewhat risk-takers.”

It seems clear that the team have the confidence of their own convictions. Part of what they're selling is their own expression of what food should be and as that expression evolves, they bring their customers along.

Andy agrees. “That's correct. We're that kind of restaurant. We're not the restaurant when you want to get pizza. Of course. You can't be everything to everyone in life as an individual. You know that that's ridiculous, so why would you ever try to be that as a business?”

Another interesting approach at Stone Row is the service model wherein tips are included. Everyone is making a good living which inspires them to help out wherever and whenever they can. Cooks serve dinner, servers help wash dishes, everyone helps clear tables. Tyler says, “I'll run food to the table. I've done wine service for a table. Guests actually seem to love seeing the Chef and cooks on the floor!

It also gives everyone a stake in their success, “I mean it's our restaurant. People are coming to see us. They're getting the full experience, you know, they're coming for the food and they’re coming for a familiar face they want to see.”

Deepening the conversation Andy notes, “We're a culture obsessed with dopamine hits, obsessed with instant gratification. Let's just exist in the moment and be present. Let's use food and having some good drinks in this venue as a way to be present and to not be isolated, right. Food is a present thing. Food is connected to companionship. Think of the Last Supper. That transcends. The idea that food is social, food brings people together.”

Dustan agrees, “It's all right here. I get to feed my own community. This is where I grew up, this is where I'm from. I lived in Chapel for 15 years, Windham. I'd like to leave it a little better than when I got here. Willimantic was one of the richest towns in the world with American Thread Company. I mean, just to get a little bit of that shine back would be cool.”

They continue to set their own pace. Andy notes, “I think that the story has evolved, but I guess the mission hasn't changed from age 25 in 2009 to today. We've been making up our own rules for over a decade. We're not in that neighborhood where every building has already been someone else's restaurant. We're not trendy out here. We're not competing.”

With his typical rebel spirit, Andy continues to use his voice to advocate for the industry whenever he can. He recently was heavily involved in producing the first Mansfield-Willi Restaurant Week which was by all accounts a success. He is “following the lead of the Connecticut Restaurant Association to try to continue to raise awareness that we're in the business of putting our best foot forward. We're in the business of the fun things in life.”

“But it's tight right now. No surprise. I've been advocating every senator and congressman that'll listen, even if they're not in Connecticut, to replenish the Restaurant Revitalization Fund, because I do want it made whole, right. But at the end of the day, we'll go on, we'll go on. We'll move forward. It's fine, it's fine.”

Moving forward and taking chances, while appreciating the past, is really what Willimantic, and Stone Row is all about.

Stone Row Kitchen & Bar
948 Main St, Willimantic
www.stonerowkb.com & IG stonerowkb

SEASONALITY TAKES PRIORITY AT STONE ROW WITH THESE PROVIDERS:
 

• Kindred Crossings Farm – North Franklin
• Cato Corner Farm – Colchester
• The Fish Market – Willimantic
• Sweet Acre Farms – Lebanon
• Tiny Acre Farm – Woodstock
• Cloverleigh Farm – Columbia
• Provider Farm – Salem
• Sweet Sage Bakery – Farmington
• Zest - Stonington