Heather Haviland's Earthly Pleasures
Vine & Bean and Lucky's Café only Scratch the Surface for Foodie-Entrepreneur

In Woody Allen's 1980 movie Stardust Memories, he plays a successful filmmaker who begins to feel discouraged because he's not doing anything good for the world. But he finds enlightenment when a space alien tells him, "You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes."

Heather Haviland has found similar enlightenment, but not about movie making or joke writing. And not from Martians, but from regular people, like you and me. Well, like me, anyway. The Cleveland chef and restaurateur has learned, in more than 30 years of creating cool culinary concepts, how good it feels to make other people feel good -- and how to accomplish it. She's learned that food is a great vehicle for that, and a legitimate one.

Haviland owns Lucky's Café (luckyscafe.com) on Starkweather Avenue in Tremont and the Vine and Bean Café (vineandbeancafe.com) on Larchmere Boulevard in Cleveland, just north of Shaker Square. And she is working on a third place called Sanctuary, also in Tremont, in the former Gospel Press Building, a pre-Civil War structure that she says has housed a Bible factory and a home for cloistered nuns.

The new restaurant, she says, will have that name because it will be “a sanctuary from fast-paced, homogenized, corporate-crap food. Bread will take seven days to make. We’ll do in-house cheeses and our own sausages. Someone can come in and sit by the fireplace and have tea and fresh bread right out of the oven, and home-churned butter. It’ll be what real food used to be. And no thirty-dollar entrees. And late-night we’ll offer high-end desserts. Knowing that Tremont is a culinary dining area, our hope is that people will come there after dinner to have a whole different experience.”

She’s already employing much of that philosophy – especially using locally grown and produced food – at Lucky’s and Vine and Bean.

Someone recently asked her why she thinks she should open yet another restaurant in this economic climate? Not only is she not fazed by the question, but, she says, “I really think it’s my responsibility to. You know, we support local farmers, we make everything from scratch, we employ young people, and yes, we are struggling, but I think we just have to dig in.”

And she’s not referring to us, with our forks and spoons – though, having eaten at her restaurants, I’m happy to do that – but to herself and her staff, and to other responsible restaurateurs.

“The nice thing about what we do is that in this economy, people may be prioritizing the thirty-dollar entrée, but people do need to go out and be taken care of. They’re going out a little less, so it’s our job as restaurant owners and chefs to create food that they think is of value. Our food is going to be more expensive than what you get at a diner, but the food at the diner has absolutely no impact on the community. That place that sells you breakfast for three-ninety-five, their eggs cost them twenty-three cents a dozen, and are full of things that can harm you, and have no flavor. Our eggs, from our farmer, cost two-twenty-five a dozen, but I can’t compromise on the ingredients.”

She’s doing a special Valentine’s Day dinner at the Vine and Bean Saturday night, February 14 (call 707-3333 for reservations). She has created the one-time menu for that night with her chef de cuisine, Ky-wai Wong, who has been the executive chef at Lockkeeper’s and chef de cuisine at Dante’s and worked at the Intercontinental Hotel’s restaurant. “We’re making the pasta from scratch,” she says. “All the desserts are going to an experience. A lot of it will focus on the farm-fresh products that we were able to freeze when they were in season. So we’re having butternut squash ravioli with toasted hazelnuts, and braised beef ravioli on top of creamed corn, and the corn is from when it was like sugar on a stalk.”

Haviland’s mother owned a catering company in Lakewood, and Haviland started working for her when she was 10, eventually performing every function involved in that field, from prep cook to waitress to wedding cake delivery. But when she went off to college, she told her mother she was through with the food business. She went to Kent State University to study political science, with the idea of helping the world through her future work in politics.

But she cooked to put herself through college. Then she wound up working at some of the best restaurants all over the country. She would read about a chef and get excited about what he or she was doing, then pack her car and go to wherever that restaurant was. “I’d show up and say, ‘I need to be able to pay to live somewhere, but that’s all I need to make.’ I worked a number of jobs for free, living out of my car until I could prove myself. I was so blessed in my culinary education, working with so many amazing chefs.”

She co-owned a restaurant near Woodstock, New York (in property owned by Albert Grossman, the legendary manager of Bob Dylan and other musical artists). Along the way, she also learned blacksmithing and pottery-making. She returned to Cleveland to be near her family. She became the first pastry chef at Fire Food & Drink in Shaker Square, and also worked at Parker’s New American Bistro in Ohio City. Then she launched Sweet Mosaic, a special-occasion dessert catering business in Tremont, behind Lucky’s, which she took over from its original owner six years ago.

“I’ve been wooed by every big urban sprawl project around here,” she says. “I’ve been approached [to open restaurants], with them saying, ‘What we need to bring into this project is the heart that you’ve developed at Lucky’s.’ And each time I’m approached, I have to consider it, because there’s going to be a critical mass of people who have disposable income there, and it would be really nice to eventually get to the point where my paycheck wasn’t in question every single week. But when I go and look at it, the heart of what I love in a neighborhood doesn’t exist.”

So maybe she, like Woody Allen’s character in Stardust Memories, was also approached by space aliens who gave her similar advice. Or maybe she just figured it out for herself. But, either way, she says she believes that, in part, her “role is opening small cafés in communities. What I loved about the idea of politics was the chance to make people’s lives better. As a restaurant owner in small communities, I think you also play that role. If you make an environment where people feel comfortable and welcome, and make them food that will truly nourish them and it’s part of something bigger, you’re accomplishing that.

“As a chef, it’s a really selfish pleasure to go into a dining room full of people who are so happy. And it’s a pleasure that they can afford. People tell me things like, ‘I’ve been waiting since Wednesday for this brunch.’ So, on some level, you got them through their crappy week.”

From Cool Cleveland contributor David Budin popcyclesATsbcglobal.net
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