Livingston Manor

Pat Cobey, Senior Menu Editor of Restaurant Business, will be hosting next time.

Our guest for this week is Eric Levely, the culinary director of the DeBruce, a boutique hotel in Livingston Manor, New York, in the lovely Catskills Mountains.

Levely arrived there in 2020 after losing his job, along with so many other people in the restaurant industry, at the onset of COVID.

And he has been flourishing there ever since, although he still lives in Philadelphia.

My role here is to make sure that restaurant performs at the level that we want it to perform at, that we write menus that are representative of the time and place.

And I think that's really like our biggest goal is to create and cook food that makes you feel like you're connected to the environment that you're in.

Which is in the Catskills in the town of Livingston Manor, I believe.

Yep.

A turkey chase.

A visit to Livingston Manor.

An ideal life.

On horseback from Strasburg to New York.

Country life may be enjoyed here as well as in England if one has the money and the inclination for it.

It means hard work for the host, though.

All my life I had been taught to have a sort of reverence for the name of Livingston, and to feel that Livingston Manor was a species of palatial residence that one must see certainly once in one's lifetime.

The opportunity offered itself, and I seized upon it.

Yeah

... that was cool is I went up to Livingston Manor to visit the artist Ellen Brooks, who lives up there, and she took us to the Catskill Art Space, which is this really cool contemporary art center in Livingston Manor.

And, and Ellen has a semi-permanent installation there, as well as James Turrell and Sol LeWitt and Francis Cape.

That's all on the second floor, but on their first floor is a Dyke Blair show, 'cause on their first floor-

...

they have, like, rotating contemporary art exhibitions.

And that was a really great experience, 'cause I hadn't been to Livingston Manor in a very long time up in Sullivan County, and it's a cute little downtown.

This art, Catskill Art Space is, like, right in the center.