FOOD: Haven Can't Wait

 

On a weekday morning in autumn, Haven Café & Bakery in Lenox, Massachusetts, is bustling, and owner Shelly Williams is right in the thick of it. Thirty-five teenagers attending a program at Shakespeare & Company, headquartered on nearby Kemble Street, have just arrived for a late breakfast, and Williams calmly takes their orders, arranges seating in the almost-full dining area, and serves up coffee and the café’s locally famous ginger-cardamom scones. Despite the influx and the gentle rise in noise level, no one—neither staff nor guests—seems anything but relaxed: in one corner, a couple appears to have settled in with a laptop and a sheaf of envelopes to stuff; at other tables, groups of three and four linger over baked cinnamon French toast, apple pancakes, and vegetable frittatas.
 

There’s something about Haven that makes a visitor want to stake a claim and stay awhile. Maybe it’s the soft glow cast by the curving chandelier and rows of track lighting. Maybe it’s the relaxed feel of the wooden chairs arranged around butcher-block tables. Maybe it’s the big windows or the plants and paintings or the colorful hand-chalked signs. Maybe it’s the fact that the open-floor design allows guests to see what’s going on in the kitchen. Most definitely it’s the food, sophisticated but unfussy versions of beloved classics, made, whenever possible, with local, organic ingredients.
 

In fact, it’s all of the above—and nearly every detail has been given careful attention by Williams, who opened the eighty-seat café in June 2008, at 8 Franklin Street in the space formerly occupied by Carol’s. Haven offers breakfast and lunch, as well as seasonal dinners beginning in May, and often serves as many as five hundred guests per day at the height of summer.
 

“Shelly has created a mecca, a place where people want to spend time,” says Suky Werman, who has hired Williams repeatedly to cater parties at Stonover Farm, the Lenox bed-and-breakfast she owns with her husband, Tom. “Her food is simple, never pretentious, and the flavors are great. She always has great new ingredients and sources she’s exploring. The atmosphere she’s created at Haven illustrates all of this, and the calm comes from Shelly. Even when it’s crowded, she has an ability to organize well, so things just flow.”

With her big smile and direct gaze, Williams, 47, is someone with whom most people feel immediately comfortable. Today she’s dressed all in black, complementing her sleek dark bob and the delicate silver hoops at her ears—but like her food, her brand of elegance is a homey one.
“I love food, and I particularly love to feed people,” Williams says, taking a few moments to discuss the inspiration behind Haven between bites of creamy oatmeal—the first thing she’s had time to eat this morning. “It’s always been my way to connect with people and take care of them. I love the immediacy of making something with your hands and putting it in front of somebody, having a mutual connection.”

Williams came by her profession the old-fashioned way: via genetics and upbringing. “I got my first real love of food from my parents,” she recalls. “My dad owns a bar in Southern California, an old, classic beach bar that’s now been there forty-five years, and when I was young I would hang out there. We were famous for our pickled eggs that my mom used to make. She was a great cook, a classic home cook. She would cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the family would sit and eat all our meals together.”
 

Williams never studied food but instead got an education working in restaurants, traveling, reading cookbooks incessantly, and paying close attention to talented chefs. “I test everything to death,” she says. “I worked on the carrot cake for the café for six months. I pore through cookbooks, combine recipes. I’m not a trained chef; I’m a collector of ingredients and recipes.”
 

Werman raves about Williams’s marinated shrimp, her boeuf bourguignon, and the dips she makes for crudités. “She kind of goes into a zone when she talks about ingredients,” Werman says. “It’s a constant source of pleasure to watch her interact with food. She’s inspired by certain ingredients and only uses the very finest. She’ll wax poetic about olive oil.”
 

Matt Schweitzer, Haven’s executive chef and former baker, says he’s never worked in a restaurant that uses such high-quality food, such as organic flours and Plugrá, a European-style butter that has a butterfat content higher than most other American brands. “There’s a lot of love that goes into everything we do here—everything is chosen and tested with care,” Schweitzer says. “Our scones are the best scones I’ve tasted in my life.”
 

It was the ultimate comfort-food menu—beef tenderloin, vegetarian lasagna, and scalloped potatoes—made for a post-Christmas party for fifty that launched Williams’s catering business, Berkshire Culinary, six years ago. “I had people telling me it was the best catered food they’d had in Berkshire County,” she recalls. “Someone hired me that night for a seventy-fifth birthday party in Stockbridge [Mass.] for one hundred and thirty people. So then I learned how to price things, how much food to make—for that first party, I had enough leftover for three more parties.”
 

In the first four years that Williams operated Berkshire Culinary, every year her business doubled (though she now focuses on Haven, she still takes occasional catering jobs). She specializes in creating high-end menus with the finest ingredients, sophisticated yet simple comfort food with both substance and style. For Thanksgiving last year, Haven offered the entire package for at-home dining: roasted turkey breast; sausage-apricot-almond or apple-sage stuffing; maple-roasted root vegetables; butternut squash gratin with a pecan crust; mashed potatoes with celeriac; pomegranate-cranberry relish; and a dessert selection that included pumpkin-bourbon cheesecake as well as pumpkin pie.
 

Williams loves catering, but the desire to work within a larger community—of both staff and customers—inspired her to open Haven, after a five-month renovation of the 2,400-square-foot space (the kitchen takes up about a third of that). “I wanted to create something that felt warm and rustic, clean but not cluttered,” she says of the decor, “and I developed the menu the same way I developed the interior—I just created things I love to eat.”

 

Both the lunch and breakfast menus feature inventive versions of familiar, delicious dishes—like grilled polenta triangles drizzled with ginger maple syrup; Haven’s signature rolled omelette, filled with Vermont cheddar, spinach, and feta or smoked salmon and chives; and a grilled-vegetable sandwich dressed up with basil oil and goat cheese and served on grilled ciabatta. Some of the recipes Williams has made over the years for her own family—she and her husband, Randal, a yoga teacher, have two children, Ava, 8, and Eli, 11—have become mainstays on Haven’s menu, such as her pancakes made with buttermilk and cornmeal.
 

Now that the café is solidly established, Williams is working on various projects that aspire to take Haven farther afield. The café already ships its ginger-cardamom and currant scones to Chicago and California; Williams is developing recipes for frozen cookie dough to be sold in stores for at-home baking. She still loves to cook on the line, though, and often heads out to the kitchen for what she thinks of as a relaxing break from management and office work.
 

Williams has created community at Haven, both in the kitchen and among her guests. Every choice she’s made has emphasized inclusion and harmony, from the cooks she’s hired (being able to “smile without effort” is an employee requirement) to the free-range, omega-3 eggs she buys from a Hudson Valley farm to the decision to forego table service so that guests come to the counter and see what’s going on in the kitchen. “I’m not sure I started out with a philosophy about Haven,” she says, “but looking back, I can see that what I’ve been driven by in my life as a whole is about belonging, and that’s driven me to create a place where people feel they can belong.” [Mar/Apr 2010]

Tresca Weinstein is a frequent contributor to Berkshire Living and to numerous local, regional, and national publications. Her favorite breakfast at Haven is the scrambled-egg sandwich on a dill-Romano-buttermilk biscuit.

THE GOODS

Haven Cafe & Bakery

Lenox, Mass.

www.havencafebakery.com