The Café DeWitt, rounding on its fourth decade, started life
as a coffee shop tucked into a hallway -- one wag called it the “plus-chic bomb
shelter in town” -- in a trend-setting re-purposed school building in downtown
Ithaca.
In the beginning, café owners Sigrid Pauen and a friend
baked their own bread, sewed the table cloths, and gave birth to the curried
tuna sandwich. The fact that the Café has grown and thrived, still in that hallway, is testimony to Pauen and co-owner Josh
Eckenrode, a young chef who, while not classically trained, grew up cooking
with his family, and has studied in depth on his own. Both focus on creating brilliant stuff from
local meats and produce. Both are longtime
community members, products of Cornell University, she in German literature, he
in business management.
Between the two of them, and with the addition of pastry
chef Barbara Brazill, “meat expert” Brent Perkins, salad-and-soup-pro Amy Pennington,
and a crew of dedicated waitstaff, the place
clicks merrily along, producing and serving favorites like their rich and
famous onion soup, its onions caramelized for hours to rich sweetness,
obviating the need for meat stock, and their famously addictive double-glazed
lemon cake.
The place and the food are important, but a good part of the
draw is the people. It’s a breakfast and
lunchtime hangout for the local sisterhood of therapists, building residents
and shopkeepers. The staff, many of them long-time café employees, can hold up
their end of a conversation. “Everybody
here has another life,” said Pauen.
“They’re musicians, photographers, potters, nurses, EMTs, textile
artists, filmmakers, librarians, film librarians.”
As like attracts like, the café has hosted arts and sciences
notables. Actors John Lithgow and Gabriel Byrne (“The Usual Suspects), New York
State Author and Pulitzer Prize winner Alison Lurie, economist Alfred Kahn,
literary critic Mike Abrams, and astronomer Carl Sagan have broken bread with
colleagues and friends at the café’s tables.
Their oddest guest of all time, though, was a white-tailed
deer that came to visit during a Sunday brunch, crashing through a store
window, skittering along the café’s back bench, leaping over the back wall’s
battery of fish tanks, and ending up, befuddled and dazed, in the dish room,
where veterinarians tranquilized it and sheriff’s deputies removed it to a
woodsier setting. While Eckenrode and Pauen pride themselves on the café’s
fresh, local meat and produce, this was a bit too fresh for them. Said Pauen, “Everybody was in shock.”
They have forged alliances with local producers. “The thing that’s excited me the most is
partnering with Autumn’s Harvest,” said Eckenrode, who sources eggs, bacon,
ham, and sausages from the Romulus, New York producers. “We’ve started making
our own corned beef from their brisket. It’s been a huge hit.” And every
Tuesday is burger day at the café using their beef.
Said Pauen, “We’ve gone very far to remain local, with
unadulterated ingredients.” They make
their own condiments, chutneys, curry spice mixes, vinaigrettes, and roast
their own turkeys. Pauen credits Eckenrode not only with adding considerably to
the café’s offerings but also with upgrading the café’s tools, and with taking
the restaurant to new levels of presentation.
Even so, the café still has its original espresso machine, nearly 40
years old, and thought to be the first in town. “It’s like a Ferrari,” said
Pauen.
On the table, the salads are dazzlingly colorful, the soups
legendary, and the basic menu hasn’t changed in years – there’d be a great
pulling out of hair and rending of clothes were items like the caprese salad or
the curried tuna sandwich to disappear.
But daily specials provide fresh approaches to soups, salads, and
omelets, often vegetarian, occasionally nearly vegan, and then they’ll hit you
with the Tuesday juicy hamburger special or some of that excellent house-corned
beef. Weekends, however, any pretence of
dietary restraint is off, as menu offerings warble a siren call with French
toast fashioned from rich brioche and stuffed with raspberries, sour cherries,
and ricotta, or pumpkin waffles with spiced apple compote and whipped cream, or
their famous huevos rancheros. And
you’re bound to find something laced with chocolate sauce as well.
The group has made the best of the café’s humble locale,
whose hallway configuration serves as a kind of people-funnel, particularly in
winter, when visitors stroll through the hall, greeting and being greeted by
friends in the café, and where sun-deprived singles and duos come to warm up
with soup, or with coffee and dessert, and to get their “people fix.” The
lighted fishtanks cast a flattering glow, as do hundreds of little Christmas
lights suspended from white dowels, holiday décor so beloved by patrons, it was
allowed to remain, spanning the seasons. The restaurant subscribes to a flower
CSA, so there are always fresh flowers on the tables.
