Libby’s Bistro & Saalt Pub

A North Country standby brings a taste

to rural New Hampshire.

BY AMY TRAVERSO

orham, New Hampshire, sits on the border between the White Mountain National Forest and the vast expanse of the Great North Woods. To hikers, it is the northern terminus of the Presidential Range. To residents, it is a place of soaring beauty, where rock climbers coexist with ATVers and the last surviving paper mill in the North Country is still turning out paper towels and tissue long after industry watchers predicted its demise. Locals track the mill’s fortunes with no small concern—Berlin, just 15 minutes north, hasn’t fully recovered from the loss of its own mill—and for some, those ATVs represent their best hope for a future rooted in adventure tourism.

When Liz Jackson moved back home to Gorham 20 years ago with her husband, Steve, the region’s only culinary claim to fame was a Berlin schoolteacher named Elmire Jolicoeur who purported to have invented the casserole in 1866 (though food historians contend that casseroles date back centuries earlier). Liz had grown up at her grandmother’s Main Street restaurant, Welsh’s, and studied business at UNH and then cooking at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and alongside Julia Child as an assistant on her TV series. She had traveled the world. And she wanted to open the kind of destination restaurant she’d seen in France, where the rural setting is part of the draw.

In Gorham, she had the mountains, a community, and her parents next door to help with the kids. But fine dining? Gorham is only 30 minutes from North Conway’s cafés and shops, but “it’s not North Conway or Jackson—not even close,” Liz says. “We thought,

Are we crazy ? But Steve said, ‘We’ll just look at it as a test run.’”

On the night that Libby’s Bistro opened, they booked 24 tables, and Liz, seven months pregnant with their third child, had her first inkling that the test run might actually stick. “People were coming up and hugging me,” she said. “They felt like the community had turned a corner.” Within weeks, calls started coming in from towns 30 minutes away. Then an hour away. Then from New York and Montreal. Diners came for Liz’s signature nut-crusted chicken—still a hit after all these years—and global accents like tzatziki and Bolognese and local veggies fried up, pakora style, in chickpea batter.

The restaurant thrived for more than 10 years. Then the recession hit. Feeling the pinch, the Jacksons opened a more casual pub in the same building and named it Saalt, with each letter representing a member of the family: Steve and Liz and their three kids, Ari, Ava, and Teo. Now, Libby’s and Saalt oper- ate side by side (“Same menu, different vibe,” Liz says). Plus, at the front of the Libby’s space, there’s a little overflow room—they call it the Coop—where an old cooler rescued from the Berlin IGA holds jars of Mediterraneaninspired spreads and dips: caponata, whipped feta with red peppers, chervil pesto. In season, Liz serves these with homemade focaccia, local goat cheese, and “Mr. Tassy’s tomatoes.” (She fears this might be the last year of farming for Steve Tassy, now entering his nineties—“but if I need something, I’ll still give him a call,” she says. “And we’ll go down and help pick.”)

On most nights at Saalt, Liz toggles between the kitchen and the dining room, where she greets everyone so she’ll remember them when they come back. Steve mans the bar, where a vintage sign above his head reads, “Rural New Hampshire.” Around it, they’ve hung their collection of photos by Guy Shorey, a Gorham native whose early 20th-century portraits of the White

Mountains established him as a hometown Ansel Adams. At one end of the bar, a couple of farmers are grabbing dinner; at the other, two women are Googling the nearest Unitarian church. A cake stand near the beer taps holds a batch of fresh cookies. It all feels like the cozy dining room of some well-traveled aunt who decided to decamp to the country. A little bit urban, a little bit global, but enthusiastically New Hampshire.

111 Main St. (Route 16), Gorham, NH. 603-466-5330; libbysbistro.org

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