Valley Bounty: Thriving on tradition and adaptation: Paul and Elizabeth’s is a Northampton institution

Paul and Elizabeth’s is a downtown Northampton mainstay, serving up pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan dishes from its bright dining room in Thorne’s Marketplace since 1978. It is rare for an independent restaurant to survive for nearly 50 years. 

Nate Sustick, who now owns the place with his parents (Paul and Elizabeth), explains the approach that has kept them going across the decades: “It’s always been about keeping your core but being open to shifting and adapting with the times. It’s kind of a fun challenge, and a hard challenge too. You can’t just sit on your past. Being here for almost 48 years, we still have to work really hard every day.”

What is at the core of Paul and Elizabeth’s? “It’s food that makes you feel good,” Sustick says. “It’s ‘let’s do as much homemade as we can.’ So we get here every morning around 7 a.m., bake all our own bread, make all our own soups, and make all of our desserts. We focus on doing as much as possible in-house with the freshest ingredients possible. We don’t have a ton of storage space in our kitchen, and we use that as an advantage – we get deliveries of vegetables and fish six days a week.”

In many ways, the story of Paul and Elizabeth’s mirrors the story of how Northampton itself has changed over the past 50 years. “My parents moved here from Boston and opened the restaurant on Dec. 4, 1978,” Sustick says. “Back then, Northampton was a blue-collar town with a hardware store on Main Street and my parents were serving tofu with a macrobiotic philosophy, which was pretty fringe at the time. They were part of a movement towards more conscious eating after the more packaged food of the 1950s and ’60s. The early years were a struggle. But as time went by, they survived, and then Northampton hit a major boom in the early ’90s when the music scene and the restaurant scene were exploding.”

Nate Sustick started working at the restaurant while attending the University of Massachusetts in the late ’90s, and he has seen the restaurant through the changes in the town and the region over the past 25 years. He notes one very positive change for the restaurant: a relationship with Marty’s Local, a South Deerfield-based, full-service food distributor, which provides most of the produce, dairy, and other ingredients that go into Paul and Elizabeth’s meals. 

“Back when I started, if you wanted produce from local farms you had to go out and source it yourself. Marty’s Local has really streamlined it all for us,” says Sustick. Local farms are an amazing resource for local restaurants looking for super fresh ingredients, but the matchmaking can be tough – restaurants tend to want small, frequent deliveries, which can be hard for small farms to manage. “No one wants to deliver two cases of zucchini,” says Sustick. A locally oriented distribution company like Marty’s Local – or Wulf’s Fish, which provides the bulk of Paul and Elizabeth’s seafood from the Boston Pier – fills an essential gap between local businesses.

This time of year, you’ll find local pumpkins and apples in Paul and Elizabeth’s famous pies and lots of local vegetables across the menu. “Right now it’s salad greens, kale, root vegetables and broccoli. We use whatever is in season in our daily soups and specials, and a lot of those things are part of our everyday menu, so whenever we can get it locally, we use it,” Sustick says.

In more recent years, both downtown Northampton and Paul and Elizabeth’s have been shaped by the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Like it or not, Northampton is still figuring itself out post-COVID,” says Sustick. “For us, it was an odd couple of years. We closed for three or four months, did takeout only for about a year, and it took another year after reopening the dining room to feel the sense that ‘ok, customers are back.’ But also, we had a lot of downtime, and it was kind of helpful. It was time to reflect and restart. The most important thing we’ve tried to do since COVID was to simplify. We made the menu a little smaller and switched up our scheduling so it’s more driven by employees’ needs.”

Perhaps the biggest change for Sustick himself in recent years has been a shift towards working front of house more often, serving food and bussing tables. “This place has been my school. I really learned how to cook from the guys working here,” he says. “So I just wanted to be more involved in more parts of the restaurant. It’s so different to work on the line as opposed to front of house. Both roles are equally important, and equally challenging. But I’ve enjoyed it – it gives me a minute to connect with customers and to hear their feedback. I can learn a lot from listening.”

Connection to diners has been important to Sustick, but the backbone of the place is the connections behind the scenes. “It’s always been a family thing,” he says. “My dad worked in the kitchen until right before COVID, my uncle worked here for over 25 years, and my mom still oversees the look and feel of the dining room. But it’s not just that – the kitchen staff has people who have been here 30, 35 years whose family members have come to work here too. That part of it is very special.”

“Every new year, I think back on the previous year and say to myself, ‘how could we have done that better?’ and there are always so many unpredictable forces, but I think having each other’s back as a staff and being there for each other is the key for a lot of it,” Sustick says. “I can talk about how my parents or I have done things, but the backbone is really the kitchen and floor workers who have kept it all moving all these years. My hope is to continue that and to be able to continue to survive and adapt to the changes that might come our way.”

Claire Morenon is the communications manager for Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA).