It’s summer 2012. I’m sitting in a newly rehabbed building in Bloomville, N.Y., a town you’ve most likely never heard of. A beautiful young woman, Inez Valk-Kempthorne, is telling me how she began life in the Netherlands, made her way to New York, worked as a model, met and married Justus Kempthorne, a boy from Tennessee, visited friends in Bovina (a metropolis down the road), bought property, built a house of post-and-beam (Justus is a carpenter), fell in love with a building at a town crossroads, bought it, renovated it, and in early July opened Table On Ten (Route 10, that is).
Seventeen years ago, in 1995, I heard that there was a cafe about to open in Bovina. Let’s go see what it is, I said to my wife, and so we drove through a landscape of incredible beauty and arrived at a building that seemed to have been transported from another world. Inside were counters and shelves filled with delicacies one might find at Balducci’s. Polished wood floors, attractive hanging lights, a music system playing Chet Baker (a favorite of mine) and, in charge, a beautiful woman (there’s a pattern here) who welcomed us as if we had always been her best friends. That was Carol Spinelli, who along with her husband, Dave Jalkower, was a refugee from the fast-paced world of the New York garment industry. You can take the girl out of New York, but you can’t take the New York energy out of the girl, and that energy was poured by Carol and Dave into a magic place called Main Street Bovina. It changed everything.

Now in 2012, Main Street Bovina is long gone, but just last week in the same building the old magic was felt again at the opening of Two Old Tarts. The tarts are partners John Schulman and Scott Finley. John was a fashion retailer and designer. Scott was the manager of a direct-mail marketing firm who, after visiting his brother, moved up here, where he cleaned houses, sold houses, waited tables, met John and baked — for years at a local farmer’s market, and now in this new-old venue, which has only been on the planning boards since January. The opening was rushed so that it could coincide with Bovina Day, not yet a national holiday. Continuity is provided by Shirley Dammenhayn, who was there on the first day to help out at Main Street Bovina in 1995 and is here on the first day again.
John and Scott live in Andes (the chic town in these parts), and in Andes a couple from Bovina, Peter Mullin and Victoria Charkut, have just opened Buttercup, a restaurant named after a cat who hated going back to the city. Mullin and Charkut took the hint and now they are here to stay. Mullin was formerly in finance and computer sales. Charkut was an actress who also writes, or will again when the burden of running a restaurant is relaxed and she has some time. Right now she and her husband are learning everything, and she takes comfort and insight from the realization that, as she puts it, starting a restaurant is very much like putting on a new show. Their theatrical venture stars the chef Chris McGee, another refugee from the city who moved up here without a job or prospects after stints at a bunch of stellar New York restaurants. He answered an ad and is enamored of the freedom he now enjoys in a small boutique setting. He especially likes the fact that he can walk out into the fields of farmers who are his friends and pick out what he wants to serve that day.
The three new establishments are different in look and feel, but they share a dedication to local ingredients. At Table On Ten, nearly everything you eat will have been harvested in a 10-mile radius. At Two Old Tarts, the pastries the customers devour — and devour is the right word — have just been prepared by the proprietors. At Buttercup, Mullin and Charkut are as surprised as anyone else by the delights McGee has created for the day.
There is also a shared commitment to being more than a commercial enterprise. Inez Valk-Kempthorne told me that she doesn’t welcome people into “my” restaurant, but into everyone’s community center. Soon she will have a pizza oven and stage movie nights. She invites groups and organizations to utilize the space. She invites guest chefs to try things out.
Charkut is thinking of staging play and poetry readings in the winter months when everything slows down and people need something to draw them out of their houses. Two Old Tarts is already (after only a week) a place where people expect to find their friends sitting at the next table.
This is all unfolding under the shadow of a perennial but unconfirmed rumor that a high-end resort will be built on a large plot of land that sits in three towns, including Andes and Bovina. It is anybody’s guess as to what will happen if this rumor ever pans out, and the people I talk to regard the prospect with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. Please no Gaps or Banana Republics, Charkut pleads. I really like falling-down barns and falling-down houses, Valk-Kempthorne tells me. For many who live here, the beauty of the area is enhanced, not spoiled, by the fact that the landscape is not manicured. The extraordinary energy one feels in the air and in these new restaurants goes hand in hand with a determination to live the slow-paced life. Is there such a thing as slow-down energy (Buttercup’s building used to house The Slow-Down Café)? What will happen to these heady ventures when the flush of early success gives way to the harsh realities of the upstate economy? Will they figure it out? Stay tuned.