COOPERSTOWN
If fresh, high-quality cilantro is unavailable, Alex Webster takes cilantro off the menu.
For a time, only European butter was served at Webster’s Alex & Ika Restaurant in Cherry Valley, because it’s simply the best.
And the coffee...
When Alex and wife Ika Fognell – he’s a Brit, she’s Swedish – served BLTs for lunch, “people were raving about it, but we weren’t making any money.”
The bacon was from Dean & Delucca, the gourmet food supplier.
That attention to detail won Alex & Ika – which has closed in Cherry Valley and will be reopened in larger quarters in Coopertown in May – exceptional attention.
Alex & Ika’s new location is the former Gil Gallery at 149 Main St., formerly Homescapes, an interior design shop, and before that Spaulding’s Restaurant, which thrived for years.
Webster’s timing may be just right: A market survey NYSHA recently completed indicated Cooperstown attracts high-end visitors who are looking for high-end restaurants, and find the village lacking. Villa Isidoro, which opened in December in a former stone mansion on Route 20 near Richfield Springs and features a celebrity chef, has been operating at capacity.
When Alex & Ika opened in 1997 in a former bowling alley, it wasn’t a secret for long.
Regional restaurant critics – in Syracuse and Albany – raved; so did The New York Times.
U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-NY, would often drive up from his country home in Pindars Corners, south of Oneonta, to enjoy the offerings.
One time, he brought along then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, and it was there that she launched her famous “listening tour,” the start of her campaign to succeed Moynihan. (The Secret Service contingent’s cell phones didn’t work in Cherry Valley either.)
In 2004 came the icing on the tort: Frommer’s ranked the Websters’ restaurant “one of the 10 best” in New York State, along with such famed Manhattan establishments as Aquavit and Peter Luger. Frommer’s followed up in its 2006 New York State guide, which praised the “laid-back cuisine magic show.”
“He’s defined a new segment,” said a long-time pal (and former employer) of Alex’s, Stagecoach founder Rod Torrence, picking up on that observation. “Elegant food; laid-back setting.”
Frommer’s made another observation, “It’s hard to believe they can hit a home run with every dish, but somehow they do ... the food is packed with so many flavor combinations, you’ll be talking about the food long after you leave.”
Which brings us back to the beginning.
When the couple – they’d met in the restaurant business in Florida – opened Alex & Ika, they experimented.
“When we were excited,” said Alex, “people were excited too.”
They offered a limited menu – three appetizers, three main courses and three desserts – that depended on the availability of the top ingredients and required “more effort into fewer dishes.”
That goal was ingredients – star anise, for example – that diners wouldn’t tend to try at home.
“They would think, that’s a great meal, even if they aren’t sure why,” Alex said. The result was “a very, very loyal following.”
Seven years ago, Alex overcame a struggle with cancer and, during that period, cut back from five nights a week to two. He discovered the fan base was “quite a finite audience,” about the same number of dinners per week – about 100 – either way. In Cooperstown, though, the plan is to have an extended schedule.
“It was time to go one way or the other” – bigger or smaller, he said.
Before choosing the Main Street site, the Websters – they have two sons, Lukas, 8, and Oskar, 3 – considered building a new place in the country on land they own outside Cherry Valley, but the cost of new construction deterred them.
Last month, the village’s Zoning Board of Appeals concluded the new Alex & Ika’s presents no regulatory challenges, and so work began immediately. You might have seen Webster going in and out of the building in the past couple of weeks.
Right now, brown paper covers the windows as work gets under way in preparation for an unveiling four months from now.
