About
A restaurant built around one oven.
Alder Table opened in 2019 in an old print shop on Haywood Row. Nell built the oven before she bought the chairs.
Our story
Fire first, then everything else.
Nell Hartwell cooked in other people's kitchens for twelve years, most of them on gas. She wanted a room where the fire was the only heat and the menu was short enough to cook every plate herself on a quiet night. The oven burns oak and hickory from a yard twenty minutes away. It is lit at noon and it is still warm the next morning, which is when the bread goes in.
Everything here passes through one wood oven, and the menu changes when the farms do.
How we cook
Three rules in the kitchen.
The farms
Six growers, all within an hour.
Their names are on the menu. When one of them has a bad week, so do we.
- Hickory Nut Gap: beef and pork
- Sunburst: trout
- Gaining Ground: vegetables and herbs
- Farm and Sparrow: flour
- Looking Glass: cheese and butter
- Lee's One Fortune: greens and roots
The team
The people you will meet.
Nell Hartwell
Chef and owner
Marcus Dove
Sous chef
Ines Okoro
General manager
Sam Whitlow
Bar