Chef's Parlour

They go through gallons of ranch every weekend.

It is made in the kitchen. So is the aioli on the cheeseburger, the juice behind the bar, and the fruit sauce that goes on the sundaes. Chef's Parlour sits at 2 South Franklin Street with eight tables and no televisions. Nicole calls it a modern scratch kitchen. Zach calls it a bar restaurant hybrid. Both are true and neither quite covers it, because the same room turns out a smoked old fashioned, a hand breaded chicken tender, and a turtle sundae.

When they opened, that is not what the town was expecting.

"People were expecting chicken sandwiches, Coney dogs, all those typical dairy bar treats that you love," Nicole says. The building had been an ice cream stand for years, and they kept that part on purpose. What they added was the part they had spent their careers on. A Nashville chicken sandwich built on a spice dust they mix themselves. A cheeseburger with house made aioli. Familiar things, taken up a notch.

They found the building before they found the town.

Nicole was the executive chef for a catering company in downtown Columbus. Zach was the sous chef at the Club at Corazon in Dublin. Then COVID arrived and catering stopped.

"There was not catering happening at all," she says. "Nobody was doing any of that."

So they started looking for something small. A rental property, maybe. Something to hold while they started a family. They were not looking for Richwood.

"I didn't even know Richwood existed really until we bought this place."

They bought it in March of 2021, when it was still Curbside Cones, and then they sat on it. It needed a lot of work and they were not sure yet what it should become. In 2022 they quit their jobs. The day after they quit, they found out Nicole was pregnant with Callie. They opened in December of 2022, five weeks after she was born.

Nicole grew up in Alger, ten minutes from Ada, and studied business at Ohio Northern before deciding there was not much business to do in the middle of a cornfield. She moved south for culinary school. What she knows about small towns is what they go without. The twenty minute drive for anything you actually want.

"We were trying to fill something that we would want if we were to live in a town like this."

The menu moves with whatever the farms have.

Everything changes by season, which costs them a full rebuild every few months. Right now it is peaches and apples from Folck's Orchard, landing in the salads, the cocktails, and the sundaes. Herbs and lettuces come from Lisa Oman, whose husband farms produce nearby. Berries come from the farm down the road. A hydroponic grower up the road, the one that supplies Harvest Pizzeria down in Columbus, stops in every so often.

Zach runs the bar. Classic cocktails with a little twist, built on syrups he makes in house. He is working on a peach syrup for the next menu, and a peach basil bourbon drink is coming with it. Local whiskeys are already on the shelf. The seasonal rewrite is a lot of work, he says, and it is the thing that keeps them creative.

What he talks about first, though, is not the bar.

"What excites me the most about Chef's Parlour is really getting to meet the people here in town. Whether it's local farmers that are growing crops for people and not just big commodity crops, and being able to purchase from them for the restaurant."

There are no televisions in the dining room. That was on purpose too. Very rarely does anyone come in, eat, and leave. Nicole and Zach own it and work it, and she says they do not take that lightly.

Callie is usually somewhere in the room. Regulars have watched her grow up between the eight tables. On the walk to the bank, she gets recognized before her parents do.

"I think more people know who Callie is than we are."

They are staying. A catering kitchen someday, if a space opens up, though there is not much real estate in Richwood to open up. Everything else is already here, on the corner, five days a week.

Two chefs who had never heard of this town.

A daughter the whole town knows by name.