Millwright’s Restaurant & 1680 Tavern
77 West St, Simsbury, CT
(860) 651-5500
Tradition meets innovation at Millwright’s Restaurant and Tavern in Simsbury. James Beard Award winning Chef/Owner Tyler Anderson want guests to feel that the dining room is their home away from home, a gathering spot to enjoy inspired New England cuisine in a beautiful, historic setting. The from-scratch kitchen signals his culinary team’s commitment to sophisticated comfort food carefully crafted from locally-sourced ingredients.
The Mill at Hop Brook has been an integral part of Simsbury’s history since the 17th century. The unique structure has inspired not only Millwright’s New England cuisine but also the restaurant’s name.
Chef/owner Tyler Anderson feels a kinship with the millwrights, who built and maintained the mill’s machinery to refine lumber and process grains for the townspeople. Now, as the millwright of a renovated building and modern kitchen, Tyler and his staff provides sustenance and award-winning, farm-to-table dining experiences for locals and out-of-town guests at the mill-turned-restaurant.
To Chef Tyler Anderson, New England’s regional cooking always has an element of comfort – “hearty food for hardy people,” he says. Many factors combine to produce the food that Tyler calls “New England cuisine with a twist.”
As a classically trained chef, Tyler draws on a foundation of age-old French cooking techniques. That foundation supports culinary methods specific to historic New England, such as the practice of roasting vegetables in salt over a wood fire. Pickling, preserving and canning summer’s fresh bounty ensures locally-grown foods for winter’s use and again honors the region’s food practices.
Tyler, Chef de Cuisine Luke Venner and their culinary team also understand the impact of the highest-quality fresh ingredients in their cooking. Millwright’s kitchen uses local ingredients – grown, raised, produced, foraged and prepared – whenever possible. Tyler has made the commitment to buy 80 percent of the ingredients used in the kitchen from purveyors in New England and upstate New York. He also takes the farm-to-table concept one step further. Millwright’s has partnered with a farm that will grow most of its organic produce – and Tyler doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty when visiting the farm or tending to his own home garden.