Photography by Gabriel Zimmer of Catskill Image
We’re itching to get out of the house, but we’re looking for a place that feels like home. This is one of the paradoxes of going to restaurants. Even though restaurants, by definition, give us a reprieve from dirty dishes, menu monotony, take-out containers and everything else that can make domestic life a drag, most of us don’t head out in the evening seeking a culinary experience that feels like boarding an alien spacecraft. We find ourselves pulled, instead, into the tractor beam of coziness. We love hygge. We warm to the familiar flourishes that make us feel like we’re about to sit down to dinner in somebody’s house — a house that just happens to be less chaotic and more polished than our own. In that spirit, here are five of our favorite spots around the country that deliver an experience we might describe as Home 2.0.
Myriel
Karyn Tomlinson’s Cleveland Avenue brasserie has been hailed as an avatar of “grandma chic,” and we can verify that it does indeed serve an apple pie that tastes like the platonic ideal of holidays with the family. But Tomlinson and her team didn’t land on that aesthetic accidentally. With its proudly Midwestern cuisine, its vintage silverware, and its down-to-earth approach to hospitality, Myriel feels like home because of a careful accumulation of gestures and details. The smudges of candle soot on the plaster walls? They’re there on purpose. Tomlinson’s own mom made the linen table runners, and, as the chef explains, “we find uses for whimsical pieces like porcelain cat creamers and silver cracker caddies.”
Corner Office
The award-winning chef Zak Pelaccio likes to begin each morning robustly — and enviably — with a few hours of skiing in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. So, he and his wife, Jori Jayne Emde, choreographed Corner Office to be exactly where you’d want to warm up and chow down after a day of fresh air and frozen toes. With walls of books, an actual working desk, and mementoes from Pelaccio’s past culinary tours of duty in New York City and the Hudson Valley, Corner Office feels like the laid-back library of a professor who fled East Coast academia and opted for a life of skiing, hiking, cooking and guzzling wine. In that spirit, the food is studiously unpretentious: potato chips, olives, smoked ham, hot buttered rolls, vegetable soup and a potato pancake suffused with melted Gruyère.
Photography by Kyler A. Martin
Atoma
It’s hard to beat the comfort factor of walking into a Craftsman house. Something about the woodwork, the soft angles and low ceilings, the welcoming embrace — these architectural jewels of the West Coast appear to have been designed by people who wanted to soothe your nerves and lower your blood pressure. Dinner at Atoma has been described as a mellow spin on a house party, and one reason why is that owners Johnny and Sarah Courtney have built the restaurant inside the bones of a Craftsman house in Seattle’s pedestrian-friendly Wallingford neighborhood. Yes, the cooking is meticulous — we doubt you’re making anything at home that’s as delicately laborious as Atoma’s rosette cookies filled with onion jam and farmer’s cheese — but the ethos is assuredly “home sweet home.”
Bintü Atelier
The eastern stretch of Line Street on Charleston’s peninsula feels very residential, so we’ll forgive you if you stroll right past Bintü Atelier a couple of times, wondering where it is. See that bright yellow house? Step inside. Chef Bintou N’Daw and her husband, Tracey Young, will help you get comfortable, and your comfort will only deepen as you survey their collection of classic vinyl displayed on the wall — Minnie Riperton’s Perfect Angel, Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly soundtrack — and realize that, yes, you’re basically a guest in their Lowcountry bungalow. N’Daw grew up in Senegal, and she specializes in West African dishes and drinks — spicy crab rice, chicken and groundnut stew, housemade soursop juice — that manage to taste like home even if you’ve never been to that part of the world.
Photography by Gabriel Zimmer of Catskill Image
Stissing House
Behold the Historic Domestic: If Martha Stewart had owned a country inn in the Hudson Valley at around the time of the Revolutionary War, it would probably have felt a lot like Stissing House, where every detail leads you to murmur, “that’s a good thing.” The tall and flickering wax candles, the commodious bowls of unshelled peanuts, the silver platters overflowing with ham and cheese and mustard and pickles, the coconut cake whose banks of white frosting look like a sledding scene from one of grandma’s holiday snow globes — chef Clare de Boer and her crew have created a menu and a mood so homey that you want to sneak upstairs to one of the private rooms and sleep over, dreaming of occupying a domicile as graceful as this one.
