A meet-cute, a pandemic home delivery service, a supper club series—Round Top restaurant Julia’s Local has all the ingredients for a feel-good rom-com. And the food’s good, too.
It all started when publicist Julia Joern bought a farmhouse in the Greene County hamlet of Round Top in 1999. In the early aughts, she was in the middle of a renovation project when her builder fell to blows with her painter. “Literally a fistfight in my own home!” she says. “So I had to fire them all.” The house in disarray, projects half-finished, she did what any resourceful person would do and took to Craigslist where she promptly found an ad for “Norwegian Carpenter.” Her interest—professional and personal—was piqued. Enter Henning Nordanger.
Raised in Bergen, Norway and Escoffier-trained, Nordanger worked at large hotel restaurants and mountain resorts throughout his home country—even cooking for the King of Norway on his yacht—before crossing the pond. In his 20s in New York City, he cooked in restaurants and as a private chef, with boldface names like Vanity Fair’s then editor Graydon Carter among his list of clients.
In 2006, Nordanger moved to the Catskills and started taking on carpentry work in between cooking gigs. “He couldn’t find a job, or one he liked anyway, so he opened his own restaurant,” Joern says. In 2012, he debuted Henning’s Local in Eldred Preserve, serving his Scandinavian spin on American comfort food with hyper local ingredients from produce to brook trout from sixth-generation family business Beaverkill Trout Hatchery. Later he moved the restaurant to the space above the historic Heinle’s General Store in Cochecton Center.
Joern became regular at the restaurant and, “he was my carpenter in between,” she says with a laugh. “It was a many, many-year side hustle. And I had a huge crush on him. I was constantly inventing projects for him to do so he’d come back. But we worked really, really well together, and I always thought we should work on a project together.”
Somewhere in there, about six years ago, respective burnouts brought them together for a summer, and they haven’t looked back. In spring 2019, they decided to take the dive on a joint venture. At the urging of her neighbor, JD Eiseman, Joern went to see a building for sale a half-mile down the road from her house. Next to the fire department at the intersection of Hearts Content and Maple Lawn roads, the building had housed German bakery Hartmann’s Kaffeehaus for nearly 60 years. It would need work to transform into a full-service restaurant, but the pair weren’t daunted.
“Henning and I are pretty handy,” Joern says. “I knew the owner—I went every day. And she really only wanted to sell it to someone she liked and could entrust with taking care of it.” Joern bought the building, and they undertook the renovation only to be slapped with Covid in the middle. So they changed gears, Nordanger cooking and Joern delivering meals to an ever-widening circle of customers.
“I put 25,000 miles on my VW Bug,” Joern says. “In the early days before the vaccine, I was the only person a lot of people saw. I met so many incredible people at their doorsteps. I would deliver soup and spend an hour with them.” She went for walks with some customers, others made her cocktails. She took an elderly widower’s dogs out for him. Advertising exec, architectural historian, teacher—she not only remembers names but professions, developing real relationships that continue to this day.
“It meant so much to me—it really kept my spirits up and kept us going,” says Joern. “I got to check out a little bit from what was happening in the media and just take care of my people.” Cairo, Windham, Athens—the radius of service just kept expanding, Joern loathe to turn anyone down at such a tense time. Her online presence was minimal—an ordering platform. This core of 400 families would later become the mailing list for Julia’s Local. “I thought if we could just bring them all together here, that would be great,” she says. “So we did that to launch the restaurant so we could test the space—test the equipment, test the staff, recruit staff.”
The DIY renovation took close to four years and included a complete overhaul of the interior. Joern and Nordanger sanded the freshly un-carpeted wood floors, built the tables, tore out the wall paneling, and built out a professional kitchen. They added a wraparound deck with a wheelchair accessible ramp and painted the whole building a joyful shade of cherry red that’s impossible to miss as you drive by.
Julia’s Local soft-launched this spring with a series of themed dinner parties giving priority to previous pandemic-era customers. Where’s the Beef?, Spring Lamb, Deconstructed Bouillabaisse, Ode to Duck—the 10-course dinners were themed around a central ingredient with a cocktail hour to start. The weekend before \ July 4th they hosted their final supper, Almost Independence Day, with elevated takes on a summer picnic. “We actually didn’t know the menu until two days before,” Joern says. “Honestly it was one of our customers who was like, ‘I'm booking six people, but I am pescatarian.’ So Henning said, ‘Let's fucking do lobster.” Corn, lobster, chocolate ganache s’mores. “It was so fun. It’s like everything about us—high brow-low brow.”
The dinner parties, which numbered around 30 people and ran weekends from April to July, were attended by young recent transplants, multi-generational local families, friends, even contractors from the build-out. Joern did the seating arrangements for the communal-style dining. “Henning did supper clubs in the city a million years ago,” she says. “It’s not a new idea. Everyone does a tasting menu, but I was just like ‘You know what? I'm going to mix it up and have fun with this.’ We had Academy Award-winning producers sitting next to my plumber of 25 years.”
From there, in mid-July Nordanger and Joern rolled into regular weekly dinner service Thursday through Sunday. A few weeks later, I go to visit on a summer evening. Joern greets me on the porch like she’s known me all my life. She has a warm, casual manner and ushers me inside for a cocktail and a quick tour of the place. As she moves through the space, she points out the handmade dishware that was a collaboration with a local potter, introduces the servers as they pass, and checks in on guests. The restaurant, in an old house, is set up in concentric circles—or, rather, L-shapes. At the center, the kitchen, which is helmed by Nordanger and two cooks who followed him from the city to work weekends at Julia’s Local (they stay in the apartment above Joern’s garage). Beyond that, a dark, moody bar with antler pendant lights a wooden staircase to the offices upstairs. Outside that is the L-shaped dining room, with an outdoor deck to match.
An Expat (Hudson Whiskey bourbon, lime, Angostura bitters, parking lot mint) and a shared cigarette later, Joern is ready to move. “You have to see the garden, because for me, the garden is more important than even the physical space of the restaurant,” she says. “It’s at the heart of everything we do.” She’s referring to the one-acre culinary garden up the road, across the street from her house on neighbor JD Eiseman’s property, where she and Nordanger grow everything from herbs to cabbage for the restaurant.
A moment later we’re sliding into my car, and off we go, the evening sunlight falling in heavy shafts across the road. Her neighbor’s property is an idyllic old farmhouse with vast swaths of lawn, apple trees, and lilac bushes.
She and Nordanger have fenced off an acre with logs from downed trees. She points at things as we pass—berry bushes, peppers, collards, mint, garlic, onions, lettuce, leeks, eggplant, mushroom logs, heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, pea shoots, summer squash, kale, cabbage, and the fuzzy tops of bolted asparagus, which they finally harvested for the first time this year. “We can serve stuff warm from the vine, because we pick everything at three o'clock,” says Joern. Everything is started from seed in the greenhouse, which, at this late date in the season, is still incubating the microgreens that garnish many of the dishes. “Oh my god, it's so good,” Joern says, tasting a sungold.
Joern moves through the garden with the excitement of a child. There is a peaceful sense of alignment here, as if the boundaries distinguishing personal life and work have been gently blurred away. “We're having so much fun,” Joern says, tearing off basil leaves to munch while she walks. “No one's getting rich. This is just what we're doing. I almost think we couldn't do it if we were younger. You ever read that Jane Fonda book, My Life So Far? This is chapter three for us.” And all the while the sun sets behind Blackhead Mountain, visible from the garden.
With the proteins determined ahead of time and the produce freshly picked, each afternoon of service, Joern and Nordanger set about tweaking the menu for the night. In late July, the chilled cucumber-sugar snap pea soup is served with yogurt, shallot, lemon, and bronze fennel. The locally sourced Beaverkill rainbow trout sashimi is worthy of a Manhattan restaurant and served with fresh horseradish, soy sauce, and spicy radish microgreens. The juniper gravlax are served with the last of the garden’s asparagus, mild mustard, and Dansk rugbrød. “It is the ultimate creativity to have this incredible garden,” Joern says.
By mid-October, the asparagus has been subbed for broccolini. A Changing Seasons salad brings together delicata squash and dried liberty apples with mustard greens, sunflower seeds, lingonberries, and a savory herb vinaigrette. On the entrees, the pork belly, served with a gorgonzola mash, remains a constant ($28), as does Nordanger’s famous mocha-seared rainbow trout, served with orange-glazed beets and seared kale ($32). While many restaurants have made the move to plant-forward menus, the Norwegian chef has stuck to his roots, dishing up a variety of hearty meat dishes from skirt steak (with grilled sweet onion, roasted garlic shallot butter, and jus, mm mm mmm, $30) to rack of lamb ($36) and a roasted chicken with parsnip puree and kale ($28). What better way to welcome in the cold weather than with a short rib bourguignon ($32)?
Another stand out? The lime-honey glazed duck breast and duck leg confit straddles the seasons, served with sautéed pepper, onion, shiitake, zucchini, and a blend of brown and wild rices ($34). Having listed most of the menu, the gist is clear: basically, you can’t go wrong. Well, unless you’re a vegetarian, in which case there is generally only a single nonmeat option. In fall: roasted red pepper stuffed with quinoa and served with baba ganoush and za’atar ($25). You might cobble together a meal out of soup, salad, and vegetable sides, but be clear: This is not a banner destination for your vegan friends.
And yet, for what it is, it is so good. Nordanger isn’t trying to be too many things to too many people. He’s doing what he does best—bringing the crisp freshness of produce, meats, and fishes, sourced as nearby and possible, to bear in an elegant but not overly contrived execution that is as colorful as it is tasty with the true taste of the ingredients always shining through.
Drinking has been kept delightfully simple—everything from the craft cocktails to the wine by the glass is $15, freeing you up to make a choice based on mood rather than money. Wines include a Slovenian macerated orange, a Croatian Plavac Mali (akin to Zinfandel), and a spontaneously fermented Alsatian Gentil. On the cocktail side, Nordanger brought Henning’s Local favorite, the Ornery Old Fashioned, to anchor the list of bespoke drinks. It’s made with Sazerac Rye whisky, Amaro Sfumato, oleo saccharum, and Angostura and orange bitters. The list also includes multiple spirituous variations on a mule (Irish whiskey, mezcal), a Hemingqay daiquiri, and an elderflower Tom Collins.
Dinner parties returned to Julia’s Local in October will a Trout Trifecta dinner on October 11, celebrating Daniel Heartquist, who has run the restaurant's culinary garden for the past three years. The dinners will continue one Wednesday a month through December, each with a special guest. November 1 honors neighbor and friend JD Eiseman, who leases the couple land for their garden, and December 6 Rita Seiko Payne of Beiko Ceramics in Ithaca, the ceramicist behind the restaurant's vegetally inspired dishware.
The multicourse prix-fixe dinners will center around fresh trout from Beaverkill Trout Hatchery prepared four ways, plus soups, salads, and desserts according to garden spoils. Tickets, $85, include a complimentary welcome drink and are capped at 30 people.
“We made ourselves a job,” Joern says. “And we’re having so much fun doing it.”
Julia’s Local is open Thursday through Saturday for dinner, 5-9pm, and Sunday for lunch, 1-6pm.
