Paul Benkert has seen that famous scene in “The Bear,” where the ticket machine goes haywire with orders and the staff at Chef Carmy’s Chicago beef shop find themselves on the hook for 78 slices of chocolate cake, 99 french fries, 54 chickens, 38 salads and 255 beef sandwiches — all set for pickup in the next eight minutes.
Though not quite on that frenzied scale, Benkert, the co-owner of Hampden’s Bluebird Cocktail Room, knows a thing or two about a mad rush. On busy nights at the Bluebird, when there’s a wait out the door, there’s no time for chatting with customers or basking in the bar’s low-lit ambiance.
For his next project, a new and intimate restaurant on the Eastern Shore, he intends to take it slow.
“It’s a zen kitchen: there’s no ticket printer, no chaos,” he said. “I want to have a conversation with people. It’s just one meal, one night.”
Benkert and his wife and business partner, Caroline, plan to open Sassafras in Kent County next spring. The restaurant takes its name from the Sassafras River, which merges with the Chesapeake Bay nearby.
Sassafras will take over a cottage-shaped building in Betterton that used to belong to a restaurant called Barbara’s on the Bay. The Benkerts, who moved to the Eastern Shore a year and a half ago with their daughters in search of a slower life, have purchased the restaurant space and are planning to outfit it with a second kitchen, a wood-burning oven and a chef’s counter.
They plan to offer just one dinner service, limited to 20 people, per night. The 12-course menu will be set at a fixed price of about $150 per person.
Paul Benkert, who will serve as the restaurant’s chef, says the focus will be “fine Chesapeake cookery”: seafood from the Bay, local waterfowl during hunting season and produce foraged or grown by area farmers. The only non-local ingredient on his list, so far, is wild-caught caviar from the Mississippi River.
The couple are taking inspiration for the restaurant from The Lost Kitchen, a rustic, 40-seat fine dining spot in Freedom, Maine.
“We really like that style — an intimate dinner party that is sustainable for our lives,” Paul said.
To fund improvements and open inventory for Sassafras, they’ve launched a campaign on Honeycomb Credit, a crowd-sourced investment platform. Investors earn an interest rate of 13.75% under the agreement.
The Benkerts are looking to raise between $60,000 and $124,000; as of Wednesday, 24 investors had pledged a total of $24,600 to the project.
The couple will continue to operate The Bluebird Cocktail Room in addition to Sassafras. They previously owned a pizzeria in Urbana called Manina, but it shut down in January 2023.
The closure was primarily due to slow traffic, Paul said, “We’ve wracked our brains endlessly for the reason. There’s many, many reasons, but I think it all comes down to location. From the start, we just didn’t have people walking through the door.”
Though he sometimes worries about a similar fate befalling Sassafras, which is set in an even more remote spot, he said he and Caroline are in a better position to control expenses as owners of the building. In addition to the Benkerts, the restaurant will only employ a handful of other staff.
As the Eastern Shore’s culinary scene starts to garner more attention — chef Harley Peet of Bas Rouge in Easton won a James Beard Award earlier this summer, for instance — Paul Benkert said he hopes Sassafras will find an audience.
“After having successes and failures, we just want to tell an amazing story in a small way,” he said.
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