Growing up, Eddie Cullari’s parents always told him to go to college and get a straight job. “So I listened,” he says. “‘Get a good job so you don’t have to slave in some kitchen,’ was the line. I went into finance. I was miserable.”
Then came the late-aughts financial crash. And no one was happier than Eddie when his dad decided to ditch his insurance management job in favor of opening the classic roadhouse Warwick needed and deserved, with delicious casual meals and craft brew.
“Dad is one of the coolest people I know,” says Cullari, now owner/manager at Eddie’s Roadhouse. “He had a vision for this—food comes first, then great craft beer, then the fact that we don’t have TV. And Mom—another of the coolest people I know—loves wine. Not the snobbish kind, wine that’s actually good, so she curates the wine list.”
Eddie’s Roadhouse held its official grand opening in December of 2010, and Cullari was on board from the first, helping manage, taking shifts behind the bar, organizing open mics and music nights. He kept his day job for a while, but the magnetism of the kitchen had set in: in 2015 he enrolled in college for a second time, this time at the French Culinary Institute in New York City.
“That was when I got a solid grip on the kitchen,” he says, “A real foundation. I love my life now. I get up every day and have fun. I have my mentee beside me—we’ll have been working together six years in March—and I get to just be creative, and the whole team lives for that—and the team that creates what we do goes beyond our walls to the farms and breweries. This is our family labor of love, my parents’ dream come true.”
That joy and passion are reflected in every page of the menu of elevated and expertly executed comfort food, which includes new treats every week. There’s often ramen, a special passion of Cullari’s. There’s five-cheese mac-and-cheese that can feature either shrimp or buffalo chicken, topped with panko-crumb crunch. Specials at this writing include a potato leek burger, blackened salmon taco, classic meatloaf, and Hudson Valley trout. Locally grown black-dirt produce holds a starring role, but is backed up by a strong supporting cast.
“They seem to have a menu item or ingredient from every country of the world, which I guess makes this place as American as you can get,” writes a Yelp reviewer. “It all goes together quite nicely. This place is way more hipster than you’d expect for a name that sounds like a truck stop, however, I guess that’s pretty hipster in itself.”
We’re not going to risk defining “hipster,” but the community ties Eddie’s Roadhouse is building are absolutely hip. Cullari is involved with two Warwick food justice orgs, BackPack Snack Attack and Small Things, Inc. “If I could somehow just do that kind of thing all the time, I’d be having just as much fun,” he says. “Another thing I love is that teens whose families are regulars come to us for their first job, spend some time working here. Watching the kids grow up, you feel like more than just a cog in the wheel.”
During the pandemic, though unable to continue indoor events for a while, Eddie’s Roadhouse was able to pull together an outdoor concert featuring Julius and Felix Pastorius, sons of late jazz bass legend Jaco. “I have my own very eclectic, eccentric network,” says Cullari, “I love exploring the middle of nowhere, and that’s deepened my connections to local farms. We lived in Michigan for a while when I was a kid and I still go back for art festivals—I was all over the Detroit hip hop scene as a teenager. During the pandemic, we made a couple of rap videos to make people smile…if we can all keep smiling, at least some of the time, things will be alright. I really believe that.”
Eddie’s Roadhouse
This article appears in February 2022.
