The first time I came up here was about two years ago, and honestly, it wasn’t even on my radar before that. It wasn’t on my immediate to-do list. But the St. Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce reached out and asked if I’d consider making the trip, and I said yes. I’m glad I did.
Here’s the challenge I run into when I travel to places that are far from home — I fall in love with restaurants and then I just want to keep going back to them. Every time. And you take that pull, that gravitational tug toward the familiar, and stack it against the curiosity I have about finding every restaurant in an area, learning their history, understanding their food — and you start to get a picture of what goes on inside my head when I travel. It’s this constant tension between going back to what you love and pushing forward into what you haven’t found yet.
The North Country feeds both of those things.
I genuinely enjoy being up here. There’s something about it that makes me feel welcomed in a way that’s hard to manufacture. And even though discovering new restaurants and meeting new people is just part of what I do, it feels like it means something when I do it up here. The North Country doesn’t get the attention it deserves. If you made a list of the top ten areas in New York State that food creators travel to, the North Country wouldn’t make it. It should. But it doesn’t.
One thing that’s always struck me about being up here is how spread out everything is. I live in Syracuse. Liverpool is fifteen minutes away. Fayetteville is maybe twenty. But up north, everything is at least thirty minutes from everything else. It’s easy to lump it all together from the outside — to say Potsdam and Massena in the same breath the way I might say Syracuse and Liverpool. But I’ve talked to enough people up here to know that Massena feels like “all the way over there” to someone in Potsdam. The geography shapes how people think about their own backyard.
I haven’t fully wrapped my head around the North Country yet, and I mean that as a compliment. It resists easy categorization. You’d think — distant, rural, quiet — and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But then you have Potsdam and Canton with their colleges pulling thousands of people through every year, and suddenly “quiet wilderness” doesn’t quite hold up. But you can’t call it a lively city either, because the wilderness won’t allow it. It’s something in between. Something that doesn’t have a clean name.
Restaurants open and close up here, same as everywhere else. But it feels different than it does in larger markets.
I know a restaurant owner who opened a place in downtown Syracuse about eight years ago. Took out a loan, put in the time, built his dream. Three years ago he closed it. It happens — most restaurants don’t make it. And after he closed, he just sort of disappeared. Moved on. People have spotted him here and there. And writing this right now, I can’t even remember his name. But I remember his restaurant.
It’s not like that up north.
If someone takes their shot up here — steps up, opens something, and it doesn’t work out — you’ll see them the very next day. In the community. In another kitchen. They don’t vanish. They can’t. Because the people you live with are the people you live with, and that doesn’t change just because a restaurant didn’t make it.
There’s something to that.
I also can’t say I’ve met two people up here who are the same. Every single person I’ve talked to has been genuinely different from the last. That’s not something I can say about every small or rural area I’ve visited. Some places, the people start to blend together after a while — same stories, same outlook, same everything. Not up here. Up here, everybody’s got their own thing going. They know each other, they know the history of their spaces, they know what their neighbors are doing in the kitchen — and then they go out and do something completely different. It’s like there’s an unspoken agreement that imitation isn’t an option. Jon’s doing his thing over there, so I’m going to do this thing over here.
I love that about the North Country. In three visits, spending hours talking to restaurant owners and chefs, I have never once heard a competitive word spoken about another restaurant. Not once. It’s like they all understand they’re in the same fight. I don’t know if they’d lend each other a cup of sugar — though I’d bet they would — but they know who their peers are, what they’re cooking, and what came before them in those spaces. There’s a real respect running underneath all of it.
All in all — I’m a fan.
There are a few places up here that feel like home to me in a way I can’t fully explain. Something about driving those roads, rolling through those towns, walking into a restaurant where the owner is just up here doing something creative and honest, trying to make great food for the people around them. There’s a simplicity to that motivation that I find myself coming back to.
So if you’ve got some time and you’re looking for somewhere to go — I’d point you north. Walk into a restaurant. Sit down. Talk to whoever’s in there. I’m willing to bet you’ll find them just as welcoming and interesting as I have.
