Coming full circle
For her 400th review, our critic returns to her first stop, Next Door Kitchen & Bar, to find consistency, evolution
In October 2014, for my first review as the Times Union’s new dining critic, I featured Next Door Kitchen & Bar, a restaurant in Ballston Spa that had been open for just over two months. At its core was sustainability underscored by green practices: the walls clad in reclaimed local barn wood and historic barn doors, the interior design, from copper elements to handblown glass, undertaken by local craftsmen, the restaurant’s nearby urban garden providing herbs and vegetables for the menu, with food scraps sent to a local pig farm to minimize waste.
It was an intelligently conceived, hyper-local model, one found in farm-to-table restaurants from California to London, but, almost a decade ago, less commonly upstate. Asterisked selections on the wine list highlighted natural and organic producers, an extensive whiskey collection was anchored by mostly small-batch distilleries, and attention to regional and local craft beers showed off New York’s range. So when I realized this week would mark my 400th dining review on the Sunday pages of the Times Union, I brought it full circle to revisit and see if it’s something in the famous Ballston Spa waters that keeps Next Door Kitchen & Bar going.
I caught up with co-owner
Matt Hall for a conversation about the restaurant’s growth and what keeps people coming back.
The team
Since opening in July 2014, the first-time restaurant owners have stayed in business, doubled the interior space when the storefront next door became available, maintained a positive relationship with their landlord (how often does anyone describe their landlord as “great”?) and survived a global pandemic. The restaurant is still owned by Matt Hall and business partner Chris Fignar, who owned Front Street Deli quite literally next door. Remarkably in this industry, they’ve kept the founding chef, Jeff Strom, who joined them from Colorado with his wife, a native of Ballston Spa, as well as their founding pastry chef, Dan Busha, who runs Paper Dragon Farms in Saratoga Springs. Making me feel the passage of time, the infant children mentioned in our interview nearly nine years ago have since hit double digits.
The menu
Anyone who has dined at Next Door knows there has always been an embrace of Japanese umami sometimes deployed in familiar modern American plates. The signature brown-butter miso Brussels sprouts are thankfully still there, the leaves loosened like
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