Foundry Kitchen & Tavern
A CULINARY CONVERGENCE OF AMERICAN CUISINE AND WEST COAST FLAVORS
Whether upward from Newtown, or southbound along the sinuous road which traces the path of the Pootatuck River, it starts getting New England-y pretty fast the closer you get to Foundry Kitchen & Tavern in Sandy Hook. Riverside Colonial architecture punctuates green hills along with the red brick of our industrial past as Connecticut’s stories changed and evolved over time. Inside a former ironworks turned general store turned restaurant, the theme continues.
Foundry Kitchen & Tavern was first opened by restaurateur Chris Bruno (currently of Edison Kitchen in Bethel) in 2013, with current owners Kate and Clark Neugold taking over in 2017. The Southbury-raised Clark had traveled extensively in his career, working in Hawaii with Top Chef star Lee Anne Wong, first at her Koko Head Café, and then at Hale huna (“Noodle House”) in Kaimuki, where he met town native David Bearden, then running a company making New York-style cheesecakes with local Hawaiian ingredients.
Before his return to Connecticut, chef Neugold swung southward, with stops at Sean Brock’s Minero noodle house, and Harold’s Cabin, owned by actor Bill Murray, in Charleston.
When Neugold and current Foundry head chef Mike Sorensen needed a new general manager in 2021, they called Bearden, who relocated 5,000 miles from home to join them. Foundry Kitchen & Tavern, located at the intersection of several roads which make Sandy Hook’s downtown, represents the culinary crossing point of all these influences.
The menu brings together classic American, West Coast Asian, and Hawaiian dishes and flavors, usually with a creative twist of difference.
“It’s great to hear chefs Clark and Mike riffing on food ideas they have,” Bearden tells us. “They bring a mutual sense of adventure and curiosity.”
He recalls a St. Patrick’s Day special, where Sorensen — a graduate of the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco — took ingredients for a traditional lamb and Guinness stew, and instead prepared them as a smoked potted lamb jam, served with sourdough toast and pickles. The Foundry staple Inside Out burger is topped with truffle cheese, bacon aioli, barbecue sauce and pickled onion, but you’ll see it alongside an Impossible Patty melt, with cashew Swiss cheese fondue, and vegan Dijonnaise.
Wednesdays often feature vegan menu specials, which Bearden says draw diners from around the state, and I was pleased to see our Thursday-night specials were two of my personal alltime favorite things: whiskey and dumplings.
I set down a pint of beautifully clean and crisp kolsch, made locally at Reverie Brewing in Newtown, to dive into a plate of pork and kimchi dumplings. The plump dumplings are delicious, and stuffed with housemade smoked eggplant kimchi, planted on a mixture of sauces, and topped with pickled red onion, and jalapeño slices. Sweet, hot, savory and smoky, they strum all the right notes.
We choose whiskey in the form of the Out of Office cocktail, with Four Roses bourbon, guava syrup, lemon juice and Montenegro Amaro. The acidic spike of lemon and bitter, herbal depths of the Amaro complement the bourbon, while the guava smooths and mellows the overall concoction. If you have to pick just one on your visit, make it this.
Spicy harissa wings grab our attention elsewhere as starters on the dinner specials menu. The mix of Tunisian spices prompt a slight warning to the table (“They really are spicy”), but to my admittedly scorched palate, the spice blend — dashed with scallions and sesame seeds, and sprinkled with a bit of microgreens for flare — is the perfect level of heat. The burn is attention-getting, but never overly much to mask the unusual blend of chilis, garlic, cumin and other spices.
The menu at Foundry changes with the seasons, but never enough to become a stranger to regulars. Their kimchi can also be had on the Funky Smashburger, which adds a dry-aged beef patty to fermented eggplant for added funk, plus spicy sambal aioli with familiar American cheese. A dinner special, North Shore shrimp, is made like it’s served from trucks on the island of Oahu, with garlic- and butterpoached shrimp, Hawaiian macaroni
salad, and furikake rice.
I choose the Beef Cheek Sugo as an entrée. Sourced from a farm in upstate New York, the meat is cooked with red wine before all the vegetable components and braising liquid are blended
into a uniform sauce and drizzled over the beef, which sits on a bed of parmigiana polenta, with curls of charred green rapini from Holbrook Farm in Bethel.
Flecks of fresh grated parm stand out above tomato gravy atop the beef, which has been rendered to a deep, aromatic and fork-tender brown in the braise. The fresh and melted parmigiana adds a little sharpness, but the star of the show is the deeply smoky, wine-rich beef. The smoke is a surprise, adding yet another depth of flavor to the meat/ vegetable/tomato umami crescendo and creamy polenta, and brings an immediate cessation to the sidelong glances I’d given to other items on the menu. This was it — absolutely no doubt in my mind.
My dining companion reports loving her madras curry bowl, with coconut milk and furikake rice, but I could barely focus on anything except my plate.
“That beef is from New York,” Bearden says. “But almost all our meats, dairy and beers are Connecticut and New England sourced.”
He goes on to mention the greens they get from Newtown’s Cherry Grove Farm, like the rapini in my entrée, and shungiku, developed around 17th-century Japan as a way to eat recently introduced European chrysanthemum greens from which the flower buds have been removed.
Neugold, described by Bearden as the hardest worker he’s ever known, also opened Marigold on Main, and Good Old Days pizzeria and cocktail den in Newtown with wife Kate during the dark years of the pandemic. Both, say Bearden, exhibit the same kind of creativity they bring to the dishes at Foundry. “He’s the reason I came 5,000 miles away from my family out here.”
Bearden recalls a sign at a local eatery back in Kaimuki, which said, “Local and organic when possible, always with aloha.” Switch that last word to love, he says, and that’s what they do at Foundry.