“I think people get lost in the minutiae of restaurants a lot,” Sohail Zandi says. “They forget that we’re here to eat food and to have a good time. It’s as easy as that.” So plainly goes the logic behind Brushland Eating House, in Bovina, co-owned by Sohail and his wife, Sara, where the founding tenet is “celebrating the ordinary.”
This is a promise Brushland fulfills with simple food cooked well, amiable service, and a communal format that upends the formalist conventions of fine dining, infused with a celebratory spirit and a profound sense of place. Pounding the drum of gratitude and human connection, the Zandis throw a nightly party whose jocular din resounds throughout the quiet hills of the western Catskills, inviting all to join.
Sohail and Sara were in their twenties working in restaurants in Brooklyn when they first visited Bovina. On a weekend escape from the city, they were attracted by the pastoral landscape and exquisite quietude and began dreaming of a life in the Catskills. A few years later, the couple purchased a historic commercial building sitting on County Highway 6, the 650-person town’s main drag. Unexpected and by all accounts unlikely, opening their own restaurant was simply “one of those things where the pieces in your life add up to something you didn’t see coming,” Sohail recalls. They opened Brushland Eating House in 2014, with Sohail in the kitchen and Sara managing the front of house.
Brushland, a onetime moniker for Bovina Center dating from the 19th century, is a nod to the hamlet’s history and a winking implication of a particular timelessness the Zandis seek to evoke. Tacking on “Eating House,” they drew on a regional heritage of informal dining establishments serving as social enclaves for the region’s local and wayfaring public. With the name, the Zandis made plain the kind of restaurant theirs would be: A vibrant third place where folks could escape the perils and doldrums of everyday life, coming together around the simple act of eating.
Dinner As Connection
Brushland is typically open only three nights per week, with the main event being the supper club dinner, held on Friday and Saturday nights—a single seating at 7pm, $75 per person. The objective is an intimate, collective dining experience, more akin to a dinner party than a conventional restaurant. The hope is to bring people closer, reminding them “how lucky they are to be able to sit down at a restaurant and eat food together,” Sohail says—if not literally bumping elbows, then locking eyes across the dimly lit room and raising a glass in mutual recognition. “We are here to throw you a party,” their website states, “take advantage.”
The more casual Thursday nights at Brushland boast an a la carte menu of approachable bites, with small plates (like the recent brisket salad with herbs, pickled ramps, and labneh) going for $8 to 17 and larger dishes (such as braised shank au poivre in mid-May) in the $20 to 30 range. Casual and walk-in only, Thursdays offer a neighboring breed of intimacy to the supper club dinners while allowing Sohail a creative reprieve. “There’s only so many ways to cook food for 40 people at once,” he explains. “We’re always searching for reasons to excite ourselves, and to be able to provide an experience that feels like it comes from a place of joy.” In Sohail’s view, variation is essential to longevity: “The monotony is, I think, what gets you before anything else,” he says.
Offering another deviation from the typical fare, each month at Brushland is punctuated by a Persian dinner. Honoring Sohail’s Iranian heritage, these feasts offer a periodic twist on the usual supper club, imbued with the colors, flavors, symbols, and warmth of Persian cooking. (The next Persian dinner will be held on Sunday, June 15.)
All dinners at Brushland are accompanied by a delightfully down-to-earth wine list, as well as a selection of predominantly local beers and ciders. Despite the spirits-free menu, don’t be surprised if a friendly table-neighbor offers you a toast of something stronger.
Open for a decade now and often written about, Brushland has become a local institution with an ever-wider reach. And if success was an open question, it was answered in 2023, with Sohail’s nomination for a James Beard Award for Best Chef in New York State. Asked if the award had been a goal of his, Sohail just laughs. “If anything,” he says, “it was a joke”—a “what if?” scenario he and Sara would toss around, if only to imply its implausibility. If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from Brushland’s success, Sohail explains, it’s for those service workers in their twenties who don’t know where their lives are heading. “I want to tell them, you don’t always need to,” he says. “You’ll just figure it out. Just move forward.”
The Quiet Work of Giving a Damn
Still, it can be difficult to stay inspired. “Full disclosure,” Sohail says, “it’s getting tough.” Despite Brushland’s success, Sohail feels as though his particular gospel of celebration and gratitude “falls on deaf ears pretty often.” Informed by the trend-obsessed and impersonal thrust of contemporary dining culture, customers seem increasingly ill-prepared to forge the kind of connection he’s after. “It kills me that people come here and I don’t get to connect with them,” he laments. “You trusted me to give you something that you put into your mouth, and you’re 12 feet away from me, and we’re not saying anything to each other.” He worries that the celebratory magic of convening over food gets lost in the quotidian rhythm of individual experience; he yearns for mutuality and bemoans the pervasiveness of disconnected, transactional formality.
Sohail’s frustration reveals a tension fundamental to the work of cooking. “It’s tough,” he says, “because you have to trick yourself that what you’re doing is really important, but you also have to know, it’s not that important. You’re just giving people food that they paid for.”
Aware of this paradox, Sohail understands that having an audience requires a concession to interpretation. Often, his work conjures genuine connection—strangers become friends over a toast of Fernet, the dining room devolves into a sloppy singalong. But, nearly as frequently, it simply yields an empty plate and a closed-out check—a connection deferred.
“I won’t say I feel defeated,” Sohail says. Possessed by an infectious gratitude, he looks out the window from his kitchen daily, reminding himself, “I’m lucky to be here. I’m lucky to do a job that gives me the ability to keep this life going.”
With spring in full bloom, Sohail is excited about the foods that spell the end of the long Catskill winter. He delights in describing the chickens he’s ordered from a local farmer—harvested on Monday, to be served on Thursday, never frozen. He’ll serve small cuts on toast with lentils, shallots, and mayo. It’s simple food, cooked well. Ever-uninspired by what he calls “chef-boy food,” Sohail decries the popular urge toward esoteric dishes and the gratuitously abstruse. Far from the rarefied, cliquey world of haute cuisine, it is Sohail’s simple life in Bovina that his food expresses, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Asked about his goals for the future of Brushland, Sohail thinks for a moment before responding. “As long as we feel excited to be here, as long as I feel tired when I go to sleep at night, I can rest easy,” he says.
For reservations, weekly menus, and more information, visit the Brushland Eating House website.
You really should have talked to some of the locals before you published this piece. Sara and Sohail have turned what was once a cozy local gathering place into an exclusive (and unaffordable) destination for tourists and weekenders. What a shame.