Andrea Reusing, chef and owner of Lantern in Chapel Hill, N.C., will open her second venture next month, a local, coastal seafood restaurant and rooftop bar inside the forthcoming Durham Hotel in Durham, N.C. The James Beard Award winner shares the inspiration behind her upcoming dining spots; her passion for local, sustainable seafood; and how she plans to sell lesser-known fish to diners accustomed to tuna and salmon.
What inspired you to open a seafood restaurant?
It’s being at the beach with my family on vacation every summer … in Avalon, N.J., and Montauk, N.Y., growing up, and now in North Carolina. Wishing I had that access to seafood, variety … that bummer that we don’t have it here [in Durham]. We’re two to two and a half hours from the coast, [but] fish doesn’t make it off the coast. There’s no East-West distribution system. Most seafood goes straight up the coast down I-95 to New York or D.C. There’s the tension of wanting to keep more of our own seafood.
[In Chapel Hill,] I was connected to a seafood market for my home and restaurant. Tom Robinson had this market. He drove down the coast every week and brought back this incredible variety of seafood — eel, butterfish, stone crab claws. He went down on Wednesday and came back on Friday. The door would open and there would be African-American grandmothers, Japanese housewives, Mexican families — a really diverse group of people buying seafood [and] trading recipes. That should be more like what a restaurant is like. I’d like to try to do that on a restaurant level.
Will a restaurant and rooftop bar inside a boutique hotel be accessible to such a diverse group of diners?
There will be a fine-dining vibe to the restaurant, [but the] bar is going to be crowd-pleasing. There might be a caviar service, but there’s also going to be a $6 appetizer.
What kinds of seafood dishes will be on the menu?
There’s going to be [American] seafood on the ground floor. On the roof there will be a raw bar [with] a lot of farmed shellfish, lots of good broth, a focus on utilization — getting more out of what we’re buying.
[We’ll] focus on seafood that doesn't make it off the coast: [There’s] not a lot of demand for spotted trout. [It’s] very delicious, very fatty — fatty, like a really good wild salmon. [We’ll also use] sheepshead, a rich, nutty fish; black drum; striped mullets, a great fish in the fall. We have relationships with fisheries on the coast — people who are actually fishing.
Will it be challenging to sell those unfamiliar species to diners?
It requires just a little more effort for us to communicate what they are. I do think there’s a growing awareness that we have to eat more species. Our grandchildren are not going to eat seafood the way we do.
How else will you focus on sustainability?
Composting of everything — high-temperature composting of small pieces of wood, excess meat and fat. There’s really almost no waste except waxed cardboard. We’re trying to have as little in the dumpster as possible. In terms of fryers, we’ll be using animal fat in two out of three fryers — one pork fat, one beef fat. The third will be vegetable oil. The [used] vegetable oil will go to friends who run Straight Diesel in their old Mercedes that has been converted to use vegetable oil. [The rest] will go to Piedmont Biofuels. We’re not serving bottled water — only purified water made in-house. [And we’re] recycling as much as possible.
What will diners love about the restaurant and the rooftop?
We’re trying to do the food they crave morning, noon and night, and have a variety of it that is seasonal. What you’re dying to eat, but what is often hard to find: simple food, done well, cooked by cooks who care … care about your enjoyment, not their chefy-ness; [food that] doesn't have a high chef quotient, [but that] has a high flavor quotient.