Stonington & Southern Rhode Island Luxury Homes

Randall's Ordinary

Randall's Ordinary is anything but ordinary. Because it's true. This unusual inn restaurant, in a handsomely restored, antique-filled, 18th-century farmhouse in North Stonington, Conn., specializes in Colonial open-hearth cooking served in a period atmosphere.
Almost everything on the menu is cooked in one of the three fireplaces according to 18th-century recipes. Meats and whole birds are slowly hearth-roasted in reflector ovens, soups and stews and vegetables simmer in iron kettles hung in the fireplaces, scallops are sauteed in a hanging skillet, fish and chops and poultry parts are grilled over hot coals scooped from the fire onto the hearth.

A $25 fixed-price dinner is served nightly at 7:30. When we called for a reservation we were advised to arrive a little early. A hostess greets each party, conducts a quick tour of the restaurant and describes the evening's choice of entrees.

After a stop in the tap room to order drinks, we watched head chef Gillian Whittle at the hearth. It's hard, hot work. She wore a mobcap and long skirts, as much for protection as for period authenticity. "Timing is everything in this job," said Whittle, who has the difficult task of coordinating as many as 70 hearth-cooked dinners a night, served simultaneously.

Whittle had no hearth-cooking experience until she came to work for Bill and Cindy Clark, proprietors of Randall's Ordinary. The Clarks themselves had never worked in a restaurant until they opened this one three years ago. Before that, she worked in insurance, he worked in construction. But they've been hearth cooking since they were married, 22 years ago. Their first house, a 1790 cape cottage in nearby Coventry, Conn., required extensive restoration. The Clarks did most of the work themselves, and found it convenient to set a pot of beef stew to cook in the fireplace as they scraped and painted.

Gradually their interest in hearth cooking grew. They collected old recipes and scoured antique shops for antique utensils. A casual interest grew into a passion, and a dozen years and three old houses later the Clarks had become accomplished at both restoration and hearth cooking.

They were living in South Salem, N.Y., where they entertained friends and neighbors with hearth-cooked meals. After a story about their unusual cooking style appeared in the New York Times, strangers started calling to ask if the Clarks would cook dinner for them. They began catering informal dinners in their home.

"We'd have groups in, anywhere from 6 to 24 people," Cindy Clark said. "They responded not just to the food, but to the ambience. The relaxed atmosphere, the leisurely pace, the candlelight, the fireplaces, the antiques."

The Clarks soon decided they preferred their weekend work to their regular jobs. They started looking for the right spot to open a restaurant and found it in North Stonington, an old house on 27 rural acres about 10 minutes from Mystic and about a two-hour drive from Boston.

According to the Clarks, ordinary was another term for a tavern in Colonial times. The restaurant is named for the first owner of the property, farmer John Randall who built part of the house in 1685. Over the next century his descendants continued to make additions.

The Clarks acquired the property in 1985 and spent nearly a year restoring it. The main house has three dining rooms, each with a working fireplace, as well as a modern preparation kitchen. All three fireplaces are used for cooking during the colder months. In summer, the cooking is done in the fireplace in the rear dining room.

There are three guest rooms upstairs, over the dining areas. Last year the Clarks moved a big old barn from Maine and turned it into nine more guest rooms, and converted the silo into living quarters for themselves and their two teen-agers.

Guests are seated for dinner promptly at 7:30 p.m., when the soup of the evening is served in ironstone bowls, along with slices of freshly-baked bread. We had onion soup, slices of a light wheat loaf, and cornbread that had been cooked at the hearth in an old-fashioned skillet or spider.

The menu changes nightly. There was a choice of roast pork, slow-cooked in a reflector-oven, wonderfully moist with a crisp outer crust; duck breasts broiled over coals and served with a red currant sauce; roast chicken with cornbread stuffing; and the house specialty, Nantucket scallops, lightly breaded and sauteed in butter.

The entrees were accompanied by pear chutney, and two vegetables grown in the inn garden, green beans and chunks of summer squash and zucchini in a light honey-dill sauce.

For dessert there was a choice of maple nut pudding, a frothy mixture of whipped egg whites and maple syrup, and pear crunch, a hearty baked sweet smothered in whipped cream.

Randall's Ordinary makes a few concessions to the late 20th century. The restaurant is air-conditioned. Most desserts, and some breads, are cooked in the modern preparation kitchen. Dishwashers are used for cleaning up. Credit cards are welcome. The restaurant has a full bar, a good wine list, including a few Connecticut wines, and a good choice of beers, including the excellent Connecticut brew Nathan Hale.

NORTH STONINGTON, Conn. "Welcome to 1685" reads the sign outside the restaurant at Randall's Ordinary Inn and Restaurant. If the earliest members of the Randall family enjoyed peaceful meadows, comfortable sleeping quarters, and hearty food cooked over an open fire, then perhaps things have not changed that much in the last three centuries.

"Ordinary," however, is an old English term for a place that offers lodging and meals at a fixed price. That's no longer the case here, where all meals, including breakfast, are priced separately.

The big, square, brick-red Colonial, with 12-over-12 windows and three dining rooms, encompasses the original Randall property, enlarged after a fire in 1720. The building as it appears today was completed in 1790 with the addition of the hearth room, where food is still prepared. The Randall farm was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and guests can see the trapdoor in the floor that leads to the root cellar where escaped slaves were hidden.

Guest rooms are in an 1819 dairy barn and silo moved to the property from upstate New York in the 1980s. To check in, we entered through the silo and traveled along a fieldstone walk to the registration desk, where a young woman in a peasant blouse and full skirt was working on we are not making this up cross-stitch. When I asked if pursuing such an old-fashioned hobby was part of the job, she laughed and said, "No, they don't pay me to do this."

Set on 250 acres, the inn is a peaceful refuge in a rapidly developing area near the state's two mega-casinos; it's about 6 miles from Foxwoods and 12 from Mohegan Sun. The Mashantucket Pequots, owners of Foxwoods, bought the inn in 1995.

With the exception of a housekeeping glitch, we enjoyed our visit to Randall's Ordinary immensely. No one serviced our room during our stay, though we checked in on Friday night and were away from the room all afternoon Saturday. As we were leaving on Sunday, after I had identified myself as a reporter, a housekeeper materialized and insisted we had left the "do not disturb" sign on the door all day. We had not. When I asked the occupants of the room next to ours whether their room had been made up on Saturday, they said no. In a telephone call, innkeeper Tina Luzzi Lessing called the lack of service an oversight and apologized profusely.

We stayed in one of the inn's two-level "mini-suites," which combine rustic charm with modern comforts. A high, four-poster, queen- size bed was on the lower level, along with a table and an armoire concealing a television. There were lamps on the two nightstands, but it was so dark at the other end of the room I couldn't read the controls on the air-conditioning unit. A single window looked onto fields, woods, and stone walls. The decor was pleasingly primitive: off-white walls simply stenciled, patchwork coverlets, braided rugs over wide-board floors, and folk art prints by Warren Kimble. The roomy bathroom had a shower, whirlpool tub, heat lamp, fan, and hair dryer.

A spiral staircase led to a loft sitting area with a loveseat, platform bed, coffee table, two end tables with lamps, and another television. The peaked ceiling with log rafters gave the place a cabin-in-the-woods feel.

The inn's premier room is the Silo Suite, three levels in the silo, the top one taken up entirely by a Jacuzzi tub. The roomy accommodation also includes a full kitchen and living room.

It was a short walk to the restaurant, which features wide-plank tables, fireplaces, servers in period costume, and moderately priced American fare. We found the jazz music piped in at breakfast incongruous. Saturday morning, we shared the dining room with a large party that appeared to be wrapping up a night at the casinos at least we hoped that was the explanation for the beer served with the hash.

From a fixed-price menu Saturday evening, we chose clam chowder, roast rib-eye of beef, and sauteed Nantucket scallops, the inn's signature dish. Bread pudding was satisfyingly sweet, though apple crisp made with Granny Smith apples was not as sweet as expected. Portions were generous, and a fiddler in Colonial garb entertained.

Sunday morning, we sat in the coveted hearth room (where there are only three tables) and watched the chef cook eggs and pancakes on a "lumberjack griddle" suspended over the open fire. The food was delicious, but the process looked backbreaking, since it required constant bending and reaching into the cavernous fireplace. Mindful of the fact that cooking was women's work in the Randalls' day, I concluded that things had in fact changed since then and probably for the better.

Jun. 25--NORTH STONINGTON, Conn. -- The paint is still fresh on the walls, the floors are newly sanded and the outside gardens are blooming at Randall's Ordinary, the historic restaurant and inn owned by the Mashantucket Pequots.

The painting and other restoration work, including extensive shoring up of the restaurant's attic and refurbishment of its chimney, were done while the restaurant and inn were closed for the season, said Barbara Hartwell, Randall's Ordinary interim innkeeper. The restaurant, one of three main buildings on the property, was damaged this past year by a chimney fire on Thanksgiving Day.

The main hearth, chimney and roof were affected by the fire, although the minor damage was contained by firefighters and by quick-thinking employees who poured water onto the roof with a garden hose as firefighters were responding, Hartwell said.

The restaurant and inn are closed from January through May, she said, and this year's downtime gave specialized workers the time that was needed to make the necessary renovations and upgrades to the historic facilities. Because of the additional work this year, the inn and restaurant didn't open to the public until mid-June.

"We've had quite a bit of work done here," Hartwell said as she surveyed the grounds.

The property stretches across about 250 acres, which include heavily wooded areas and nature trails.

"The decision to do a lot of this work was made before the fire," Hartwell said, adding such work is necessary to preserve and maintain the character of old buildings. The property includes the restaurant, which has three bedrooms on its second floor that currently aren't available for overnight guests, a farmhouse/inn with 12 guest rooms and a nearby three-bedroom cabin that can be used by individuals or for functions such as corporate meetings or retreats.

"This entire thing is a real labor of love for us," Hartwell said of Randall's Ordinary.

While not disclosing the cost of the seasonal refurbishments, she said the work was expensive because it entailed using specialty craftsmen who need to be familiar with historic structures. The Pequots purchased the 1685 wood-frame building that houses the restaurant for $1.4 million in 1995 from William and Cindy Clark. The tribe offers open-hearth, colonial period fare that has brought the restaurant national media attention.

Besides the Randall's Ordinary property, the Pequots also own the Mystic Hilton Hotel and the Spa at Norwich Inn.

In addition to the interior work on the wood-framed restaurant building on the property, Hartwell said the grounds around the three buildings have been upgraded and numerous gardens, including a rose garden and an herb garden, are now in full bloom.

Outside the restaurant, the Pequots have added a large tent that is used for various functions, including weddings. Hartwell said Randall's Ordinary is also used for many specialty private functions, such as corporate events, weddings and family gatherings.