Lessner to try farming after selling Jury Room
After 15 years of feeding and watering central Ohioans, Elizabeth Lessner is adding lemon trees to that list. Lessner, whose Columbus Food League runs joints such as Dirty Frank’s Hot Dog Palace, Surly Girl Saloon and Tip Top Kitchen and Cocktails, and who resurrected the Chintz Room in the Lazarus Office Building, is headed west to farm.
“I moved to Columbus in 1996 from San Francisco, Calif., and fell in love with this city,” Lessner said in an email. “I have thoroughly enjoyed herding my restaurant cats here in Columbus for the past 15 years.”
Lessner plans to join forces with a friend and grow lemons in southern California.
Although she isn’t leaving
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Columbus just yet — she’ll spend a few weeks in California next month checking things out — she might be splitting her time between here and there in a few years.
“Right now, I am here,” said Lessner, who was born in Chicago and reared here and in North Carolina. “It is a startup. It doesn’t exist yet. It will expand in a couple years.
“I have long been interested in how food is made and where it comes from.”
Lessner also announced the sale of the Jury Room to another Columbus restaurateur. She did not disclose the buyer’s name but said the new owner is wellknown around town.
The Jury Room will reopen before Thanksgiving with a new concept and a new name.
“We knew it needed a new brand,” Lessner said of the 184-year-old restaurant, on E. Mound Street, just off S. High Street. “To really reach its potential, it needed to be rebranded.”
The staff from the Jury Room has moved to the Chintz Room, Lessner said. The Chintz Room, 121 S. High St., opened last week for dinner. It will add lunch on Monday and will begin serving breakfast in the near future.
The crowd at the Chintz Room has been a mix of people, both those who are familiar with the old Chintz Room and those who aren’t.
“There is this amazing mixture of young and old Columbus,” Lessner said. “Usually our restaurants draw a lot of young hipsters, but we’ve had a lot of elderly people.
“The very first night, people were all dressed up. Not that it’s a dressy place, but I think they were remembering it.”
Earlier this year, Lessner closed Betty’s Fine Food and Spirits in the Short North. She said the consolidation of her businesses here is letting her look at other opportunities, such as the lemon farm in California.