A couple with a shared passion and dream. Unfulfilled by our 9 to 5, we shared a yearning from deep within for something more.
Lisa grew up with food as a way of life. Her father’s family is from Naples and has been making pizza for over 45 years. Pizza runs through her veins. A culinary wizard and baking expert, she was born to do this.
Nathan’s a Mechanical Engineer by education; a whiskey aficionado by nature. He’s a cocktail virtuoso with a passion for authenticity. A detail obsessive food science geek, though mostly, he’s a pizza lover.
Why Not? We Asked Ourselves.
After a lifetime of dreaming it took nearly four years to bring The Fig & Barrel to life. It all started when a seed, a small seed, was planted in Lisa’s head at a young age: pizzas.
Lisa grew up in a pizza shop where her father, Sal (pictured below), had perfected the Brooklyn pizza. But another type of pizza, The Neapolitan – born in the city Sal is from, baked in a wood-fired oven at over 800 degrees and leavened using natural yeast – was the stuff of legend. We had to learn more about this, and we did – everything we could – and what a rabbit hole it turned out to be!
The true lesson was that there is something to the Old World methods. And maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason things were done the way they were before everything became commercialized and mechanized.
What if that lesson applied to other food as well?
And, what if that lesson could be applied to cocktails?
WE WERE DETERMINED
TO FIND OUT.
Turns out, Grenadine isn’t supposed to taste like cough syrup or involve ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and Red 40. It’s actually fresh pomegranate syrup, and tastes sublime when properly utilized in a cocktail.
Bitters are historically considered an essential element to a cocktail, and are wonderfully fun to make and experiment with.
Making our own stock from scratch gives food a texture, taste and mouthfeel that can’t be replicated any other way.
We don’t want to lose what our ancestors have known; we want to make things that are real, with whole, natural ingredients. While we’re at it, let’s redefine hospitality and human interaction in an age of social media.
With those principles in mind, we needed the perfect location. The criteria was simple: it had to be old, it had to be authentic and
it had to have loads of history. With both of us having grown up in York County, we knew there was really only one place to look: York City.
After an exhaustive search, we finally found the perfect location for our Pub. The building was originally built by the York Traction Company (later known as the York Railways Company) and later housed the Edison Light & Power Company. The brick walls of the 110-year-old building are literally oozing with history, with a plaque on Cherry Lane to prove it! We had the perfect location to match our concept, and The Fig & Barrel was born.
