Carolann wasn’t quite intending to start a full-blown restaurant.

“I just wanted a café, because I didn’t want to be stuck in the house all the time. We were just going to do coffee and pastries, you know, and have a super chill little place and then it just turned into a restaurant somehow,” she says with a sigh.

Carolann is not an inexperienced chef though, having been cooking for friends and family since the age of 12 under the tutelage of her mother. US-born, and Canada-raised, Carolann lived in a multi-cultural community and learned to cook all sorts of regional dishes with her mother. Although she began her career as a make-up artist, she later lived in Italy for five years to study the cuisine there.

After settling in the Catskills from NYC, she decided to do a Pierogi Pop-Up in the restaurant when it was Liza Belle’s Kitchen, which closed at the start of lockdown in 2020. Pierogis are some of her favorite foods and the pop-up was so popular that she considered starting her own restaurant at that point. The seeds were sown.