New restaurant ready to open on Main Street

After months of waiting, Dee Muma finally has all her permits in hand and is about to open the doors of her new Dark Horse Restaurant at 1 East Main Street. See video and photo slideshow.

Now, with chef Jeffrey Trujillo, she’s stocking the bar and kitchen of the new brasserie and putting the finishing touches on their first menus.

Muma said she plans a staged opening, with meals served to groups of diners by invitation only for a couple of weeks, to allow a period of time for the staff to develop synergy working together for the first time.

“It will be on my nickel. You’ll tip the server and fill out an anonymous card telling us what you really think,” said Muma at the restaurant Thursday afternoon, where workers were busy putting the finishing touches on the light-filled dining room and making adjustments to the kitchen’s stainless steel stoves and ovens.

After the  initial week or two, the Dark Horse Restaurant will open its doors to the public, serving lunch and dinner daily and brunch on weekends.

Muma and Trujillo, who have for several years run the successful Dark Horse Catering — the catering arm of Tweeds Restaurant, which Muma owns with her husband, Edwin Fishel Tuccio — are both pumped for the long-anticipated opening.

The menu will feature fresh — and wherever possible, local — foods prepared in dishes cooked to order, at an affordable price, Muma said.

Dinner entrees will include steak frites, bison chili, bison pate, duck prosciutto, brown lentil salad with orange, short ribs with pickled onion, pan-seared salmon, or a whole roasted chicken served with green tomato chutney, Muma said. 

“All entrees will be offered in both small plate and large plate servings. You can have it any way you want, the way you want to eat,” Muma said. “You’re here, we’ll feed you, whatever you want.”

But, she cautions, save room for dessert. Dessert offerings will include toasted sugar flan, flowerless chocolate cake, passion fruit cheesecake, chocolate mousse and chocolate chunky bar pate. If you’re in the mood for some fun, you’ll be able to build your own ice cream sandwich, with “a couple of cookies, sides and your choice of ice creams,” Muma said.

The lunch menu will feature bison pastrami on rye, Mexican lasagna, diver scallops and marinated grilled chicken, among other things, she said.

Dark Horse will serve locally brewed beer and offer wines by the glass and bottle. Her two criteria for wine selection, she said, is  a Wine Spectator rating of 88 or higher and reasonable price.

Muma describes Trujillo and herself as “two control freaks who love to cook, who pay serious attention to quality.” It enables them to deliver an upscale menu at “an affordable price point,” she said.

“Our tendency is to take classics and give them a little twist of some sort,” Muma said.

The same can be said of the building renovation Muma has just completed, where Dark Horse Restaurant occupies the first floor. See video.

“This building and the Riverhead Savings Bank building across the street,” said Muma, gesturing at the marble landmark across Peconic Avenue, “always told me we had arrived in Riverhead when I’d come out here as a child,” Muma said. She grew up in Fort Salonga.

The corner brick building was built in 1929, and one of only four buildings of that era actually designed by an architect, Muma said. The others are the historical society building and the Henry Perkins on West Main Street and the Oddfellow building on the corner of Roanoke and Second, she said.

Muma has painstakingly renovated and restored the three-story structure. (See photos.) She has created five duplex apartments on the second and third floors, all of which, like the restaurant below, feature lots of sunlight. The apartments, designed as live-work spaces, also feature wonderful aerial views of downtown architecture and streetscape.

“It really is a different perspective from up here,” Muma said. “The architecture is beautiful. The view is like something you’d expect to see in Greenwich Village.”

Ray Dickhoff, who is building the Summer Wind mixed-use project on Peconic Avenue, is the general contractor on the 1 East Main Street project. The design work was done by New York City architect Geoffrey Freeman, who has a home in Riverhead and is an acquaintance of Muma’s. Her attention to detail is obvious in the renovation project as well as the furnishing of the restaurant. Her priority has been remaining true to the period in which the building was constructed, Muma said. So, there is lots of subway and mosaic tiles on the floors and walls in the halls and stairways of the building, plenty of fascinating old photographs and framed full-page advertisements out of old Forbes magazines and items from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

The project has been a labor of love for Muma, a lifelong cook and equestrian. But she also likes to look at the bigger picture: sustainable living, green building and downtown revitalization, all of which she sees as inter-related.

Downtown Riverhead revitalization should be emblematic of the new urbanism, according to Muma. It will be a place where young professionals can live, work and play, she said. That’s what workforce housing like the duplexes above Dark Horse Restaurant and the upper floors of Summer Wind are all about.

As for the “play” part of that equation, food is the key.  A revitalized downtown Riverhead, in Muma’s vision, will be a place where hungry people go to eat, where there are “at least 10 good restaurants offering different kinds of food, so that it’s not, ‘I’m going to Tweeds’ or ‘I’m going to Dark Horse.’ It’s ‘I’m going downtown.'”

Muma’s vision has already expanded beyond the not-yet-quite-completed 1 East Main Street. She is about to close on her purchase of the Peconic Avenue building next door, and is planning to gut, renovate and expand it. She’s envisioning creating a new entryway to Peconic Avenue from the riverfront parking lot, through a “broad hallway” on the ground floor of the building. There will be a number of small shops and an entrance to Dark Horse off the hallway, she thinks. She will move an old barn from the site and hopes to expand the back of the building upward,to three stories, and construct more “new urban living spaces” on those floors as well.

“With Summer Wind, the Vail Leavitt, the new building and 1 East Main,” Muma said, “Peconic Avenue [revitalization] will be done.”  She believes these projects will be the spark plug for the rest of the Main Street corridor.

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Photos by Peter Blasl