Photo by Jason Varney

A Kennett Square couple have turned their homey storefront market into a dinner destination that’s been dubbed “the toughest table in America,” and diners—the few lucky ones—wait a full year to sample it. Now, they’re planning a new restaurant with enough room for the rest of us. Drew Armstrong spent a day at Talula’s Table and found out why Bryan Sikora and Aimee Olexy’s quest for the quiet life has generated such a hubbub.

Maybe it’s best to begin with the chicken fingers. Bryan Sikora and Aimee Olexy—the co-owners of Talula’s Table, the one-reservation-a-night restaurant and gourmet market in Kennett Square—have a daughter, Annalee. Being three years old, her palate isn’t exactly sophisticated. So one day Aimee went to the grocery store to buy chicken fingers for Annalee and tried to feed her one.

Then Sikora tried one. “Never buy these again,” he told her. He went to the kitchen, found some chicken cutlets, olive oil, breadcrumbs and spices, and went to work making the best chicken fingers he could devise. Now they’re sold frozen in packs of four for $6. Aimee grabs a pack and holds it up. “If this is $6, that’s $1.50 each for these things. That’s competitive!” Olexy says.

“They’re great,” Sikora agrees. “I still can’t get my daughter to eat them.”

Finicky three-year-olds aside, there are few foodies in the country who would turn down a bite from Talula’s kitchen.

From dawn until dusk, Talula’s is Kennett Square’s coffee shop, gourmet market, bakery and town hall. People come in to buy pastries and snacks, to pick up an order of cheese or grab a sandwich, or even just to chat with Olexy. Then, at 7 p.m., the market closes and Sikora and two other cooks prepare one of the most sought-after meals in the country—for which reservations are more difficult to procure than for Napa’s French Laundry or New York’s Per Se—a seven- or eight-course meal, lasting hours, for a table of 12 in the middle of the store. It’s intimate, subtle American cooking, with flawless service led by Olexy.

Olexy and Sikora, who are married, are the former owners of Django, the renowned Philly BYOB that was the first ever to earn four bells from Inquirer restaurant critic Craig LaBan. Bryan cooked; Aimee sourced the cheeses—for which Django was particularly well known—and ran the front of the house.

But when Annalee was born, the couple decided they didn’t want to raise their daughter in the city. They sold Django—even though it meant signing a non-compete agreement that stated they wouldn’t open a restaurant within 40 miles of the city. And Kennett Square, at the epicenter of so many artisan farmers and producers, seemed like the perfect choice: “The product is so good here,” Olexy says of the almost 50 local producers that provide the restaurant’s raw ingredients. But what started in 2007 as a simple market wasn’t enough to satisfy Olexy’s ambitious culinary talent—and so, the nightly chef’s table, (not quite a restaurant), was born.

Because the cooking is so excellent, and because there is only one table, Talula’s is one of the hardest restaurants to get into in the country. Reservations for the $90-a-head feast are booked exactly one year in advance, and fill up immediately. Cancellations are rare.

Every morning at 6 a.m., Dan McShane, who lives upstairs, opens the store. People begin calling at around 6:45 a.m., but no reservations are taken until 7. Sometimes, people line up outside the front door in the morning—that’s also allowed. There have been fights.

Still, even with this kind of success, there’s room for change. Now, Django has closed, their non-compete has expired, and Olexy and Sikora have a “handshake agreement” with the owner of a 19th-century building just down the street. They’re looking to get back into the restaurant business, (as if they had really left). The as-yet-unnamed, 60-seat restaurant and wine bar—which could open by next August—will focus on simple, locally sourced food. Sikora describes the anticipated menu as “small, in the moment” with dishes like prawns with white beans and herbs. Talula’s will still be the destination restaurant, though; ”one of the main reasons we’re doing this is because it’s a block away,” Olexy says.

Back at Talula’s, as darkness falls on a Saturday evening, Sikora is slicing razor-thin ribbons of radish, destined to be part of a small bed of greens for the oyster dish that opens the night’s meal. He pauses a moment to show off a softball-size piece of cured meat. It’s a culatello: prosciutto-like cured pork that comes from the rear leg of the pig. Sikora explains how he and Olexy age the meat over four months. It’s bathed in salt and hung in a humid, dark cellar, so that moisture leeches out, shrinking and preserving the meat, while deepening its flavors. By the end of the process, the curing has shrunk the ham to perhaps half its original size. “That’s about as dry as it gets,” Sikora says, hoisting it from hand to hand before letting it rest on the table.

Like the culatello, most of Talula’s other charcuterie is made in-house. But because the meats have to age for months, and because Talula’s used to be a shoe store and as such, does not have a cool, humid cave for curing salami and other aged pork, Olexy and Sikora have made some compromises. At first, they tried to age the meat in the walk-in refrigerator. That didn’t work. Then they tried family, using Aimee’s mother’s basement, which was cool and damp enough for the meat to age properly. But that, also, didn’t work out: ”My mom got pissed because she could smell it through all the vents,” Olexy says. The solution came from a customer who used to be a regular at Django. He had a large wine cellar, and offered to let Talula’s use it. Problem solved. Now they cure their meats alongside bottles of Bordeaux.

Hidden by a wall with two porthole windows looking into the store, the kitchen at Talula’s is not the barely controlled chaos found in so many larger restaurants. For starters, nobody yells at anybody else. Sikora has opened a bottle of La Crema Chardonnay, a glass poured for everyone. The ingredients for each course are laid out on large trays, held on a rack. As one course is cooked and served, the elements for the next are pulled down and prepared. “Pretty boring, huh?” says Sikora.

On the sparse, rectangular plates, Sikora and the other chefs nestle two oysters each. One sits in its shell, the other is clutched in the small curvature of an endive. In between goes the bed of greens, with the radish. Sikora walks to a bowl of ice water and pulls out what looks like a soda siphon, filled with a foam of pickled lemon and saffron. “The binder is gelatin,” he explains. “The ice makes the gelatin set.” Onto one of the oysters fizzes the foam, weighty as air. “In old school cooking, this is where you’d use an aioli, which is very rich—this is light,” he explains.

Out go the oysters to the lucky table of 12, all smiles and cutlery. Olexy says she doesn’t miss the pandemonium of a regular restaurant. And when the new place opens, they have no intention of leaving Talula’s behind. The staff, the cooks, the customers even—it’s all like one big family. “We have people who want to work here all the time,” says Chris Unruh, who lives a block away and works in the store and during dinners. “Aimee is really good at picking the ones who fit.” The defining factor, he says, is how much the staff cares about the place and the food. “Everybody here,” Unruh concludes, “gives a shit.”

And living the antithesis of big-chain, corporate restaurant culture is exactly what sets Talula’s apart. “It’s all very Berkeley. I’m very bohemian: that’s who we are,” Olexy says. “As we get older, we joke… ‘How long can we pretend that we’re in college?’”

The answer: As long as the diners keep calling before sunrise, hoping to get a reservation. Which means a very long time.

1. [...] parts of the community take part in shopping at the market! Just imagine our excitement when we saw Bryan Sikora and Aimee Olexy (originally of Django, currently of Talula’s Table and working on a new restaurant in KSQ) [...]

   Posted by From Farm Market to Table « Kennett Square Farmers Market | July 1, 2009, 3:03 pm