The Pittsburgh Dish

084 The Tavern on the Square

• Doug Heilman • Season 2 • Episode 84

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A crumbling 1849 house, abolitionist lore, and a quest to cook for the next hundred years—this is the story of how Maggie and Matt Noble turned The Tavern on the Square into a living landmark. We sit down inside the restored space in New Wilmington, where original beams meet brand-new wiring, and the elevator isn’t a luxury but a promise that everyone belongs at the table. 

We trace their unlikely route from California kitchens and construction sites to Amish-country sourcing in Western Pennsylvania. Culinary training in Napa taught discipline and seasonality; small-town life sharpened their commitment to scratch cooking. The result is a tavern menu with a conscience: stocks built from bones, sauces fired to order, and a flagship burger made from a single, 100% grass-fed, grass-finished cow raised three miles away. Beloved staples like Korean sticky ribs and crispy-skinned salmon sit alongside pizzas that turn local harvests into a seasonal showcase, and cocktails crafted to slow and savor the evening.

Plan a visit to this historic gem and bucolic community for a delicious experience. Check hours, events, and specials on their website at www.thetavernonthesquare.com and on Instagram at @thetavernnewwilmington. 

If the story resonates, subscribe, share with a friend who loves thoughtful food, and leave a review to help others find the show.

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Doug:

Welcome to the Pittsburgh Dish. I'm your host, Doug Heilman. What happens when your vision of restaurant ownership goes beyond the ordinary business plan? This week, how one farm to table tavern concept has become a local pillar in the community, preserving history, supporting others, and impacting generations to come. For Maggie and Matt Noble of The Tavern on the Square, fate and family spirits of yesteryear might also be playing a part in their journey. Hey everybody, we're on a special location, and I'm gonna let the guests of today's podcast introduce themselves and tell you a little bit more about where we are. So, Maggie, would you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us where are we recording from today?

Maggie:

Well, hello everybody, I'm Maggie Noble, and you are joining us at the Tavern on the Square in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.

Doug:

It is so lovely. And I have to be honest, I don't know if I've ever been in New Wilmington before. So what a gem Thank you guys so much for inviting me.

Maggie:

Absolutely.

Doug:

And Matt, how about you?

Matt:

Um, Matt Noble, uh owner here at the Tavern on the Square in New Wilmington. It's a small town, Amish community that surrounds us, uh, about an hour north of Pittsburgh.

Doug:

Yes, and we are very close to Westminster College. That might give some of our listeners another idea of where we are. And I was behind a horse and buggy today. The traffic here is terrible. I'm so sorry. It was great. I love it. You can't avoid it. And so I know you mentioned you are the owners of the restaurant. Is that the primary role you play? Do you have any other positions that you're doing? I'm sure you wear a lot of hats.

Matt:

Yeah, I mean, I uh find myself with my elbows deep in a dish sink pretty frequently. Um if anything breaks on this building, we spent a good part of two years remodeling it so I know every circuit and and every piece of pipe in this building. So I'm if something breaks, I fix it. Yes. I also have a contracting background, so that helps with with that. We host, we table touch, we cook, we um do the creative work on the menu. Um Baggie does all of those things and more.

Maggie:

That's nice of you. I get to I get to do more storytelling than you, which is fun. So I I like to connect um with the community outside of the building. I get to do that a little bit more. Uh, reaching into our surrounding areas, Newcastle, and looking for ways that we can plug in and hopefully do a little bit more than just welcome people through our doors in the future as well.

Doug:

Right. Yeah. And I do want to reiterate, it was a lovely drive here today. It's not far from the downtown city center, and then from points north, like Erie coming down, or you know, we're around Grove City and some of those areas as well. It's easy to get to.

Maggie:

It's worth it if you're looking for an experience, then that's part of the experience is getting here.

Doug:

Yeah.

Maggie:

Um, and we know that well because we're not from here either. We had to get here to to move here. And also we uh our family, we have family um in Pittsburgh and the Sewickley area. So we're down there frequently, and we get to enter into this country setting every time we come home, and that's definitely part of the experience of coming to the tavern.

Doug:

Yeah, it just feels like a breath of fresh air. I feel relaxed as I was driving in.

Maggie:

It's wonderful.

Doug:

I do want to circle back to something that you said, Matt. You you all purchased this building just a couple of years ago, and the restaurant its elf, as well as your mercantile, it's been open since May of .

Matt:

May of 2024. So we've been open for uh 20 months or so. And before that, uh the building had fallen into significant disrepair. So when we purchased it two years prior to our opening, we had a uh a project on our hands. That project started with should we, you know, replace the floor tiles in the kitchen and definitely get a new stove to an elevator and a major addition, and pretty much touching every single space in this building.

Doug:

Every nook and cranny. This is a very historic building, right? I read a few things on your website. 1849.

Maggie:

1849. Oh my gosh.

Doug:

Yeah, it is beautiful. We truly are on the corner in a square. You've got a couple beautiful oaks outside, it's just got a great setting to it. And this initially was a doctor's residence.

Maggie:

It was uh Dr. Seth Poppino was here. Um, he built the home and he practiced in what's now our mercantile. So the doctor was in over there. We have some apothecary items from local vendors thinking of that. Um, but what's really neat about uh Dr. Poppino was uh he and his wife uh plugged right into this community, which was largely an abolitionist community. And Mercer and Newcastle are well-known stops on the Underground Railroad. And it's suspected and believed that this home was also a stop on the way to Mercer.

Speaker 2:

Wow.

Maggie:

So there's a lot of legend and lore when we were um renovating the whole. There's some neat pictures on our website of when um Matt and the team jacked up the back of the building. We had a great contractor, TJ Rollinson, was not afraid to work with this foundation. And they put it all on pylons, and and when we were about to cover it up, cover the flooring up, uh you dug to see if there was a tunnel because there was a rumored tunnel. Wow. Yeah.

Matt:

Yeah, we had a um a backhoe in the basement of the building, which is kind of crazy, but the basement didn't have a floor above it at that point. And we were just getting the floor ready to lay a concrete floor down, and we hit these like large boulders, and we get another one and another one, we start digging. Like, there's like a hole of boulders, so obviously somebody filled in something. And we've heard this legend of the tunnel, like for the Underground Railroad, that connected this building to a building across the street. And so in our brain, we're thinking this could be like this really could be something a really cool historical artifact. Um, unfortunately, after digging many boulders out of this hole, we did not find a tunnel. And if there was one, it would probably have caved in and then you know brought it away by that point. But um, yeah, as I was digging it out, you know, and we're getting excited, this could be it. I'm thinking I'm seeing the glass floor over this deck. Yes, with a you know, historic marker.

Doug:

Let's keep that lore going. Yeah, it's such a a building filled with character, and you've kept a lot of it, as much as you can, while modernizing and updating, you know, elevators and bathrooms and things that we need, but I still saw that uh foundation that you were just talking about, the the stacked stone and uh the beams like across the ceiling. It's lovely. You guys have done a great job. Oh, thank you.

Matt:

Yeah, it was a significant challenge when doing the remodel, both in the design and the building of it, to preserve the history, what like you said, but also bring it up to the modern state. So, like it's all new electrical wiring through this entire building. No knob and tube, I promise. Um, all new copper pipes, all new drains. It's like it's built on the inside, like it's 2025. Right. Uh, and many places on the outside, we just we painted, but we didn't touch otherwise, you know, and like we pulled the site, the old aluminum sighting that went on probably in the 60s. We pulled that off the entire outside of the building, and where that's still exposed on the outside, and in some places on the inside now, we just left it be. You know, that's it. That tells a story also. Yes.

Maggie:

Even though we're an hour from Pittsburgh, when we were doing this project, before we could work locally with growers, we wanted to work with local craftspeople. So that's why you know I said our contractor, TJ Rollinson, was amazing. Um, but we also worked with a really fabulous Pittsburgh architect, Jerry Morosco, okay who is one of the last graduates of Taliesen West in Arizona, a student of the Frank Lloyd Wright School. Um, and Frank Lloyd Wright's wife was still on site when he was there and he graduated in the 80s. So we connected with him and brought him up to look at this old building that needed so much. And he he rocked our program. It was shocking what he said to do. He looked at it and he said, You have a problem. There's no good way to get into this building. You need a stair tower and an elevator. And we were like, You're fired. Um, because it just ratcheted up our budget. Oh my god. But then we we lost some sleep over it, and then we talked about it. We said, if we have a party here, we know people directly who couldn't come because they can't get in because of their accessibility. And so uh it was a tough decision, but he's the one who pushed us to open up our eyes, open up our budget, and say, this isn't uh our career project. This is trying to give this building a hundred more years. Yes. And I just want to thank him for that terrible idea right now because it's actually um it's been one of the most marvelous things to see people in chairs or walkers be able to make it to the very top floor.

Matt:

I came up the elevator today. Yeah, yeah. There's um besides preserving the historical, uh or I'd say while historic preserving the historical and updating it to modern times, we've made the entire building completely accessible. Um and not because we had to, but because once you kind of go down that road, why make it 80% accessible? Go all the way, make it from make it fully accessible. So we widen doorways and put them back together to maintain their historical look. We made every threshold zero. So you're not ever having to make a step anywhere in this building if you don't want to.

Doug:

I love the concept of it's not just for you, but it's for a hundred more years. I think the character just brings so much more to the ambiance and to the food, which we need to get to in just a moment. Yeah. Let's take a step back in history then. So after the doctor uh had his time here, it was sold to a couple that had started the tavern in a different location. Is that correct?

Maggie:

Yes, just down the street. So the uh couple, it was uh Cora and Ernst Durrast, they met at Westminster College. One graduated before the other, and I'm not sure which one was which, but the other one, the um industrious one who graduated, thought, I'll stay busy and and start a little restaurant, a little cafe while you're finishing up. And they named it the tavern, not on the square yet, but just the tavern, uh, because it was just a stone's throw from the college and a little home. And it did well. And um, and this was 1931 is when it started. And then uh seven years later or so, they rented this home from the Poppino family, who had now relocated to Minnesota or somewhere in the uh Midwest. And so they rented to own essentially, and eventually in the 50s, I believe Cora bought the building from the Poppino family. So it's only had uh up to that point uh through the 20th century two owners this building. And what's really interesting about that to us, what stuck out to us was that um they decided to name their restaurant The Tavern in a dry town, and and it was seven years into Prohibition. So there was just a little cheekiness to it that piqued our interest. And so when we were renovating and drumming up a lot of enthusiasm about the project in the town because it was a historic landmark to us, we we got so many stories about what Cora used to do. Fun, you know, she was a taskmaster, but she had a sense of humor. Um and she would, she would sneak little glasses of champagne toast. She would let people come in with something in their jacket, yeah.

Doug:

Kind of look the other way.

Maggie:

A little bit. So I don't know if they had moonshine or anything, but the prohibition, it's it's hard to put yourself in that position. We've been through something, all of us, where the world changed overnight and it stayed that way for we didn't know how long, but it wasn't seven years. Right. It was only a few years. Yeah. So it's just hard to imagine what it would have been like to do that.

Doug:

And Cora is the wife of this couple, and it sounds like she might have been the industrious one because she kept that tavern going even after her husband passed away. Yes, for like 50 years.

Matt:

We recovered a business card from uh from the tavern. I forget who somebody maybe have given it to us. I can't recall. And uh it was her business card, and her title was proprietary. So Maggie took that uh I took that moniker on.

Maggie:

It sounded a little bit archaic, but I thought let's lean in.

Doug:

I can't even say I almost didn't get it out yet.

Maggie:

It's also why I like it, because it's uh it makes you slow down.

Doug:

It does. Oh, so great. Uh I know on your website folks can go in and read your story and they can learn a little bit more about Cora and some of her eccentric ways, let's say, of how to manage guests and all of those cool truths.

Maggie:

A true chef at heart, really. I don't know, she wasn't the cook, but the things that make people want to make shows about chefs, she had that in her drama.

Doug:

Yeah. And after, you know, sort of she passed on, a couple of other folks owned it.

Maggie:

And then it's stranger than fiction. I don't know if you're gonna maybe want to cut this out because it's too crazy, but her daughter took on the role of proprietress for some time after she passed. And it was a tough time in food because uh this was a fine dining restaurant without a liquor license through the 60s, I think, is when it kind of became white glove, and you wear your mink to this in children. Maybe you can, maybe don't. Um children were discouraged.

Doug:

Yes, to a degree.

Maggie:

To a degree, yes. And then it was the special occasion restaurant. I don't know if I detail how you got into the restaurant. I probably do on our website how you were you were sent your reservation card and you had to bring it with you, and it's and it became your bill at the end. So this card that came to you in the mail followed you throughout. I wish we could see one that she wrote a thank you. Yes, she wrote a thank you at the end. So it was this from her hand. Yeah. It's amazing. So when her daughter took it over in the 80s, you we were there. You were, you know, it's like the culture changed.

Doug:

Right.

Maggie:

And also uh food costs changed because our food sourcing changed dramatically. Industrial food was real. So your margin should go up if you're charging the same. But really, in our industry, the margin depends so much on turn and burn if you don't have alcohol, which means no fine dining anymore.

Doug:

Well, that's right.

Maggie:

Or you have alcohol, and that's where your margin is. And they didn't have that. So her daughter was facing an uphill battle. And then um actually uh I had the recent joy of meeting some family at this very table several months ago. I was told by our server Heidi, hey, Maggie, that table 35 says they're your family. And I look out from the kitchen and say, I don't know. And so a little while later, I come up to the table, and the woman in her 80s looks at me and she blurts out the name of my aunt who passed on 30 years ago. And I said the same thing, Mim, because she looked like her too. We both looked like this relative we shared. Oh so I sit down to and start talking with them, and she says, My name is Sandy Arquelo, and uh I'm your cousin. We are my grandfather and her father were cousins, or sorry, uh brothers. And she said, I own the tavern for seven years. What? I know that is so weird.

Doug:

So a a cousin of yours owned this place.

Maggie:

And I don't know her, I didn't know her, but my grandfather is he has a name a menu item named after him in uh Buck burger. Her her that was her uncle. Buck was her uncle, direct uncle. And um, and we named this place as a lot of homage to him because he was a depression era kid, the bottom of 13, which is a lot of uh the Newcastle local people, their story, Youngstown, the story is mirrored throughout lots of households that it's an immigrant house, bottom of 13, had to be industrious, and he um he started his business by picking up coal that fell off the carts in front of him and saving it and reselling it. And then eventually that led to strip mining, which we now know is terrible, but it's at the time it's what pulled his family out of poverty, and that um hard wrangle out of poverty and and eventual success has a lot to do with why we're sitting here right now because we were able uh to get our family on board to support us in this endeavor. So um Sandy's part of that same story, and it's really neat to see she came from the same family, the same stock, nothing, uh changed their name to assimilate, you know. And and so it feels like we were meant to do this. So if that's the case, then hurt we'll see it through.

Matt:

It's so crazy. My family turns out I've got great, great, great grandfathers and uncles and aunts that are buried in the cemetery sooner.

Maggie:

And he's a fifth-generation California. You had no idea Civil War uh vet but died here in Shenango. It's crazy. Amazing.

Doug:

I know in some indirect way you're carrying legacy on.

Maggie:

In a way, we had no idea. We had no idea. We just learned that ourselves.

Doug:

Well, we should come back to when you did step into this place because was it uh my understanding you initially were looking up here to just move to kind of get into the country? Is that right?

Matt:

Yeah, so our our first um our first contact with New Wilmington came by happenstance. We uh our third child had just been born, and we were living in my my uh in-laws Maggie's parents' basement at the time, a really nice basement, but a basement. And um because we were re- had remodeled our home in Sewickley, our town home, and we were putting it on the market for sale. I'm from California. I'm used to seeing long skies, big skies, a little more space. You see the mountains from the beach. Yeah. And down in Sewickley, love Pittsburgh, love Swickley. There's all those hollers and hills, and it's just like I always felt like I was in the bottom of one of the city. Pencil tucky is how I sold it to me. No matter how high I got, I was always still at the bottom. And um, and so I came up here one day on a on just a drive and I saw this open sky, and I thought this is appealing to me. So on our anniversary, um, we go for a drive, it's all we could do. We didn't have big plans, we had a baby just come come to us. And so we we find ourselves in Volant. We get off the Grove City exit or somewhere thereabouts, and and find ourselves in Volant looking for a cup of coffee on a Sunday.

Maggie:

Not to be found, not to be had, no, no luck.

Matt:

So I look up on Google Maps, look up the next town over, okay, New Wilmington. They've got a coffee shop, let's go check it out. Closed Sunday, you know, nothing happening. But we we drive through town, probably drove right past the tavern without knowing it was even a restaurant because it just kind of looks like a big old house. And um hang a left on Market Street, drive past the closed Muggs at the time coffee shop, and there's a uh this beautiful college chapel with a wedding party outside of it, and like I see this old kid riding his bike down the street, and then we drive past this beautiful campus. I'm like, where the heck are we? This is like, does this still exist in America? Yes, especially Western PA, this bucolic small town Americana thing, and uh so just planted a seed, and then a couple weeks later, as I said, we were looking for looking to get out of the hustle bustle of Sewickley and um and maybe get some space around us and this big old house, big, you know, eighteen ninety.

Maggie:

We had a budget, you know.

Matt:

Yeah, we had a budget, so eighteen ninety five house goes for sale for you know two thirds of what we're hoping to get for our little townhouse in Swickley, and we think this could be our new life, you know. So we uh we we jumped on it, we um He said, Let me tell you this is.

Maggie:

That's where he says, We're looking at Zillow. Because how did you get up here? Well, we got up here for because of Zillow. Because Matt hands me the phone. He says, How about this one? And I see this gorgeous home, big window panes like you can't find anymore. I didn't realize how drafty they'd be, but they were so beautiful. And I said, Oh, that's it. Where's that? And he said, New Wilmington. And I said, Where's that? So then he reminded me of the little country drive. And I my first thought was, Does Amazon deliver up there?

Doug:

Yeah. I think there's a distro center just down there. Yeah, it's all good.

Maggie:

We're totally set up for Christmas. We're fine. No, no, no. Small town shoppers. But uh, but yeah, that was it was really a discovery for us as well.

Doug:

So so just to sort of fast track this, so you find this beautiful historic home, you sell the townhouse in Swickley, you move up here, you restore that house.

Matt:

We restore the home during COVID. Yeah, um, did a lot of similar things we did here, took chimneys out, moved walls, both it was training camp and we didn't even know it.

Doug:

Right. It was a primer, and then while that's happening during COVID, this restaurant location has shuttered.

Maggie:

It does and now you continue to watch our town sink further down. Yeah, into um yeah, it was it was sad. And one of the just one of the reasons Matt was coming up here is because uh he does have we did some design build in Swickley. Um, we did our own home, and then Matt was doing kitchens and bathrooms in Swickley. So he was working with uh cabinet makers from up here, and we didn't know that there were these Dutch cabinet makers up here, Amish. So that was what brought you up here. One of the things that brought you up to Big Sky Country, as we like to call it, was working with these craftsmen.

Doug:

That was one of the first draws up north, right? And where you then got to discover this, as you said, bucolic lifestyle that was maybe possible.

Matt:

Yeah, and it's a neat place. I mean, I think um when you come up here, we're surrounded by Amish communities and or a large Amish community. And what that does is it brings this like interesting element of the community, this these people living like it's the olden times. And you drive past, you drive up to the tavern, you see some man on a four-horse plow plowing a field, and it's like, what's going on? Or a nine-year-old, you know, and then you stumble into this beautiful restaurant and you're treated with real hospitality. You get this kind of throwbacky, slow down, right? Everything's gonna be all right, kind of kind of vibe. So we're really trying to tap into that.

Maggie:

Yeah, it's still there, and it's not um anything that has to polarize or divide, it's all about bringing people together that community is still there, a gathering place is still there, all our welcome at this table is still there, you know, or getting stronger, hopefully. So we're trying to hearken back to something that we want for this community, and we're saying we'll be uh the team that makes it still there.

Matt:

I love that. Thank you.

Maggie:

Yeah. I'm Maggie Noble.

Matt:

I'm Matt Noble. And you're listening to The Pittsburgh Dish.

Doug:

Well, I'd love to bring it back. And actually, I want to ask a couple of things. I definitely want to get into the restaurant and you know, as you said, the service you're trying to provide as you're bringing folks to the table. I also want to just sort of step back to your own personal lives. It sounded for a moment like you're you're both into this renovation and contractor kind of world, but you both met in culinary school. Is that correct?

Matt:

Yeah, we both sort of meandered our ways through our 20s. Okay.

Maggie:

Jacks of all.

Matt:

And we had slightly different meanders, but uh but they led us both to culinary school at about the age of what 28, 29. Um my background, um, I grew up in Southern California, Santa Ana, Newport Beach, Irvine, the North Orange County area.

Doug:

Beautiful there.

Matt:

Yes, beautiful. Great childhood, suburban lifestyle. It was great. Then moved up to San Francisco to go to business school when I was 21 years old. Got my degree in 2008 in business, uh, just as the world economy fell completely off the face of the earth. And um, I couldn't find a job anywhere. So while I was in school, I was doing handyman work for my uncle in the Bay Area, Greater Bay Area, which was a really cool experience because I got to go, A, he was a foodie. We cooked together. Um, B, we were in San Francisco, so there's great food everywhere. Yes. And just got to explore the greatest. The lunch hour was fun. Yeah, the Greater Bay Area, because he knew all these little holes in the wall, and we'd go to little Chinese dim sum spots, or go to get some pho and in the sunset, or whatever it might be. And my interest had already been sparked. My parents are also foodies. We cooked at home. I started just cooking, like like before Julia and Julia did her thing. I was actually cooking through the first few chapters and making potato leak soup and mushroom soup and in Julia Child's mastering the art of art mastering the art of French cooking. And it's like I go to the Fairy Palo Aza farmers market in San Francisco, which is this incredible farmer's market with all the best food you can imagine in the world. And I would just get something from the market that I'd never seen before or never tasted before, and take it home and learn how to how to make it or cook something with it. And so that experience sort of like was this initial spark for my culinary interest. But the contracting thing paid the bills. And then uh when after I graduated, I just kept doing the handyman thing. I kept doing the contracting work.

Doug:

And well, that sort of plays into what you've done here, right? Like all of that. That's all part of the stuff.

Matt:

So that sort of training of in contracting and then that sort of interest in food. And then when we go to co we meet in culinary school, obviously I've had decided at that point that I wanted to do a career in culinary. And uh I didn't, I went into culinary school with the real intention of being the top of my class. Like I was like, A, not gonna get distracted by some girl. B, I'm gonna like, I'm gonna be the best, you know, and I'm gonna be a chef in the Napa Valley. Of course, day one, I meet this girl and uh sweeps me off my feet.

Maggie:

I'm strong like that. Oh yeah.

Doug:

And and Maggie, then what about you? So you you do have roots in Sewickley. Yeah. What took you out to California and to culinary school?

Maggie:

Ignorance. What? Right. So no, I am I'm a Yinzer at heart. Um, and I went to uh I graduated from Chatham and in 08. And then I did uh I did a lot of internships in Pittsburgh in the area trying to figure out I was a communications major, which means you need to figure out what you're gonna communicate about. So I worked for the Pittsburgh Pirates, I worked for uh 91.3, and then finally I worked, I worked for a production company called Sunking at the time, a fabulous place I work with Coca-Cola. So I got to learn a lot, and I wrapped up with Green Building Alliance, and I was just reading books on their shelves, their library. And that's when I started to um have no you have to be older to know that people weren't really talking about environmentalism. Um, and so I was starting to be interested about our impact, human impact. I love, love nature, and I thought, oh my goodness. Rachel Carson came to my attention as a Chatham uh student. I I also was not very good at science. So I thought I need to learn more about environmentalism. I I can't be an environmental science, I get a master's in that. That's just not my route. I don't know what to do. I thought I got to start, you know, where my ignorance starts, and that's in the dirt, you know. What do we get from the dirt? How do we keep the dirt safe? And I thought I started thinking about food and how little I knew about food production and how to cook it. I couldn't boil water. Um, and so that my interest started out of a desire to not be so ignorant. Um, iceberg lettuce and beef steak tomatoes were lettuce and tomatoes for me.

Doug:

That's what you knew.

Maggie:

Yeah, I've heard it said it's the cold part of a burger. Um, so I um started out with the literally getting in the dirt. I did a really neat little program at Harvard um in landscape architecture. And a lot of people in my program were making rooftop gardens, which gardening didn't occur to me, let alone putting it on a roof.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Maggie:

And so um I thought, okay, I need to learn how to grow stuff if I I don't know what I'm gonna do with this yet. So I found a program in uh South Carolina working on an organic farm, and I was just a hands, I was hands in a field. And I got the I was lucky to be the person who brought the product to market quite a few times. And I also got to bring the product to the chefs in South Carolina and Charleston, which is a great food city. And so I would bring these big wooden crates with these beat-up hands and tan skin, and I'd walk into these sterile environments. They look surgical, chefs all in white, and I'd be holding the stuff that I knew just came out of the dirt. And these surgeons, I was, what are you gonna do with this? Right. And the my gateway vegetable is uh a leaf called sorrel, uh green sorrel. And I knew what it tastes like because I eat stuff in the field and it tasted like green apples to me. So what are they gonna do with this? And this one chef just looks up and says, We turn it into a sauce, and that blew my mind. I said, How do you turn a leaf into a sauce?

Doug:

Yeah, that transformation.

Maggie:

What happened? How did you do that?

Doug:

Right.

Maggie:

Blenders did not occur to me, dude. So um, anyway, so I started to ask my uh the farmer that I worked for who was from Sonoma, and um, I had a great friend whose husband was a chef who went to Culinary Institute of America. I already had a degree and I couldn't ask my parents for more money. So um I tr found in northern, they said you gotta go west. If you want to learn about where food comes from and how to cook it, you have to go to California. And so after doing some research, I found Napa Valley Cooking School, which was a um program out of Napa Valley College. So it was a state program, and so therefore it was very affordable. Um their marketing materials were great, the food looked beautiful in the pictures, and I get there, and we talk about this often, the first day this chef walks into the room all in whites, it's a woman, and uh she's 50 or so, and this she's just a tour de force. She starts telling these stories of her global culinary experiences, and this woman, chef Barbara Alexander, becomes over the course of the next five years, she becomes my mentor, best friend. I plug in between her and her daughter, somewhere weird I could be in that family. Um, it just becomes over those years very familiar. I ended up working for her. She hired me after I graduated and I became the assistant instructor of the school, way too green, knew nothing. She knew it. Um, and it was so hard and so scary, but um got through it. And uh I didn't know also, just like with Matt doing construction work in these old homes in the um San Francisco Bay Area, just like I was thrown into teaching professional culinary students just having graduated myself, like blood in the water. Um, I didn't realize that that would also be preparing me for this as well.

Doug:

Journey, yes. Yeah, my goodness. That's cool. It's so cool. Yeah, but you have been thinking about with your background then too. I'm sure that the menu here trying to do local and not that you said it earlier, industrial sourcing. That probably plays into a lot of the dishes, right?

Matt:

Yeah, absolutely. We um we work really hard and and it does, you know, cost us time and money to to source the the local ingredients that we source, but we do it because we think it's the right thing to do. But just as important, it's better. You know, the food. It's the food tastes better.

Doug:

Totally does.

Matt:

When you cook seasonally and you cook locally and you cook with ingredients that came out of out of good soil, out of good earth, it's just better. It's better for you, it tastes better uh in every way. It supports the local farmers and the local community, plugging back into our locality, and so it's uh it's definitely a significant part of our mission. And it's honestly based off of our training from Chef Barber Alexander in the Napa Valley Cooking School and the experiences we had in in in the Napa Valley and in California in general, we wouldn't do it any other way. There it was that we wouldn't we wouldn't compromise that value for for anything. So if this doesn't work, you know.

Maggie:

Yeah, we were I'm sorry, you're gonna have to make this like parts one, two, and three. But um, when we were discussing our business plan, again, like my uh my dad is one of our um biggest investors because he grew up in Grove City and wants to see these communities thrive. Thrive, right? So he was we were explaining our business plan to him, and he doesn't, he's not in the food industry at all. So he said, Well, why don't you what do you think about mirroring you know one of these profitable businesses that serve food in a basket out of a fryer, which I enjoy, sure. I like fried pickles too.

Doug:

There's a place for that.

Maggie:

Absolutely. But I just said I don't have any interest in plugging into that as a business person. I can't, I like to try that food sometimes, but I don't want to be part of producing it. I can't, I can't do it. We're that's why we're so grateful to be on your show because it's like we're begging people to get on board with us. We need you. We need people who feel the same way as we do. We owe it to the customer to provide great food, um, but we are asking for for like-minded people to support our mission. Right. Yeah.

Matt:

Yeah, I think the um the thing that is the most difficult element of cooking farm to table, which is a phrase that kind of maybe doesn't mean that much to some people. Maybe it means they get has negative connotations to others. But basically what it means to us is that we're cooking as seasonally as possible and locally as possible. And we've found that we can do that both with really strong connections with our local farmers, but also good relationships with our vendors, whom a lot of them do support, you know, if you US foods and some of the bigger suppliers, they're supporting the getting local, yeah. The only way you can really do it through those vendors is by buying whole ingredients and cooking everything from scratch. Yeah, you can't do the pre-batched stuff.

Maggie:

You can't buy a not from within 200 miles of the air. Right.

Matt:

Pot stickers from US foods are not local. No, but you know, you can get raw ingredients from them and make pot stickers that are local. So that's uh that's the biggest part of the challenge is um the scratch cooking element. We're building stock from bones like like cooks do. Right.

Maggie:

We're trying to keep our um our prices, we're trying to stay competitive with the local market, but we're not buying food in a bag, we're paying real people to process it and make it. So our ticket times, I'm really proud of our ticket times, they're great, but everything is fired to order. So, you know, you're coming here, same with our, we have this amazing mixologist, Augustine Dunn, who's just a diamond in the rough up here. We've we're so lucky to work with him. And he keeps telling us cocktails are something that are made to be savored, they're supposed to slow you down. He's wonderful with that. So we think that the same way with the food, even though it's not fine dining, it's tavern, bistro food. But you're supposed to take your time getting up here and take your time enjoying it.

Doug:

Can we talk a little bit more about the menu right now? Because I think we haven't told our listeners much about it. So, since we've mentioned farm to table, tavern style, slow it down. You've got a great cocktail program going on. What are some of the dishes that are really currently resonating with your diners or some things that you guys are just really proud of to have on that menu?

Maggie:

What I'm most proud of is our burger.

Matt:

Our number one seller is our our burger. Oh, really? We like Maggie said, we're uh we're a tavern, we have a bistro menu. We are not fine dining, we're not trying to be, but we are trying to do everything we do.

Maggie:

Deliciously. Delicious.

Matt:

So you don't, there's nothing, there's no dog on our menu. Um literally or figuratively. The the burger is special to us, and I'll let Maggie tell you why.

Maggie:

Oh man, well, because it's this place is so familial. And uh we I just got my Christmas card from the team, and they all call me like a mother. Oh, oh my gosh, how old am I? But I thought, whoa, I am old enough to be your mother. Um but I'm also old enough to be a daughter uh to a local farmer down the way. His name's Chuck Moose. And he again, like Augustine, finding these people who are excellent up here. Uh, Chuck is in his early 70s, and he found us when we were just in a pile of rubble on demo day, really, and pulled up with an 18-wheeler of hay. And he said, Uh, my daughter lives in South Carolina. She said she saw on Facebook that you're gonna look for farmers for this place. I said, What is going on here? And it turns out he said, I raise cattle. I said, Okay, I was skeptical. Okay, great. Give me your card. I don't have cards, but you can come out and visit me. I'm just three miles down the road. Okay, well, you know, what's what's your practice life? Because I thought if he's three miles on the road, he doesn't have a KFO. It's small scale. He said, I raise them all on grass. And I started to be very interested. You raise all your cattle on grass. You can't find 100% grass-fed beef anywhere. And he said, Okay, tell me more, have you ever supplied to restaurants? Well, yeah, just I I've settled one. Um, it's in New York. I said, We're in New York, it's Hudson River Valley. And I start to know, I know, I know which one. And I said, which one? He said, Blue Hill Tavern. And I said, That's a Michelin star restaurant Chuck.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Maggie:

And he said, I heard that. I don't know, haven't been there yet. And so I'm a stinker and skeptical. So he's he knew it and he gave me the contact that he works with, and I emailed them and I said, Are you working with Chuck Moose down here in New Will? Why? Why? And he said, We can't get cows over five years old anywhere else. And uh, the way we braised them and we use the whole cow, we need milkers, we need older cows who can handle that kind of cooking process and have that developed flavor. And so it was verified. And uh, so when we were ready after a year of construction, when we were writing this menu, I said, Matt, we gotta have chuck. And we knew we couldn't do steaks because you gotta remember there's two tender loins on one cow. That's it. That's all you get, right? Yeah, that's like one night of service for us, if that. So Matt here had the idea, let's turn it, let's use it for burger. And uh, we tried just the ground meat, and it wasn't, you know, uh just the ground of an old cow wasn't great. So Matt again said, let's use the whole thing tender than all. So we buy, I don't know how many cows a month from Chuck.

Matt:

Uh two to three, depending on season.

Maggie:

Yeah, two to three cows a month, and the entire cow becomes our burger. Your burger. 100% grass-fed, which as I get older and we all start thinking about our health after you turn 40, and you start to learn that you really shouldn't eat beef any other way because our bodies aren't pro like we can't process it well, and the cow can't process grain well either. They can process grass, so we can process a cow that eats grass much better. And I'm that's what the definitely the product I'm most proud of because he's one of my favorite people to work with, and I just value what he's doing. Everybody called him a hippie. He doesn't even know. He's he's not it's not any kind of message. He just said, I just he grew up on a dairy farm, he turned into a cattle rancher, and he just said it just made sense to me. Why am I buying grain in when I got all this grass right here?

Doug:

What an incredible story.

Matt:

Yeah, it's a special an idea and like a promise of our values that turned into a problem. That we turned into a solution. That um I think when you taste our burger and you tell somebody that it's 100% grass-fed, grass finished, never ate grain, lived its entire life in a pasture.

Maggie:

Three miles away.

Matt:

Three miles from here. And because it's if we age it right, and also we're using all of that choice meat. So all of the rib, all of the tender, all of those prime cuts that would become steaks in almost any other setting are being turned into our burger, including all of the fat that comes off of the animal. But because that fat is grass-fed fat, it's leaner, it's not greasy, and it's just it's delicious. It's probably one of the best burgers in the state. It's so good.

Maggie:

It's my go-to, honestly.

Matt:

So yeah, that's something we're very proud of. It's also, like I said, it's our our big, our number one selling item. But we have a lot of other stuff that uh a lot of other menu items that we're we're proud of. And we've when we started the restaurant and built the menu, we always talked about our farm to table concept and cooking it seasonally. And we changed this menu over four times a year at least. You know, if not more. But but then you start making like really good food and people really like it.

Maggie:

They get mad at you when it's not there if it's not there anymore.

Matt:

We have um uh Korean sticky ribs with a Korean barbecue sauce that are just to die for. They're so good, they fall off the bone, and people love them. I can't imagine taking that off the menu. Yes.

Doug:

Um that a little fury coming in.

Maggie:

No, so we have a on our mains, we have a crispy skinned salmon with a uh Van Blanc sauce. And that's there because again, a shout out to Chef B, as we call her, our mentor chef. Uh that's the first thing that you learn how to make, the first entree that you learn how to make in culinary school, we did anyway for French culinary um training, because it was the first plated dish at a restaurant in Paris. It's uh, but it was in a sorrel sauce and a piece of salmon with uh a sorrel sauce. And so that's just kind of uh hearkening back to our days of you know learning the building blocks of a plated dish. Delicious.

Doug:

It brings back the sorrel sauce.

Maggie:

Yeah, my my baby, but sorrel sauce. So we don't, we actually um it's funny, we don't have any sorrel in it over the winter because we don't have any sorrel.

Doug:

Not seasonal.

Maggie:

Yeah, and we didn't um we didn't have it over the summer this year either because we couldn't just couldn't keep up. But we have all these lovely guests who are growers around here say, What can I grow for you? And they're just home home gardeners and like sorrel. Everybody who asks me what can I grow for you, I say sorrel, please sorrel, sorrel.

Doug:

So sorrel may be the next kale. That's it. After eating.

Maggie:

Oh my gosh, let's find out if it's good for you, and then it'll really take off. That's right.

Doug:

We should also say, just to to kind of wrap around, uh, not only are you open for lunch and dinner through the week, you do brunch on Sunday, and then I've seen later in the day is it?

Maggie:

Don't you even, yeah, don't you question it? Meatloaf night is real. Oh, yeah. It's Sunday night for a reason. It's like Sunday supper. Bring the family around. Will you get a salad in a main course for 25 bucks?

Matt:

Oh, it's like the blue place special.

Maggie:

Yeah, exactly. Um fresh mashed potatoes.

Doug:

Get rid of the Sunday gloomies if you're going back to work the next day. I love the whole idea.

Maggie:

Yes, yeah, that's that was the idea is get in here with your family on Sunday night.

Matt:

Smelling good in here.

Doug:

It it is smelling really good in here, and we have a few diners, so hopefully uh we don't get too rowdy. But thank you guys again. This has been so special to be in the place that we're talking about. It is such a vibe, so historic, done in such a beautiful way. You've been open, coming up on two years now. What's ahead? Are there any new goals or events, or or just keep trucking along with how it's going now?

Matt:

There are a lot of goals and um and plans.

Maggie:

You know, we you do what you know. Um one of the things I did at the cooking school in Napa is um I helped to manage the um the recreational cooking classes. That's something I'm passionate about. And it's hard, we don't have time and we can't get people into our professional kitchen because we are a restaurant. But one thing we're doing is we're bringing the community in for fun things like that. So we have a mixology class with Augustine that's sold out, unfortunately. Um, but it's uh over the holidays, it's awesome. And then I'm I'm doing a class with Augustine uh for dry January on kombucha and its benefits. It's Matt wants me to call it How to Keep Drinking When You're Not Drinking.

Doug:

Yes.

Maggie:

Um we're doing that in January. So we're trying to, we're shooting to have a class a month that uh brings people in and we learn together. Um, so that's some small scale goals that we have. And then uh some bigger goals is we have we still have a couple square feet in this building that we want to finish out for private dining because we didn't realize that that would be such a big part of our business.

Matt:

We had an ask for it, right? Big time, a lot of requests, and we fulfill almost all of them for anywhere from 12 to 25 person dinner parties. You know, and they want uh one big table and they want 20 people to sit around it. And uh it becomes challenging to do that in the same space as running regular restaurant service. Right. So uh we have some ideas about how we can utilize some other uh the spaces that we haven't fully developed and turn those into really elegant private dining rooms, like truly private dining rooms.

Maggie:

Yeah, we have we have a lot of fun ideas, especially with my brother coming on, helping us as our general manager, and he's also Sewickly based. So he wants to get things closer to him, and he had some ideas for you know, bringing our pizza off site, maybe having some satellite things like that. So that's like macro tenure thinking.

Doug:

By the way, I've heard good things about the pizza. The pizza's good. That was Matt's idea.

Maggie:

Matt's a great pizza maker, and he demanded we have to have a pizza oven. I said, Why are we having a pizza oven in a Pennsylvania farm to table restaurant? But it was a good call.

Matt:

It's a good call. You know, it's another thing we can do very easily. We talked about how hard it is to change some of the menu items, but on a pizza, we can run a seasonal pizza so easy. You know, um, and and get fresh ingredients on a pie and make it really good and tasty. So yeah, makes total sense.

Maggie:

A hundred percent. That's it's what we're learning. We celebrate thousands of anniversaries here a year, and I always ask, what's the secret? What's the secret? And everybody says it's listening, everybody says that to each other to each other, and I'm gonna learn someday. But I think this this journey with you today has helped me to say when we listen to each other, cool things happen.

Doug:

So I I just can tell, like the two of you talking, it's been you're looking at each other the whole time, it's super collaborative, it's kind of like you know each other's next level. It's hard, it's hard.

Maggie:

It's it's like we um doubled up and we got these skills that neither of us had, and we like click together like a transformer and became way more effective, but there's also a constant creative tension. So I feel bad for our children. They'll have plenty of fodder for therapy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we haven't really mentioned that yet. Oh, right.

Maggie:

We oh, right.

Doug:

And they're they're little kids, they're little kids, they're little kids.

Maggie:

But our daughter is gonna, she's like like a pastry chef in the makeup. I made Christmas cookies yesterday, and I was about to say yes, chef, half the time.

Doug:

Oh my.

Maggie:

Yeah, she's she's wonderful, she's uh really talented, and she's got our same problem with wanting to teach herself every autodidact problem. She got you, she suffers. Yeah, your jeans.

Matt:

I've been told I'm stubborn.

Maggie:

Right.

Doug:

She's not getting any of that from you. No. Well, I have to say, uh, once again, uh Maggie, Matt, it's been such a pleasure to come into your establishment to have this conversation. I hope we get some of our listeners so intrigued that they want to come on up. It's an easy drive. Thank you. Yeah. Let's remind folks, if they're not familiar with New Wilmington or your your location, uh, your website, your social handles, and where they can maybe find some of that event information you were just talking about. Absolutely.

Maggie:

So we like to make things complicated. Just slow you down here. Our website has two the's in it. It is thetavern on thesquare.com. And our social media is The Tavern New Wilmington for Instagram. And our hours, our special holiday hours are up on the home page.

Doug:

Um we're recording just a little before Christmas. So people should check that out if they want to make a trip. I think I heard that maybe you're taking a little break then in January after all of the Yeah, but we have a great New Year's celebration with a special menu that we're gonna do, which is exciting.

Matt:

Our regular hours of operation are Wednesday through Sunday. Uh we open up at 11 o'clock every day and then close at nine, except on Sunday, we close one hour earlier at eight o'clock, offering a special Sunday brunch uh from 11 till 3 every Sunday. And then, of course, meet love night on Sunday nights.

Maggie:

Live music on Thursday nights. And again, I mean, just diamonds in the room. We have so many talented musicians up here. And I also want to point out my one last shout out, you can include it or not, Doug, but on your way out, again, so many talented people in this region in western Pennsylvania. There's a piece of art in our parlor painted by a local artist, Thomas McNichol. He hangs at um Jason's gallery in Pittsburgh, and then another gallery in North Carolina. And I was connected with him with a local Westminster graduate, but nationally renowned opera singer who is also my neighbor, who connected me with Thomas McNichol several years ago, and we became friends, and I helped work on his website, and he um has repaid me with a seasonally changing oil painting for our parlor. It's for sale. Um that and you have to contact the you know, the artist family directly because I don't know how much it is, I can't. Um, but I just I'm looking right now. We have a new one that he hung yesterday, and I just get lost in them. So please come up and enjoy fine art, great food, great cocktails, and hopefully great company. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt:

And after almost two years of running this business and hiring and training, the best part is the staffing. It's like it's the most meaningful part, really. Like the guest interactions are great, the community feedback is great, but these faces we come into and these lives we get to know every day, deeper and deeper. That's like that's the best part of the thing so far for me. And that surprised me. That I it's a challenge, of course, but it's the most maybe the most rewarding um fruits of our labor.

Doug:

Well, thank you for sharing that. Because I think, you know, to your earlier point, staffing can be hard as a as a restaurant entrepreneur. You're thinking about the food, you're thinking about the community, but you've built a community inside these walls. Yeah.

Maggie:

Yeah. Um, I like country music, and I heard it said one time, I'm too blessed to be stressed. Because uh we have 55, right, on paper, 55 people carrying this load with us. I feel like we have to just claim that it's you know, we got we got too much to gnaw on that stress, you know.

Doug:

It's a great family.

Maggie:

Yeah, it is, it really is.

Doug:

Well, thank you guys so much. I do have one final customary question, and you both can answer it separately or together. The name of the show is The Pittsburgh Dish. What's the best dish you've eaten this past week?

Maggie:

Sorry, we're like hyper, hyper. That's a hard question for two chefs, right?

Matt:

So many delicious meals and wines and and drinks in my life. Um, but this last week, uh Maggie at home made a cream of mushroom soup.

Maggie:

Oh you stop.

Matt:

That's just you're hired. It just warms one of those one of those like home cooking warming things. So right out of Julie bringing Julia Child's art of French cooking right back onto the table. And uh just a simple cream and mushroom soup with uh some sourdough bread. And I was happy.

Doug:

I can't think of anything better. Yeah. But Maggie might have something.

Maggie:

No, mine takes a different direction. I should say it's the burger that you built the restaurant for that you've sourced for, and you I should say all that, and it is, and I love you. But um, this is I I have a surprise, surprise one. Matt and I got to go out last night and we went to a restaurant called Le Resto in Newcastle, and we've been told to try it, and we finally got a chance to. It's a young Japanese couple from Japan.

Speaker 2:

Wow.

Maggie:

And they um took over this incredible bank building, gorgeous bank building. It's a big bite, it's a big project, and most of the menu was sushi. And we were jerks, and we thought, I'm not gonna get sushi in December in Newcastle. Uh, I don't know how long the fish has been there, you know. But typical Japanese fashion, the owner of the restaurant comes out and gives us a gift of some unagi eel. And I could tell the way it was prepared that there was a hot broth poured over this eel because just the top had a little bit of color and and um there was intention behind it, plus it was a gift, so you never refuse a gift. And we tried it, and we were both really impressed. It was delicious and the warmth and the hospitality behind it, and then that his wife was our server, and she was probably eight months pregnant, both speaking through broken Japanese, and it just was so powerful for us to see this couple who's behind us in age taking a massive bite, trying to do something that seems crazy. And we said that we'll be back and we mean it.

unknown:

Yeah.

Doug:

Remind us of the name again?

Maggie:

It's called Le Resto in Newcastle. And just a reminder too to myself, it was a reminder to me and to our listening friends here too, that when you go out, it's you are you're part of the story, and every dollar you spend, I know sometimes oh that was burned or that was cold or whatever. It's your investment means so much. Everything you everything you think you want to try, oh it's 10 bucks. When you it's it means something to the server, it means something to the business. It's an investment we we deeply, deeply appreciate and need. So please don't feel bad when you go out and spend some money because we've really, really we need it and we're grateful.

Doug:

You're really investing in your community and in other people. Yes. So let's do it. Maggie, Matt, Noble, owners of the Tavern on the Square in New Wilmington. Thank you both so much.

Maggie:

Thank you, Doug.

Doug:

Thanks for being on The Pittsburgh Dish.

Maggie:

Oh, we're thrilled. Thank you very much.

Doug:

If you enjoyed the show, consider buying us a coffee for this episode or supporting the show monthly. You can find links to those options at the bottom of our show description. And if you want to follow my own food adventures, you can find me on social media at Doug Cooking. That's our show for this week. Thanks again to all of our guests and contributors, and to Kevin Solecki of Carnegie Accordion Company for providing the music to our show. We'll be back again next week with another fresh episode. Stay tuned.

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Douglas Heilman

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