Over 20 years in restaurants.

A lifetime of noticing what makes food memorable.

FOOD FLAVOR HOSPITALITY

What if?

What if our little community could experience flavors, foods and traditions they might otherwise have to leave town to discover?

That became the idea behind the Grotto: food, family, community, and discovery.

Good Food. Good People. Good Vibes.

How I think about food

There is not one right way to eat.

As a mother and a cultural anthropologist, I've spent a lot of time around people with different tastes, traditions, preferences and relationships with food.

You can put eight people at a table and get eight completely different palates. One wants familiar. Another wants adventurous. Someone wants sweet. Someone wants savory. None of them is eating wrong.

That curiosity followed me into restaurants. I started paying attention not only to what I liked, but why I liked it. What was present? Did it have sweetness? Salt? Crunch? Something creamy? Chewy? Unexpected?

Over time, I learned to taste food not only for what was present, but also for what was missing and for what could transform it. That's the fun part. Fun like sweet purple heirloom tomatoes, dancing with kiwi, pineapple, red onion and a champagne vinaigrette.

From thought to plate.

I'm not a chef.

But I'm a hyper communicator with a sensory-sensitive palate. I notice things. Flavor. Texture. Contrast. Balance. Opportunities for enhancement. And I can usually find the words to give a descriptive analysis.

At the Grotto, we built an entire menu that way.

All the dishes started in my head as ideas for sensory experiences. I could describe detailed flavor notes and profiles. I knew what I wanted a bite to do and how it should feel. How the flavors should build and in what ways to weave texture. I turned thoughts into words. Our chef, Jonni Lutz, turned those words into food.

Dopamine Dance.

At The Grotto, I wasn't interested in making the same food people could find everywhere else. I liked taking something familiar and asking what else it could become and how I could transform it.

Sometimes it was taking something comforting and putting it together in a new way. Sometimes it was playfully twisting a current food trend. Sometimes that meant an unexpected ingredient. Sometimes it meant playing with texture. And sometimes it meant putting flavors together that didn't seem so obvious, until you tasted them.

Some combinations make you raise an eyebrow.

Blackberry, potato, and basil soup.

Then they make you dopamine dance.

Brie, fig, and cinnamon apple sammich.

The combinations weren't common, but they weren't random either. They were creatively developed through nostalgia and food science.

Bahamian rum cake topped with a Piña Colada fluff inspired by ambrosia.

There was always a reason something was there. Balance. Surprise. A complementary or enhancing element of texture and flavor. The first bite should make you pause and then go back for another bite.

Food takes you places.

I know food to be transformative. A liminal space built through the senses. Food crosses time and space to bring you to places foreign and familiar.

At The Grotto, our menu didn't stand still. Neither did I. I was constantly tasting, critiquing, and refining. Looking for ways to make a dish more memorable.

Every few weeks, we'd choose another destination. Another culture, another set of flavors, another opportunity to build around it.

Sometimes that meant researching a dish I'd never tasted before. Sometimes it meant learning why certain ingredients were used and adapting to a more obtainable or sustainable source. Sometimes it meant figuring out how to introduce something unfamiliar in a familiar way.

I wasn't trying to make every culture taste familiar. I just wanted people to have a reason to try something they might never have ordered before. To have access. To ask a question. To taste something new. And discover their own connection to it. Through food, our community was able to go somewhere without leaving town.