lost kitchen tour

Meet Erin French on Her National Book Tour for 'Big Heart Little Stove' 

Meet renowned chef and bestselling author Erin French on tour for her new cookbook  Big Heart Little Stove: Bringing Home Meals & Moments from the Lost Kitchen .

All tickets include a copy of  Big Heart Little Stove ! Erin will share stories of The Lost Kitchen and her recommendations for cooking thoughtful and meaningful meals at home: start with the best ingredients you can find, keep it simple, and serve with love. 

November 1: New York City The 92nd Street Y with Ina Garten 7:00 PM ET 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10128 Buy tickets: 92NY.org TICKETS SOLD OUT

November 2: Boston, MA Brookline Booksmith at Somerville Armory 7:00 PM ET 191 Highland Ave #1c, Somerville, MA 02143 TICKETS SOLD OUT

November 4: Dallas, TX McFarlin Auditorium, SMU — Presented by Arts & Letters Live 7:30 PM CT 6405 Boaz Lane, Dallas, TX 75205 Tickets available at  dma.org TICKETS SOLD OUT

November 6: Seattle, WA Book Larder at Fremont Abbey 4272 Fremont Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103 Evening Event with Aran Goyoaga | 6:30 PM PT - SOLD OUT Afternoon Event | 12:00 PM PT - SOLD OUT

November 7: San Francisco, CA NEW VENUE: Book Passage at Calvary Presbyterian San Francisco 1:00 PM PT 2515 Fillmore St, San Francisco, CA 94115 Tickets available at  bookpassage.com TICKETS SOLD OUT

November 7: San Francisco, CA Omnivore Books  4:30 PM PT 3885 Cesar Chavez St, San Francisco, CA 94131 More information at  omnivorebooks.myshopify.com TICKETS SOLD OUT

November 8: Traverse City, MI National Writers Series at City Opera House 7:00 PM ET 106 E Front St, Traverse City, MI 49684 Tickets available at  nationalwritersseries.org TICKETS SOLD OUT

November 9: Kansas City, KS Rainy Day Books at Unity Temple on the Plaza 7:00 PM CT 707 W 47th St, Kansas City, MO 64112 Tickets available at  rainydaybooks.com TICKETS SOLD OUT

November 16: Portland, ME Print Bookstore at State Theater 7:00 PM ET 609 Congress St, Portland, ME 04101 Tickets available at  printbookstore.com TICKETS SOLD OUT

Connect with

Sign up for our newsletter to see book giveaways, news, and more.

" * " indicates required fields

The Lost Kitchen: A Glimpse Inside Maine’s Most Wildly In-Demand Restaurant

• @remodelista?utm source=remodelista&utm medium=follow&utm campaign=tools 100
• Remodelista 101
• Remodelista 102
• Remodelista 103
• Remodelista 104
• Newsletters 105

Start typing to search...

This is the country’s most talked-about restaurant, but you’ll need to get a little lost—and mail a love letter—to find it.

The Lost Kitchen is an unlikely success story. First, there’s the matter of where it is: in the rural town of Freedom, Maine, 17 miles from the coast, surrounded by farmland and backcountry roads, near towns like Unity and Liberty. You can count the buildings in Freedom on one hand: There’s a general store, a gas station, a post office, and the Lost Kitchen itself, in an 1834 mill building, perched over a stream.

Then there’s the matter of the restaurant’s story. It’s helmed by a self-taught chef, Erin French, a Freedom native who spent her teenage years working at the local diner. She started the Lost Kitchen as a series of under-the-radar dinners in her small apartment, then saved to open a real restaurant, one floor below. The Lost Kitchen took off, until one day French arrived to find padlocks on the doors, her grandmother’s china and every pot and pan locked inside: the Lost Kitchen, lost in a contentious divorce. French rebuilt, renovating an Airstream and serving pop-up dinners across Maine before she got word that the falling-down mill in Freedom had been saved and was in need of a tenant. She moved in and fitted everything herself, sourcing vintage appliances from old farmhouses, building the dining tables by hand, and scouring antiques stores for tableware.

In its current iteration, the Lost Kitchen has eight tables and one seating a night, and French and her team of women servers and cooks do it all: one server grows the flowers, another raises the chickens. French cooks the multi-course meals on the spot, in the open kitchen, with no menu in mind, drawing only from what’s available that day, recipes learned from her mother and grandmother, and the simple flavors of Maine. The ink on the menus is barely dry when guests arrive: They’re printed just before the seating each night—until then, what will be served is in flux.

It’s an unlikely success story, but a wild success it is: In the four years it’s been open, French has written a cookbook, The Lost Kitchen: Recipes and a Good Life Found in Freedom, Maine . It used to be that on April 1 the phone lines would open for the summer’s reservations, but after the phone lines crashed, French turned to a more old-fashioned system last year: Prospective diners sent in a handwritten postcard, postmarked between the dates of April 1 and April 10, to be considered for a coveted seat at the table. French received almost 20,000 postcards: They fill buckets in the small office beside the dining room.

Starting today, The Lost Kitchen is accepting postcards for the 2019 season; see all of the details here . Unless you’re one of the lucky few, though, you may never get inside the Lost Kitchen. Consider this a glimpse.

Photography by Greta Rybus for Remodelista.

Landed a spot at the Lost Kitchen, and need a place to stay the night? Might we suggest the guest bedrooms at High Ridge Farm , a 20-minute drive.

Take a look more hidden gems in Maine, as part of The Maine Line issue:

• The House that Craigslist Built: A Bare-Bones Farmhouse in Midcoast Maine
• On Our Radar: 4 Up-and-Coming Ceramicists to Watch in Maine
• Into the Wild: Evangeline Linens in Portland, Maine

N.B.: This post is an update; the original story ran on August 17, 2018.

Product summary  

Iron Mountain Paint

The Lost Kitchen: Recipes and a Good Life Found in Freedom, Maine

Explore deeper into these areas.

• Design Travel
• Antiques & Vintage
• New England
• Restaurant Visit

Trending on The Organized Home: Modern Minimalism

Just add pillows: the diy headboard for $35, have a question or comment about this post, related stories.

Design Travel: An Italian Chef and a Danish Baker at Marigold in Rome

Open Hearth: 7 Design Ideas to Steal from Dunsmoor in LA

Honest Materials: 5 Ideas to Steal from Brooklyn’s Astarita Pizzeria by TBo

Remodelista.

Order our new book Remodelista: The Low-Impact Home ⬇️

Join the Remodelista Family of Websites

Become a member at no charge.

When you register as a free Member of the Remodelista family of websites (Remodelista, Gardenista, and The Organized Home), you gain access to all current posts plus 10 archived posts per month, our internal bookmarking tool, and the community bulletin board.

Member benefits include:

• Access to all posts published in the past year
• Access 10 archived posts (older than one year) per month on each site
• Use of our internal bookmark tool, so you can save products, posts, and other pages for quick reference
• Access to our community bulletin board so you can ask and answer design-related questions
• Unlimited access to the Product Catalogs, Design Travel sources, and Architect & Designer Directory listings
• Choose from our ten newsletters to keep up with the latest on the sites

Or Subscribe for Maximum Value!

For $5/month ($59.99 paid annually) you'll enjoy unlimited, ad-free access to Remodelista, Gardenista, and The Organized Home and all the benefits of Membership.

Subscriber benefits include:

• Unlimited access to all three sites
• Weekly access to subscriber-only content
• Ad-free browsing environment
• Unrestricted access to 30,000+ archived posts
• Receive the full-text daily newsletters
• All features that Members have access to
• Annual subscribers pay 50% off the monthly subscription price of $9.99

Subscribe to the Remodelista family of websites

Sorry as a registered member you get 10 free posts from our archive (posts more than a year old) every 30 days. you have reached your limit for this 30-day period. if you would like to access unlimited posts from the archive (ad free, too), become a subscriber today, and keep reading as many articles as you want., full access individual subscription.

Benefits include:

• Unlimited access to Remodelista, Gardenista, and The Organized Home sites
• Annual subscribers pay just 50% off the monthly subscription price of $9.99

Sorry! You have reached your limit of three (3) free posts from our archive every 30 days. You can increase this to 10 posts by joining as a free Member, or read unlimited posts with no ads by becoming a paid Subscriber.

Login to your account, lost your password, create your account.

Already have an account?

No worries, we will email you reset instructions!

Already have password reset code?

Reset your password?

You should receive an email with your password reset code - please enter it below, along with your new password. The email will be from [email protected] - please check your spam or junk folders if you don’t see it.

• Change Password

Manage Newsletters

Stay current with the latest posts from Remodelista each day – in their entirety.

Stay current with the latest posts from Gardenista each day – in their entirety.

Get excerpts of the latest content delivered each morning.

Get excerpts of the latest Gardenista content delivered each morning.

Twice-a-week notices of our latest tips and inspiration to improve your home organization and storage strategies.

Our Monday digest of helpful ideas and inspiration to improve your dream kitchen or bath.

Ideas to update and improve your outdoor space with hardscaping elements. Delivered Mondays.

A Wednesday round-up of our favorite new products for the home

Never miss a fabulous garden or ideas on how to design your own. Delivered Wednesdays.

Remodeling and renovation tips and ideas for projects big and small. Delivered Fridays.

Our Friday guides to making each plant look its best in your garden.

Shops, hotels, restaurants and points of interest for the home and garden obsessed on the go. Delivered Saturdays.

Congratulations on becoming a Subscriber to Remodelista, Gardenista and The Organized Home! You now have access to many great features across the sites:

• Receive any of the newsletters, including the the full-text daily Remodelista and Gardenista newsletters

Congratulations on joining as a free Member of Remodelista, Gardenista and The Organized Home! You now have access to many great features across the sites:

If at any time you want to become a Subscriber and enjoy unlimited, ad-free access to all our content, just go to the My Account link and choose Subscribe.

• Edit Email Edit Email
• Manage Subscription Manage Subscription
• Subscribe Subscribe
• Change Plan Change Plan
• Edit Email Manage Newsletters
• Bookmark Bookmarks
• Log Out Logout

• MOTHER'S DAY
• ACCESSORIES
• STATIONERY & BOOKS
• BIG HEART LITTLE STOVE
• THE LOST KITCHEN
• FINDING FREEDOM
• VISIT THE MILL
• SHOP AT THE MILL
• SUPPER AT THE MILL
• STAY AT THE MILL
• FARMERS' MARKET
• WE ARE HIRING!

Your cart is empty

SUPPER WITH ERIN AT THE MILL

Spring Is Here!

Our mailbox in freedom, maine is now open for 2024 season submissions., 2024 submissions details.

Submissions are open for a chance to join us at our tables in Freedom, Maine for an intimate and warm dining experience hosted by Erin French.

Send us a postcard

Please include your name, address, phone number and email. Use the remaining space to send us a note if you'd like. In the upper left hand corner, please write '2024'. Be sure to use appropriate postage.

Address and mail your postcard to:

THE LOST KITCHEN 22 MILL STREET FREEDOM, ME 04941

A few things to know

When sending your postcard...

You can choose your date and party size when we speak with you according to our current availability—no need to specify your desired date or the number of people in your party on your card. Please keep your postcard to standard 4x6 sizing. Do not mail your postcard in an envelope. Mail-in envelopes are sorted separately and do not end up in the correct bin for our reservation drawing.  Please do not send more than one postcard per person. Duplicate submissions will be disqualified. Please do not send postcards on behalf of others. ​Make sure we can read your contact information. If we can't read it, we can't call you! In the rare event that two family/party members receive a reservation call, within the same session, we kindly ask that you decline a second reservation. 

what happens next

During the month of April...

We pull cards one by one at random for reservations...If your card is pulled, you will receive a phone call from us, and we will help you find a date that works for you and your guests. If your card isn't pulled during this window, there is still a chance you could hear from us at some point later in the season. In the event that we have a cancellation, we go back to drawing cards to fill the vacancy. 

why postcards?

In the summer of 2014....

We opened The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine.​ We quickly, and unexpectedly, got found. ​ And in an effort to slow things down, we didn't go online...we went old school. We know the internet is a convenient tool, but it was never going to solve our reservation problems. The Lost Kitchen is small. That's part of its magic. And we want to keep it that way. But when your card is pulled, you become our focus. We want you to be excited every step of the way. From the moment we first speak on the phone to the moment you walk across the bridge and into our dining room, we want you to feel like you're coming home. This is our greatest joy. ​​If your card isn't pulled, a piece of you is still with us. Every card we receive is saved and remains with us in Freedom. We love reading your stories, laughing at your jokes, and getting a tiny glimpse into your lives. It means the world to us.​So if you do find yourself here in Freedom for dinner, we promise to share the best we have to offer in a delicious and memorable meal by the mill pond. 

still have postcard questions?

Availability

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Manage Your Subscription
• Give a Gift Subscription
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes
• Restaurants

The Heartbreaking Story Behind The Lost Kitchen, an Incredible Restaurant in Freedom, Maine

In 2013, chef Erin French lost almost everything. Then, in Freedom, Maine, she started anew with her restaurant The Lost Kitchen.

To eat at chef Erin French's critically acclaimed restaurant, The Lost Kitchen , you'll have to jump through a few hoops. First, you'll have to mail in a postcard to enter a lottery to get a table. Then, the next challenge is finding the place: From the mid-coast town of Belfast, Maine , drive 17 miles inland through woods and rolling farmland on a two-lane country road. Watch closely or you'll miss the sign for Freedom. Take a quick left on Main Street, and there's The Mill at Freedom Falls — The Lost Kitchen's once crumbling, now beautifully renovated home. Cross a narrow bridge over a rushing stream, and you're there.

The dining room has sanded plank floors, exposed beams, and suspended mill trestles. A wall of windows looks out onto the stream and bridge. Upstairs is a school for local kids; downstairs, a stone-walled wine store with bottles carefully curated by The Lost Kitchen's sommelier. There are no restaurant liquor licenses to be had in tiny Freedom, but you can buy wine at the store to drink at The Lost Kitchen, or bring your own.

The restaurant opened quietly in 2017 but news of it spread, and customers now come from many miles away. Chef Erin French, who is entirely self-taught, creates unfussy, astonishingly delicious food using as few ingredients as possible in combinations that are both exciting and viscerally satisfying. She doesn't rely on fancy sauces or avant-garde culinary techniques; she is rooted in tradition. She gets some of her recipes from her mother and grandmother, elevating them and making them her own.

French's almost entirely female crew, whom she counts as close friends, are also local farmers. "I get the best produce," she said. "My friend will text me a photo of a cauliflower in her field, and I'll say, 'Bring me 12 of those.' " Later, that friend will serve the cauliflower herself. Another friend who raises ducks taught French how to confit them. A third plates the salad greens she grows. Everything French serves is in season. Even in late-winter months, when local ingredients are scarce, she is resourceful, using wintered-over root vegetables like beets in complex-tasting sauces for braised short ribs , or crisp endive salad brightened with citrus and mellowed with a smoky bacon dressing. The Lost Kitchen is as farm-to-table as it gets. French even made the tables, in classic Maine DIY fashion, out of barn boards and plumbing fixtures.

French herself is as local as it gets. She was born and raised in Freedom. By the time she was 14, she was flipping burgers on the line in her parents' diner located only a mile from the old mill. After college at Northeastern in Boston, she moved to California to become a doctor. At 21, an unexpected pregnancy derailed that dream. She moved back home to have her son, Jaim; her mother was her Lamaze partner.

Returning to Maine proved to be a good decision. French sold her own baked goods and worked for a local caterer for years; then, when she was 30, she started an underground supper club out of her apartment in Belfast and called it The Lost Kitchen. She experimented and studied cookbooks obsessively. Her rigorous autodidacticism paid off — her weekly dinners sold out within minutes. She and her then-husband bought their building, an old bank; after a five-month renovation and build-out, French opened a restaurant downstairs. "It had crazy success," she said. "I had a following."

In 2013, she lost the restaurant and many personal possessions, even her grandmother's china, in a painful divorce. (French has since opened up about her custody battle and addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs in her 2021 memoir, Finding Freedom .) Broke, homeless, and heartbroken, she moved to Freedom with Jaim, back in with her parents ("Thank God for them!"). They helped her raise money to buy a 1965 Airstream. She gutted it with a sledgehammer, then built a kitchen inside and gave pop-up dinner parties across Maine.

A friend, a farmer whose chickens are now served at The Lost Kitchen, told French to check out the town's old mill. The first time she walked in, her jaw dropped. She presented a business plan to potential investors (mostly friends and family), cashed in an inheritance from her grandfather, and signed a lease. Over the next several months, she built out a simple open kitchen behind a polished concrete island.

With symbolic aptness, The Lost Kitchen reopened in 2017. Four nights a week, French cooks with focused but easy efficiency for a sold-out room while her crew moves from the fryer to counter to tables; the feeling in the candlelit space is calm, festive, and homey all at once. Ensconced in her community, French is bringing the world to Freedom. "I've come full circle," she said.

Related Articles

Advertisement

In 'Big Heart, Little Stove,' Erin French gives tastes of The Lost Kitchen experience

Copy the code below to embed the wbur audio player on your site.

<iframe width="100%" height="124" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://player.wbur.org/hereandnow/2023/11/01/big-heart-little-stove-erin-french"></iframe>

Erin French 's The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine, is one of the hardest restaurants in the country to get into.

In her new book " Big Heart, Little Stove: Bringing Home Meals and Moments from The Lost Kitchen ," she shares tips and recipes to create that restaurant's ambiance and menu at home.

This segment aired on November 1, 2023.

More from Here & Now

Q&A with Erin French | The Woman Behind the Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine

Seemingly overnight, a restaurant in a tiny Maine town became one of the most sought-after dinner reservations in the country. Meet its owner and head chef, Erin French.

By Ian Aldrich

Sep 02 2018

Erin French, head chef and owner of The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine.

Yankee : You’re speaking to us at the end of your winter break. How did you recharge your batteries and prepare for the new season?

Now that you have some distance from the 2017 season, what do you make of everything that happened, what do you think of the celebrity status that accompanied it all.

What are you excited about for the new season?

Is there anything you’re nervous about, do you really pay attention to that stuff.

Your new reservations process requires people to mail in a card, and if it’s drawn at random, they’re among the lucky few who will get to eat at your restaurant. What was your thinking behind the change?

Do you ever foresee a time when you’ll open another lost kitchen, or another place that features your food, so that more people can have access to your cooking, recipe: graham cracker pie.

Ian Aldrich

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

How Erin French Made a Tiny Maine Town a Dining Destination

The lost kitchen.

View Slide Show ›

By Tejal Rao

• Aug. 1, 2017

FREEDOM, Me. — Right in the middle of dinner service at her restaurant, the Lost Kitchen , the chef Erin French likes to step out and talk to the crowd, as if she’s giving a toast at a party.

“It’s July in Maine,” she said on a recent night, raising a sweaty glass of rosé. “How lucky are we?”

Locals in the dining room cheered; July meant long sunlit days with cherries and elderflowers, sweet snap peas and creamy new potatoes, small and misshapen as freshwater pearls.

Ms. French talked through her menu, annotating it like a memoirist. The main course today was lamb, not because it was part of her plan, she explained cheerfully, but because the swordfish she had ordered never arrived, and the angry phone calls she made got her nowhere. So Ms. French did what she always did: She vaulted off the disaster toward something else, something she hadn’t planned for.

Dinner at the Lost Kitchen is an occasion, and most restaurants of its caliber work to maintain an illusion of effortless perfection. Ms. French, who is 36, has built a cult following with her own approach — open, intimate and personal.

Inside a hydropowered grist mill in Freedom, a town about halfway between Augusta and Bangor, she cooks a set dinner for 40 people, four nights a week, editing the menu each day to keep up with subtle changes in season and supply.

When reservations opened in April, Ms. French received thousands of phone calls requesting tables, clogging up the phone line and answering machine. The restaurant is open eight months of the year, and she filled the books from May right through to New Year’s Eve in just one day.

“People told me I was crazy, that this restaurant would never work,” she said.

Despite its success, they still do. Smiling politely, Ms. French brushes off inquiries and advice from those who think her small restaurant in rural Maine should operate in a certain way.

Has she considered staying open longer, on more days of the week, and serving breakfast, lunch and dinner? Couldn’t the dining room squeeze in at least a dozen more seats? And wouldn’t online confirmations be more efficient than a phone call from her mother?

One man mailed Ms. French what he considered to be a better business plan, perhaps not realizing that she was already running her business exactly the way she liked.

“You reach a max-out point if you do too much,” said Ms. French, who published her first cookbook, “ The Lost Kitchen: Recipes and a Good Life Found in Freedom, Maine ,” in May. She said she doesn’t keep the business small for a sense of exclusivity, but rather for a sense of warmth: “It’s the way I’d want it to feel at someone’s house.”

Most of Ms. French’s cooks and servers are close friends, and all of them are women, something of a rarity in the industry. Rarer still, many of them are also farmers, growers of heirloom tomatoes and organic blueberries, who are working second jobs at the restaurant.

The team thrives without the stereotypes associated with high-pressure kitchens, and important decisions are made as a group, like the one to pay cooks and servers more equally, and pool tips.

“Everything about the way this place is set up is made to be low-stress,” said Ashley Savage, a server who runs the flower farm in Knox that grew the sweet pea blossoms in the dining room. Another server, Maia Campoamor, has a solar-powered organic farm in West Montville, with fruit orchards and greenhouses full of vegetables. A third, Meghan Flynn, is a ceramist; she made the restaurant’s eggshell-colored plates and bowls at her studio in Lincolnville.

Freedom has Prohibition-era laws that ban alcohol sales in restaurants, so Ms. French’s mother, Deanna Richardson, manages a wine shop downstairs where people can buy bottles on their way to the dining room. She also greets people as they come in, wearing a slate gray linen apron, her hair in a low crown roll.

In the open kitchen upstairs, Ms. French says a quick hello before sliding into the rhythm of service with her two cooks, plating fried green tomatoes with buttermilk and flowering herbs, pouring chilled squash soup over lemony garlic scape pesto, searing dozens of steaks on cast-iron spitting with hot fat.

A giddy diner approaches with a copy of Ms. French’s cookbook. “Erin, would you sign it?”

Ms. French grew up in Freedom and never expected her hometown of fewer than 1,000 to become a food destination. As a teenager, she played soccer, listened to Björk and flipped burgers at her family’s diner.

She worked in catering later on, and in bars, and in her early 20s, she got into baking. With her newborn son, Jaim, strapped in the carrier on her chest, Ms. French rolled dough for pecan pies and creamed butter for carrot cakes. She delivered the orders as he slept in the car seat.

Ms. French looked into culinary school but was put off by the expense. Instead, she cooked more at home, and more ambitiously. She married and started a supper club out of her apartment in nearby Belfast.

She called it the Lost Kitchen, and tinkered there with the earliest drafts of her precise, straightforward cooking, often embellished with edible flowers and shallots macerated in vinegar. Ms. French reconfigured a classic salade niçoise into a dish that made sense in Maine, serving halibut browned in butter with a runny poached egg and a warm vegetable salad. And she puréed local vegetables with fresh buttermilk and lemon juice to make soups with beautifully controlled acidity.

She used few ingredients to build each dish, and worked simply, without special equipment, taking service cues from both fine dining and dinner parties at friends’ homes.

Ms. French soon opened a restaurant of the same name downstairs. But just as she was finding success, her marriage was coming apart.

“If you want to find where all the cracks are in your relationship, open a restaurant,” she said, “then watch it implode.”

The stress took a toll on her mental health. Suffering from anxiety and depression, she became addicted to the pills prescribed to help her manage. Ms. French went to rehab to get clean, and she did. Two weeks later, when she returned home to Belfast, the fallout from her divorce took her by surprise: The locks were changed, her staff was fired and her restaurant was closed. It was no longer hers.

“Just like that,” she said, “I lost everything.”

Ms. French moved into an Airstream trailer, which she still occasionally refers to as the divorcemobile, and parked it for a while in her parents’ yard. She was paralyzed by a sense of failure, misery and rage, but only temporarily.

When Ms. French was a little girl, she had been warned to stay away from the grist mill in Freedom. It was dilapidated, streaked with spray paint, littered with decades of bloated trash. It seemed as if it might fall apart at any moment.

But the mill was restored to splendor by a new owner, just as Ms. French was ready for her own second chance. She built the Lost Kitchen inside it, and when she opened, in the summer of 2014, many of the cooks and servers who had worked with her in Belfast were ready to come back, too.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Ms. French said, “but this place is our fuel.”

One of Ms. French’s defining qualities as a chef is the immediacy with which she responds to change — an immediacy she brings to her menus each day.

The elder tree behind the mill is in full, fierce bloom for just one week in July. The moment Ms. French spots the elderflowers from the dining room window, she hops the fence by the footbridge, climbs down the rocks and snips as many as she can carry.

She batters and fries the blossoms into sweet, spindly fritters, dusted with powdered sugar. Or she infuses them in syrup to pour over warm lemon cakes. She serves the cake in thick slices with softly whipped cream, semifreddo and cherries from Ms. Flynn’s trees, drizzled with honey. After dessert, people totter out, and a few stop by to hug Ms. French as they say good night.

When all of the tables are clear, Ms. French heads home to an old farmhouse a mile from the mill, where she lives along with 14 chickens and a dog named Penny. Jaim, now a teenager, splits his time between his parents, and when he’s staying with Ms. French, they hike together behind the house to swim in the trout pond, and build fires in a stone-lined pit on the lawn, where they chat until they’re dry.

On her way back to work in the morning, Ms. French usually lets the chickens out to feast on the buffet of insects. But on the next day, she spotted a hawk in the sky. Though Ms. French couldn’t be sure it was hunting, she’d already lost a few birds to predators and thought about keeping them inside, safe from danger.

She quickly reconsidered. There was no such thing as being safe from danger, not really. And staying inside? That was no way to live.

“Good morning, girls,” said Ms. French, pushing the cover off the coop door. “Be careful out there, O.K.? Be careful, but go, go, go!”

Recipes: Halibut Niçoise | Chilled Golden Beet and Buttermilk Soup

And to Drink ...

The dominant flavor of this niçoise variation is not the fish itself. It comes from the surrounding Mediterranean chorus of olive, lemon, anchovy, garlic and tomato; the potatoes, halibut, lettuce and egg are just a mellow backdrop. Those Mediterranean flavors suggest the classic Provençal solution: a good dry rosé, of which moderately priced examples abound. For a little more money, the rosés from Bandol or Cassis, or darker, more singular examples like Château Simone or Clos Cibonne , would be delicious. You could try a rosé from anywhere, really, so long as it is dry and relatively light-bodied.

Other alternatives? Dry, brisk whites would be fine unless oak flavors are evident. Bone-dry sparklers, too. But I would steer clear of reds. ERIC ASIMOV

Follow NYT Food on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter and Pinterest . Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice .

A caption in an earlier version of the slide show accompanying this article misspelled the surname of one of the cooks at the Lost Kitchen. She is Carey Dubé, not Carey Duba.

How we handle corrections

More on Food and Dining

Keep tabs on dining trends, restaurant reviews and recipes..

Rich piloncillo, used in place of brown sugar, adds unparalleled depth  to baked goods and even savory dishes.

The 136-year-old company Manischewitz’s products have been staples in American Jewish households for generations. After a major rebranding , the matzo ball soup comes with merch.

A veteran food journalist settles some long-simmering disputes on a slippery subject: whether your spaghetti needs to be al dente .

With its bright pink packaging and spicy contents, these Korean-made instant ramen  packs are going viral online and flying off shelves.

Eating in New York City

We asked, you answered: Here are the restaurants our dining-obsessed readers  would rank the best in the city.

Pete Wells, our dining critic, has unveiled his annual ranking of the 100 best restaurants in New York City .

At Shaw-naé’s House on Staten Island, the owner and chef Shaw-naé Dixon serves up Southern classics  and a warm welcome to her “living room.”

Once the pre-eminent food court in Flushing, Queens, for regional Chinese cuisines, the Golden Mall has reopened after a four-year renovation. A new one in Manhattan  is on the horizon.

Book Passage

Search form

Erin french with michael dutton and elizabeth poett - big heart little stove (calvary presbyterian sf).

Erin French in conversation with  Michael Dutton and Elizabeth Poett

Big Heart Little Stove: Bringing Home Meals & Moments from The Lost Kitchen

~ Live In-Person ~ Calvary Presbyterian SAN FRANCISCO   • $42 Tues., November 7, 2023 • 1:00pm PT

Presented in partnership with Calvary Presbyterian San Francisco.

Please note the venue has changed to Calvary Presbyterian at 2515 Fillmore St, San Francisco. It was previously Book Passage Corte Madera.

Big Heart Little Stove  is your new go-to inspiration for cooking thoughtful and meaningful, yet refreshingly simple meals. With more than 75 recipes and her favorite hospitality “signatures,” Erin French—author of  The Lost Kitchen  cookbook and the  New York Times -bestselling memoir  Finding Freedom —invites readers to bring a piece of her beloved restaurant, The Lost Kitchen, home with them. With dishes pulled from French’s family recipe box and the menu at The Lost Kitchen, ranging from irresistible nibbles like Pecorino Puffs and Gram’s Clam Dip; to luscious soups like Golden Tomato & Peach and Potato & Lentil with Bacon and Herbs; to heaping platters of family-style salads and sides like Peach & Blackberry Salad and Green Beans with Sage, Garlic, and Breadcrumbs; to show-stopping main courses like Pickle-Brined Roast Chicken and Wednesday Night Fish Fry; to French’s favorite all-purpose kitchen staples like Kitchen Sink Pesto and Floral Vinegar, this cookbook has all the tools you need for assembling a seamlessly special meal. To round things out, there are beverages to sip as dinner comes off the stove (Fresh Fruit Shrubs, Slush Puppies) and desserts to make your guests feel truly looked after (Salted Caramel Custards, Roasted Peach Pie with Almond and Fennel). And because weekend mornings deserve celebrating too, there are feel-good treats like Sunday Skillet Cakes and Little Nutmeg Diner Donuts. Regardless of whether it’s a dressed-up affair or a quick weeknight meal, French’s recommendations are the same: Start with the best ingredients you can find, keep it simple, and serve with love. But  Big Heart Little Stove  is more than just a cookbook. With tips and tricks French has used in her own dining room—at home and in the restaurant—this book is your invitation to use what’s around you to create meaningful moments, from setting a table with found treasures, to adorning dishes with edible flowers, to thoughtful gestures such as offering a cold cloth on a hot day. Full of warmth and spirit,  Big Heart Little Stove  will show you how to create more joy and connection around your table.

Erin French  is the owner and chef of The Lost Kitchen, a 40-seat restaurant in Freedom, Maine, that was recently named one of  TIME Magazine ’s World’s Greatest Places and one of "12 Restaurants Worth Traveling Across the World to Experience" by  Bloomberg . She is the author of the  New York Times  bestselling memoir,  Finding Freedom , and features in Magnolia Network’s  The Lost Kitchen . A born-and-raised native of Maine, she learned early the simple pleasures of thoughtful food and the importance of gathering for a meal. Her love of sharing Maine and its delicious heritage with curious dinner guests and new friends alike has been lauded by such outlets such as  The New York Times ,  Martha Stewart Living,  NPR’s  All Things Considered ,  The Chew ,  CBS This Morning ,  The Today Show ,  Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe , and  Food & Wine .

Michael Dutton is a recovering New Yorker whose career took him into the depths of the media content universe through such mainstays and bastions of news and entertainment as MTV Networks and the Associated Press. He honed skills as a producer as well as developed a keen understanding of the technical and business sides of the media industry. But in 2013, while still at the AP, Michael met Erin online and with the wink of an eye, his journey north from Manhattan to Maine began.

Today, Michael is Erin French’s husband and partner.  Over the last 10 years, in addition to chopping wood, making fires, putting out fires, tending to chickens, renovating buildings, fixing anything from door knobs to hydro turbines, occasionally cleaning outhouses, and generally supporting the growth and forward momentum of the Lost Kitchen, he is also an executive producer of the Lost Kitchen TV show and manages all the media strategy and public relations for Erin and the Lost Kitchen.  

Erin French photo courtesy of Greta Rybus. Elizabeth Poett photo courtesy of the publicist. 

Location: 

Big Heart Little Stove: Bringing Home Meals & Moments from The Lost Kitchen (Hardcover)

• Off-Site Events

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission

How Chef Erin French Gets It Done

Erin French had her first restaurant job at just 14 years old, helping her dad out behind the counter of her family’s diner. By 2013, without any formal training, French was being invited to host dinners at the James Beard House. As she’d later detail in a memoir , she then entered rehab for alcohol and prescription drugs and lost everything — her house, her marriage, custody of her child. As she rebuilt her life, she opened an establishment in 2014 in her hometown of Freedom, Maine, called the Lost Kitchen . The 50-seat restaurant in a renovated mill serves simple dishes from locally sourced ingredients. Word-of-mouth recommendations and good press raised the Lost Kitchen’s profile enough that when it started accepting reservations in 2017, the restaurant was inundated with 10,000 phone calls in just 24 hours. The restaurant now has a lottery system and only takes reservation requests via postcard. 

Today, French is a four-time James Beard Award semifinalist and the subject of a Magnolia Network series, The Lost Kitchen . She also has a new cookbook, Big Heart Little Stove , out on October 31, that guides readers through recipes that go beyond simple instructions to include the small touches that make a meal feel special. French lives in an old farmhouse with her husband, her “very old dog,” and her 21-year-old son, “who should probably be thinking about getting his own place.” Here’s how she gets it done.

On her morning and weekly routine:  The alarm goes off around 6:30 a.m., but I’m in bed for an hour. I’m waiting for coffee to kick in, looking at the New York Times , seeing what’s going on in the world, doing the spelling bee. Then I get up, let the chickens out, let the dog out. I built out these edible flower gardens, and I found that if I go and harvest flowers for the restaurant in the morning before I go to work, I come in in a better space.

I get to the restaurant by about 8 a.m. Since COVID, we only do dinners on Fridays and Saturdays. The week starts revving up and it gets busier and busier. Once you’re hitting Thursday, your heart is pounding, getting ready for Friday. It’s two 17-hour days in a row of work. Then there’s the Sunday crash, where it’s sleeping in as late as your body will let you.

On remembering to feed herself: Breakfast is hard for me. I dream of getting up and being like, “I have enough in me to make a smoothie.” It’s really just coffee to get going, and then snacking throughout the day. One thing I learned about being in the restaurant industry is that your own relationship with food is very different from what you’re presenting to people. I’ve been cooking all day long, and I discovered that my stomach was not giving me cues that I was hungry. Sometimes, a day or two later, I’d think, Why do I feel like an animal? It’s that I hadn’t really sat down and had a meal in 36 hours.

On service days, I’ll come home around 12:30 a.m., 1 a.m., take a shower and microwave something and eat it in bed. That is not a thing I’m extremely proud of, but I make sure that it’s organic. We keep our chest freezers stocked in the summertime. The boys in the house are not allowed to touch “mom’s emergency after-work dinners.” An organic Annie’s cheesy kale bake is a go-to, or the cheddar and broccoli. In the summertime I’ll get the Mexican bake and I might even chop up a little tomato to throw on top of it. Sometimes my husband will be an absolute doll and he’ll run out and pick up some Indian food so there’s something to microwave at the end of the night.

On not feeling like a chef: I was ashamed for a while that I didn’t have culinary training, and I didn’t think that I was good enough to do this. Then I found myself in a position of , I’m just going to run at it and see where and see where it takes me. It was a gift. Instead of listening to someone else tell me what they thought food should be, or how they thought it should taste, I had to dig deep into my own intuition and have that self-discovery. I continue to be mystified by people wanting to come here so badly. Because I think about food in a simple way, it was easy to feel like an impostor. Well, I have terrible knife skills, and I don’t know a lot of techniques in cooking. I’m putting together ingredients, and I’m not overly manipulating them. Does that make me not a chef? Even though I do it professionally, I don’t feel like a chef. I’d rather be called a hostess, which sounds like it’s dumbing it down a bit. But I’m proud of the way that I make this room feel and the food that we put together.

Self-doubt is an important part of balance, too. If you weren’t doubting yourself, then you weren’t checking in with yourself, or asking how you could improve. It’s like sailing. The environment is going to change. Things are going to come at you. You learn to tack and jibe and embrace the wind.

On her TripAdvisor critics: In the early days, I read Tripadvisor every night. That was one of the worst things that I could have done to myself, but it taught me to thicken up my skin. I had to take what this person was saying and glean the things that were important — Did I not cook that steak correctly? How could I improve upon it? — and then find the other parts of it to shake off and say, That’s not worth listening to, but what can I learn from it? That empowered me. But I have now made a rule: I have not read Yelp or Tripadvisor in over five years.

On succeeding without growing her business: The night when the phone really started to ring off the hook here, I thought, Oh my God, we’ve made it. But at one point, I was crying. I was crying with joy because I was so excited about it. And I was crying with fear because I was like, How are we going to maintain this and move forward? People still say, “What’s your problem? You have all these people who want to come there — why are you not opening more restaurants?” This restaurant, the size that it is, is my dream. To grow that will lose the magic of what it is. It’s been about not making snap decisions, and listening to my gut and saying, Is this the way I want to live my life? I already had everything that I wanted and needed. Moving forward, it was all just gravy.

On dividing labor at home: My husband is constantly vacuuming — probably about ten times a day, and that’s not a joke — and staying on top of dishes. He’s so great at that. My son is getting better. Today, he’s going to pick up chicken food because he noticed last night that we’re really low. He also takes the dog out. I’ll throw in a load of laundry in the morning. I’m the cook. On days off, I’m the one who’s going around and fluffing pillows and making bouquets to put through the house before the busy time of the week starts so that the house doesn’t look completely wrecked. On Sundays, we pick up the broken pieces if we missed anything.

On appreciating family: There are moments from my son’s childhood that I missed because I was so consumed with work. If you’re a leader in your space, everyone is looking up to you. I’m driving the ship — and if I am not there, then it’s not moving. I had a hard time prioritizing family. I would love to get those ten years of my kid’s life back. We’re in a good place now, but that’s why I’m letting him still live at home. We’ve really made a commitment to Sunday, that’s 100 percent family day. We don’t even make any plans with friends. We might go out on our boat and have a picnic, anchored off of an island for the day. We always make sure there’s a meal involved.

On the people who help her get it done: The women who work at the restaurant all wear different hats. They’re not just coming in and doing one job. Here’s Becky, who’s helping in the kitchen and making rhubarb compote with me, and now she’s heading over to my house to clean my shower because I can’t get to it. You have that kind of friendship, people saying, “I know you’re working this long week — any way that I can help out?” My mom will make a meal if she can see that I haven’t eaten a lot. My husband — he’s an administrative assistant and manager and partner — is rooting me on when I’m thinking, Am I an impostor? He’s always lifting me out of the gutter.

Correction:

• how i get it done
• restaurant industry

The Cut Shop

Most viewed stories.

• Madame Clairevoyant: Horoscopes for the Week of April 28–May 4
• Is Taylor Swift Really Still Beefing With Kim Kardashian?
• In Defense of Annette Bening’s Face
• What Motherhood Looks Like in ‘Florida!!!’
• A Guide to the Art of Flirting (Over Text)
• The Freelance Journalist Meeting a Fling in Capri

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Challengers Link to Challengers
• I Saw the TV Glow Link to I Saw the TV Glow
• Música Link to Música

New TV Tonight

• The Veil: Season 1
• Hacks: Season 3
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz: Season 1
• A Man in Full: Season 1
• Acapulco: Season 3
• Welcome to Wrexham: Season 3
• John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in LA: Season 1
• Star Wars: Tales of the Empire: Season 1
• My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman: Season 4.2
• Shardlake: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• Velma: Season 2
• Them: Season 2
• Ripley: Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1 Link to Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

All Zendaya Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

Video Game TV Shows Ranked by Tomatometer

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

The Most Anticipated Movies of 2024

Poll: Most Anticipated Movies of May 2024

• Trending on RT
• Most Anticipated TV of May
• Seen on Screen
• Zendaya Movies
• Play Movie Trivia

The Lost Kitchen

Where to watch.

Watch The Lost Kitchen with a subscription on Max, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

Cast & Crew

Erin French

Keayr Braxton

Executive Producer

Michael Dutton

Ethan Goldman

More Like This

Series info.

Oh no! This title currently isn’t available to watch in your country.

Food & Home

The lost kitchen.

: Erin French welcomes food lovers from around the world to The Lost Kitchen where they gather to enjoy her locally inspired and sourced menu.

Plans start at $9.99/month.

1 . Welcome to The Lost Kitchen

Erin works with farmers to build a last-of-the-season ingredients menu her guest... More

2 . The New Normal

Erin launches a no-contact farmers market and an outdoor lunch to curb the effec... More

3 . Let's Do Dinner

Erin prepares to relaunch dinner service and hopes tried-and-true recipes meet g... More

4 . Getting Back on Track

Construction on a dining cabin creates issues as Erin and her staff return after... More

5 . Fall Flavors

Erin builds a menu to reflect the arrival of fall, and the dining cabin falls be... More

6 . Come to Fruition

As temperatures drop, Erin plans her final service of the year and debuts the pr... More

Food & Home, Cooking

3 Seasons Available (26 Episodes)

Release Year

Rating information, about this series.

Erin French followed her passion and opened a restaurant in her hometown of Freedom, Maine. Travelers from all over the world gather at The Lost Kitchen to enjoy Erin's locally inspired and sourced menu.

Cast and Crew

Starring: Erin French

You May Also Like

Magnolia Table with Joanna Gaines

Baked in Tradition

The Making of Magnolia Table with Joanna Gaines

From the Source

Recipe Lost and Found

Ranch to Table

Big Sky Kitchen With Eduardo Garcia

Family Dinner

In the Kitchen With Abner and Amanda

La Pitchoune: Cooking in France

Family Restaurant

Find iconic entertainment for every mood.

You can soon enter the postcard lottery to eat at Maine's The Lost Kitchen

by Ariana St Pierre , WGME

FILE - Erin French opened The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine, in 2014. (WGME)

FREEDOM (WGME) -- Get your postcards ready: The world-famous restaurant The Lost Kitchen in Freedom will announce details for its reservation system on March 19.

The popular Maine restaurant owned by Erin French transitioned to postcard bookings in 2018 after becoming overwhelmed by calls and visits to secure a table.

People send in postcards and then the restaurant chooses from those, reaching out to people to book reservations.

• Also read: Dinner at Maine's The Lost Kitchen now costs $250 per person

Details for the 2024 postcard reservations system will be announced on The Lost Kitchen’s website on the first day of spring, which is March 19.

According to the Bangor Daily News, in 2023, dinner at The Lost Kitchen cost $250 per person.

The $250 cost for the 5-hour, multi-course dinner doesn’t include tax, tips or drinks.

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Manage Your Subscription
• Give a Gift Subscription
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes

Erin French and 'the Magic of the 'Lost Kitchen' ' Returns for Season 2 — Watch the Trailer

The new season of Erin French's hit series Lost Kitchen premieres this month on discovery+ and the Magnolia app

The ladies of the Lost Kitchen are back!

The new season of Maine chef Erin French 's hit show from Chip and Joanna Gaines' Magnolia Network premieres with two episodes on Friday Oct. 22 on discovery+ and the Magnolia app — and PEOPLE has a first look.

"We got knocked down last year and we stood back up and here we are," French says in the opening of the trailer.

French turned Freedom, a remote Maine town with only 719 residents, into a world-famous foodie destination with her restaurant (also named the Lost Kitchen) . People visit from far and wide to taste her elegant but humble cooking style, using whatever produce is nearby and in season.

Season 1 documented how French and her all-women staff navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and the unexpected challenges it caused for the restaurant industry. French closed reservations for some time, opened a food market, and moved diners outdoors — all of which caused her to rethink the location of their kitchen.

Now, in season 2, the beloved indoor dining room is open after more than 20 months.

"The magic of the Lost Kitchen was never defined by the four walls around us," she says. "When your best ingredient is love, that's what makes it right there. It's what we bring to the table that's the magic, the magic that we have inside of us, and we can take that anywhere."

Located about halfway between Augusta and Bangor, the town of Freedom is accessible only by car — a scenic trip through lush woods and rolling farmlands. This has always posed a challenge for guests (though it certaintly doesn't stop them from entering the restaurant's postcard reservtion lottery !) — so French created a solution.

"I've always had this dream to create a space for our guests to come and spend the night," she says in the trailer. This season will show off the gorgeous cabins French and her husband, Michael Dutton , built for this purpose.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE 's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

"We can dream bigger and be more creative. Now it's like, 'Let's push our limits real hard and see what we're really made of!' " adds French. "Every hard thing we go through, we become stronger, we become a better team."

Season 2 of The Lost Kitchen premieres on Friday Oct. 22, on discovery+ and the Magnolia app.

Related Articles

Put-in tours

Original tour agency in moscow and st petersburg..

Onboard a Soviet van!

Welcome to Russia!

We are Sergey and Simon, a Russian and a Frenchman, both  passionate about Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and classic cars. Together, we have created Put-in tours. Our goal is to help you experience Russian culture off the beaten path. Join us onboard our classic Soviet van and let’s get rolling!

In Moscow we offer you a city tour to discover most of the city in an original way as well as a night tour to admire the lights. Our pubcrawl is ideal to explore Moscow’s night-life and have fun. If you are craving to discover Russian culture, come impress your senses during our monastery diner or join our 100% Russian Banya Excursion . The latest will also bring you to Sergiyev Posad and it’s famous monastery!

For the most extreme travellers, our shooting tour will deliver your daily dose of adrenaline whereas our tank excursion will let you ride a real tank and shoot a bazooka.

We also offer help to receive your visa , safe and multilingual airport transfers , as well as organisation services for team-building events or bachelor parties .

All our excursions (but the monastery diner) happen onboard our Soviet military vans and can be covered by our  professionnal photographer or videographer.

In Saint Petersburg

We welcome you in Saint Petersburg onboard our Soviet van to discover the imperial city with our city tour and night tour .

Continue your discovery in style! The adrenaline lovers will like our shooting tour  which brings 3 Russian weapons to the tip of your trigger finger.

Follow us on Social Media...

Our partners

© Copyright 2021 - Put-in tours Designed by SD Marketing & Design

At Put-in tours, we put you in our classic Soviet vans to go explore Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Russian culture off the beaten path. Discover our Moscow city guided tour, visit Moscow by night, join our banya & Sergiyev Posad excursion, visit and dine in one of Moscow's oldest monastery or even Luzhniki stadium, before you party on our famous pubcrawl! Original and atypical tours : Shoot AK47 and a bazooka after riding on a tank with our tank & bazooka excursion ! Extreme tours: Fly a fighter jet in Moscow onboard a L-29 or L-39 aircraft!

© Copyright 2021 – Put-in tours

Design web: SD Marketing & Design

Home About us Videos Moscow Saint-Petersburg Contact Online booking Blog Disclaimer Privacy Policy

WhatsApp us

2018 Primetime Emmy & James Beard Award Winner

Reviving classic Russian cuisine

Oct 19 2018.

Roads & Kingdoms talks to Russian chef Vladimir Mukhin of Moscow’s super-restaurant, White Rabbit.

Still in his mid-30’s, Vladimir Mukhin is already one of Russia’s best known chefs and the leading culinary light of the White Rabbit Group, which has 16 restaurants around the country. The most well-known of these, Moscow’s  White Rabbit , was named one of the 50 best restaurants in the world last year. Roads & Kingdoms’ Nathan Thornburgh talked to Mukhin in Moscow about being a fifth-generation chef, reviving classic Russian cuisine, and finding good product in the age of embargoes.

Nathan Thornburgh: Tell me about White Rabbit, what is the food? What are you trying to accomplish there?

Vladimir Mukhin: The White Rabbit is a big restaurant. We’re trying to revive Russian cuisine. I’m a fifth-generation chef, so I’m passionate about the food we create. During the Soviet Union period, we killed Russian food. Classic Russian recipes became too simplified. For example, usually you drink tea, but if you want to be, just to be creative, want to make the tea with milk, you can’t. It would be like stealing milk from the government. People went to jail.

When I was growing up, I remember my grandfather coming to the kitchen and crying because he couldn’t experiment with his food.

Thornburgh: Wow. I remember this famous photo session with Che Guevara which came up with some of his best pictures, maybe two incredible iconic portraits came from an entire roll of film, and the photographer went to him and showed him this roll of film and Che said, What the hell are you doing? You wasted all of these images. You took 30 pictures to get one? That’s the government’s film. It’s a similar mentality.   So you’re telling the story of a kind of cuisine that was lost on the Soviet history and now you’re playing with this idea of finding it again. What does your process look like? Do you get as many grandmothers as you can round up and just kind of shake recipes out of them? How were you doing this?

Mukhin: I just try to work with as many local farmers and producers as I can, so we can use as many Russian ingredients as we can.

Thornburgh: So this is a close relationship.

Mukhin: Yes. I traveled throughout Russia—not just the big cities, but also the villages to talk with older people.

Thornburgh: You know I think people don’t understand the vastness of Russia, and how big it’s collection of cultures and languages and cuisines is. What parts of the country influences your food?

Mukhin: I’m inspired by the whole country. It’s a big territory, and sometimes it feels like it’s too big. I try and use different techniques and ingredients from all over the country, which I think makes my menus distinct.

We have an a la carte menu with about 50 dishes of classical Russian food. Everything looks modern because I’m a young chef. But if you close your eyes and try these dishes, you’ll taste 100% classic Russian flavors.

I want to highlight all aspects of Russian cuisine. Before the Olympic Games in Sochi, we opened a restaurant there, not just to make money, but to expose people visiting for the Olympics to Russian food. That’s why we opened The Red Fox restaurant. It’s all about Russian ingredients.

Thornburgh: Sochi, at least when I’ve been there, is like a Miami Beach. It’s like a place to get pizza and sushi, and go to the nightclubs.

Mukhin: You been?

Thornburgh: Yeah.

Mukhin: It’s crazy.

Thornburgh: It’s a little crazy, but it’s interesting to bring in Red Fox and sort of say okay, because people are coming out, let’s bring Russia to Sochi.

Mukhin: It was incredible. We had thousands of visitors at the restaurant.  

Thornburgh: So you really looked internally for inspiration. Did working outside of Russia motivate you to focus on Russian cuisine?

Mukhin: Yes. I spent time working in Avignon, France. I worked with Christian Etienne, and he would make a special Russian meal once a year.  It was crazy.

Thornburgh: How was the food?

Mukhin: It was shit. I told him that I would cook real Russian food for him, and I did. I cooked borscht, blinis, and other classics. He liked it and said that once a year we should use my recipes, but with his influence. I agreed, and we went on to make amazing food. Eventually, I wanted to come back to my motherland. So I left and I started working on making White Rabbit a reality.

Thornburgh: When people go to White Rabbit, what are they going to find?

Mukhin: Someone once told me that there is a new Russian cuisine and an old Russian cuisine. I think Russian cuisine is going through an evolution. So I hope people will come and see evolution at White Rabbit.

Thornburgh: Great. Always good to end on an invite. Thank you.

Mukhin: Thank you so much.

R&K Insider

Join our newsletter to get exclusives on where our correspondents travel, what they eat, where they stay. Free to sign up.

21 Things to Know Before You Go to Moscow

Featured city guides.