DINING: Soul Food

 

At ten o’clock on a wednesday morning in May, restaurateur Tom Ellis is stationed behind a large stainless-steel mixing bowl, doing the unthinkable: peeling fifteen pounds of fresh organic garlic with a surgical-grade paring knife.

 

“I try to do it when I’m relaxing at night, but we have a big week coming up,” says the affable sixty-four-year-old chef-owner of Elizabeth’s Café Heaven on outer East Street in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “We have some people who had their first date here when they were at Williams College, and they’re getting married, so they rented the entire restaurant on Friday.” The wedding, however, is out of town, “so they’re busing in [guests] from all over the country.”

 

The weekend after next is the school’s commencement, for which the lively, home-style joint serving fresh, eclectic fare—big bowls of pasta, Mediterranean-inspired specialties, “honest” bread—has been booked now for a year. The unmistakable, electric-blue-and-white two-story house seats only about forty people, and as Tom and his wife, Elizabeth, 53, have nurtured a cult-like following over the past twenty-five years, regulars reserve their favorite tables well in advance.

 

“This place is about taking care of people first and food second,” Tom explains. Liz, who’s just whipped a hot sheet pan of roasted eggplant from the oven, shoots him a look that suggests he elaborate. “See, food is very subjective,” he says. “This is a lot like theater. It’s about celebration. I like to picture someplace in Provence or Tuscany, on this big table under a grape arbor, where everybody’s bringing out all this wonderful food. Most nights in the summer, when everyone’s toasting and drinking wine and people I don’t know are hugging me and saying they hoped we were in their city, we go home and though we’ve put in a fifteen-hour day, it’s like we haven’t even worked.”

 

As idealistic as that sounds, it is part of a tested recipe. “Sit back, hold hands if you will, and let us take you there,” the Ellises proclaim on Elizabeth’s single-page menu, peppered with the lovers’ favorite expressions by the likes of fellow foodie M.F.K. Fisher. In addition to the regular, all-vegetarian menu are three nightly specials—one fish and two meat dishes—which the servers illustrate as if reciting poetry. First-timers might sniff hyperbole or scoff at the set entrée price of nineteen dollars—which includes family-style salad and ample slices of Berkshire Mountain Bakery sourdough—until the salad plates are set down.

 

“It’s the best salad we eat in America,” asserts Leslie Jerome of Cresskill, New Jersey, who has been an Elizabeth’s enthusiast with her husband, Stephen, ever since their daughter’s camp counselor recommended the restaurant to them some twenty years ago. On this bustling Friday night—Stephen’s birthday, actually—the four lettuces are tossed with organic carrots, celery, radish, jicama, strawberries, green apple, raisins, low-salt feta, cheddar, a dusting of Parmesan, and Leslie’s favorite: small chunks of cooked potato. Just as the menu promises, it is “a serendipitous mix … dressed respectfully with balsamic,” indeed.

 

Lenox, Massachusetts, second-home owners, the Jeromes occupy their usual corner table on the first floor, facing the stage upon which Tom and Liz waltz. He’s at his prep station, facing diners and painstakingly chopping ingredients for each salad; she’s tending to four enormous pots of water on a standalone stove on the far wall, two old Blodgett commercial ovens, and a couple of saucepans at the kitchen’s center island. A server collects their creations then floats up the cyan staircase at the side of the room to muted chatter above.

 

Topped with white tablecloths and white butcher paper, the six small tables down here are in close quarters, and conversations ebb and flow. After stepping out to the front porch for a moment to admire the twilight sky with a cordless phone in hand, Tom announces that there must be trouble on the Taconic Parkway, as three separate parties en route from Manhattan have called to extend their reservations.

 

“It’s more like eating in someone’s living room [and] kitchen than eating in a restaurant,” Stephen Jerome says, after feasting on an appetizer of roasted Spanish onions drizzled with olive oil and jasmine honey and a dish of short ribs prepared especially for him. (His wife was thrilled to find her all-time favorite offering on special this evening: salmon baked in parchment with tomato-ginger broth on a bed of lemongrass, twice-baked quinoa, and sesame-roasted asparagus.) 

 

Wide, shallow bowls of pasta glide by at diners’ eye level: fettucine fragrant with white truffle oil and Parmigiano-Reggiano; penne tossed with roasted wild mushrooms and herbes de Provence; shells dripping with hot gorgonzola cream and dappled with baby sweet peas. When a plate of the evening’s carnivorous pasta special—ziti baked in red sauce with marjoram and homemade, lavender-scented sausage beneath a crust of caramelized mozzarella—passes by, diners notice. But mostly they seem lost in the textures and flavors of the foods they’re sampling.

 

One party of four—or perhaps dual tables of two, seats inched closer together—murmurs approvingly while tasting spoonfuls of vibrant orange soup. Caribbean cream of tomato, it’s rich and chunky, silky thanks to coconut milk, spiced with Jamaican curry, and flecked with niblets of sweet corn from a friend’s farm in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

 

“I pick out every single head of lettuce, every single carrot,” Tom notes later. “I know it’s sort of compulsive, but in the old days, all chefs did that. We don’t buy wholesale. I love going to the farmers’ markets come summer.” The guy can’t wait to toss watermelon and cantaloupe into that salad.

 

Tonight he’s whipping together what has become known colloquially as his “Middle Eastern shepherd’s pie.” Beneath a shell of crispy basmati rice is chopped sirloin sautéed with allspice, Saigon cinnamon, and toasted pine nuts, layered with wilted baby spinach, roasted baby eggplant, and caramelized onions and topped with dollops of a tangy homemade yogurt—harking to Tom’s Lebanese heritage. Other nights he’ll dabble in Mexican (wild boar stew with traditional mole sauce), French (coq au vin), American (meatloaf), or Italian (slow-simmered osso buco).

 

“My mom was an unbelievable cook,” Tom affirms. The North Adams, Massachusetts, native went to school on the GI Bill and found himself cooking in his downtime. “If I was entertaining anybody, friends or females, I’d call my mom and say, ‘Ma, I’ve got a redhead here, how do you cook a chicken?’ And she’d say, ‘Put olive oil on the chicken and throw it in the oven!’—my mother was very direct like that.”

 

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—at least according to Liz. One evening in 1983, while waiting in line for popcorn during the once-glorious Palace Theatre’s dollar movie night, Tom invited her to sit with him. Not wanting to abandon her girlfriends, Liz demurred. Minutes before the credits rolled on Terms of Endearment, however, she joined him. They were married three months later.
The couple would throw raucous dinner parties—with the rule that chef Tom didn’t have to clean dishes. In 1986, he popped the question: how about he quit his stable job as a probation officer with the Central Berkshire District Court—his colleague Peter Spina was leaving to found H&S Auto Parts and Service, anyway—and they open a restaurant? To Tom’s utter shock and eternal delight, Liz agreed.

 

As Spina had no use for the single-family house on his new property, the Ellises bought it from the original, ninety-something-year-old tenant instead. But under one condition: that they never remove the wooden porch banister, as it had been built by the lady’s husband in the 1920s. They agreed. After gutting the interior and draining their savings, they opened Elizabeth’s for lunch and dinner, seven days a week. And though nobody recognized it at the time, the Ellises specialized in slow food.

 

“We’d roast an entire organic turkey every morning at three a.m., just to make turkey sandwiches on homemade bread with organic lettuce—people came from all over,” Tom recalls. The lunch crowd back then pooled heavily from the General Electric Company, whose massive factories sit just up the street. “G.E. brought in about four hundred engineers from Europe,” Tom remembers. “They’d come in at noon and wouldn’t leave till three-thirty. We were doing inexpensive bouillabaisse and cassoulet … [but] after about six years that whole project went away.”

 

They ceased midday meals and closed for a couple of nights. Then they started making pizza. And oh, did they make pizza. “If our food is OK—and I’m not being coy—our pizzas were the best,” Tom says tenderly of the twenty-three-ounce pies made of dough risen three times, like French bread, topped with assorted organic ingredients, best eaten with a fork and knife. Fearing economic burnout, they halted that eventually, too. (Yet queries about that pizza continue today.)

 

“We started nurturing a certain clientele—this was before the real boom in second-home owners,” Tom says. Liz, busy pressing a batch of her grandmother’s infamous spiced sugar cookies into six-inch rounds on fresh sheet pans, pipes up. “We’re more relaxed about it now. It’s our own little universe here.”

 

Elizabeth’s fans seem stark raving obsessed. (And not one has skipped out on an IOU—after a wine-fueled private party, one guy sent a check for approximately $3,700 from Australia.)

 

“It’s a hidden gem,” declares Carol Robertson of Pittsfield, who visits almost every Friday evening with her husband, Tom. (As it’s the retired couple’s “date night,” they sit in the quieter upstairs dining room; friends frequently ask to join them.) “[It’s] our special occasion place, it’s our go-to place. We really do compare everywhere we eat to Elizabeth’s. We were at a restaurant in Hawaii this winter, and our daughter said, ‘This is great, almost as great as Elizabeth’s—and we’re looking at the Pacific Ocean!”

 

Barbara Sammons, a sixteen-year aficionado also living in Pittsfield, concurs. “It’s a happening, a unique experience with this great, comfortable atmosphere,” gushes the retired Long Island transplant. “I don’t want to use the Cheers analogy, but it’s something similar. It’s just fun. We’re lucky in the Berkshires overall, but there are an awful lot of formulaic restaurants…. I just can’t say enough good about it.”

 

Tom remains candid. “We have a clear sense of what our deficiencies are: we don’t take credit cards; we don’t use ice; [our] kitchen is the size of a closet. For the first fifteen years I wouldn’t serve decaf coffee, because I thought it was unhealthy…” (He now serves regular coffee, but still no ice, saving at least a dozen extra loads of dishes per night.) The décor is minimal—Matisse posters tacked to the walls—some might say stark.

 

“There are [some] people who want to come here for the food—and this is conjecture—but the place isn’t quite fancy enough,” Tom says frankly. “To some people, the setting is as important as the food … but I think you do come here for the ambiance.”

 

Greta Yakel, a thirty-something Pittsfield native now living in Albany, New York, thinks so. “The atmosphere and the food are hard to beat,” says Yakel, who would visit Elizabeth’s “at least six times per year” while a cash-strapped college grad. Now recently married, she craves to return with her husband. “It is not swanky or pompous,” she shares. And perhaps best of all, “People don’t look at you if you laugh a bit too loud.”

 

Robertson offers an analogy that aptly sums up Elizabeth’s allure: “When you walk in the door, it’s like a warm hug,” she croons. “Everyone is happy to see you—Tom and Liz, the servers, the clients. There’s no way to avoid getting hooked. [JULY 2010]

 

Though only a child when Elizabeth’s first opened, Berkshire Living senior editor Amanda Rae Busch remembers the eatery’s legendary pizza. It was the stuff her dreams are made of.

 

THE GOODS

Elizabeth’s Café Heaven
Open Wed-Sun at 5
Reservations recommended
No credit cards
.
Pittsfield, Mass.