Main Street in Trumansburg is four blocks long, more or less, a strip of low storefronts along Route 96 twelve miles north of Ithaca. If you drive through it at the wrong hour you will miss the restaurant entirely. There is a sign in the window, a sandwich board sometimes on the sidewalk in summer, and a narrow door between a hardware store and what used to be a bank. Inside is a room with about twenty-eight seats, plus a counter, plus a kitchen that you can see into from every table. This is Hazelnut Kitchen. It has been the best dinner within an hour of Seneca Lake for long enough that saying so no longer counts as a hot take.
The kitchen is run by chef-owners Dave Hartman and Eileen Stout. They opened the restaurant in 2008 and they have been behind the pass ever since — this is the rare case, in this county or any county, of a place whose founders still cook the food they put their name on. That longevity is half of what the restaurant is. The other half is a menu that changes roughly weekly through the growing season and more slowly in winter, built around a set of farms within about fifteen miles of the back door. Blue Heron Farm for produce, Stick & Stone, the nearby grain projects, whatever goat dairy is doing well that month. The sourcing isn't performative — no table talker lists every farm on the plate — but if you ask, Dave or Eileen will tell you where every protein and most of the vegetables came from, and what the farmer's name was, and how long they've been working together. These are long relationships.
The format is a short prix-fixe. The menu reads, most nights, as three or four choices per course over three courses, with a tasting option you can opt up to on certain nights. The price has drifted the way all restaurant prices have drifted, but it has stayed below the point where the evening starts to feel transactional. You sit down at seven. The bread arrives. The first course arrives eight minutes later, and for the next two hours you watch the kitchen work through a dinner service that is both intimate — you can see the pickup window from every seat — and disciplined in a way that small restaurants can find hard to maintain past year three. Hazelnut has maintained it past year fifteen.
We started sending guests here about five years ago, after a meal in the second week of October that read, in retrospect, as a demonstration of what a competent kitchen does with a specific moment in a specific agricultural year. The menu that night leaned on the late squash harvest from a farm three miles up the road. There was a starter built around roasted delicata with brown butter and a sheep's-milk cheese from central New York. There was a main that used a cut of pork from a farm the chef named when we asked, served over a polenta ground from wheat grown in Trumansburg. There was a dessert involving a last-of-the-season fig and a brown butter tart. None of the plates tried to do too much. Every plate tried to do one thing very well. We drove back to Burdett afterward, in the dark, arguing about which course had been the best, which is the kind of argument you want to be having after dinner.
That experience has repeated, on slightly different terms, on every visit since. The menu is always a version of itself. The pace is always a version of itself. The kitchen does not appear to have off nights — which cannot literally be true, but which means that whatever variance the kitchen produces is smaller than the variance a casual diner would notice. This is a competence that takes years to build, which is why restaurants do not usually build it in towns of two thousand people. Trumansburg is fortunate that Hazelnut stayed put.
The wine list is short, literal, and correct. There is a Finger Lakes section with about a dozen producers, most of them the ones we send wine-day guests to — Wiemer and Ravines and Forge and a handful of the smaller natural producers. There is a European section built for the menu, which means more Loire and Alsace than you'd expect from a restaurant in upstate New York, and more Chablis than most wine lists of this size would carry. There is a short cocktail list that leans on the farm, too — shrubs, seasonal bitters, the occasional use of a local spirit distilled one town over. You can drink well here at a range of budgets. The ninety-dollar bottle and the thirty-five-dollar bottle both clear the bar the kitchen sets.
The physical room is the other thing to say something about. Hazelnut is small. The acoustics are warm rather than bright, which means you can have a conversation at the table next to another conversation at the next table without leaning in. The lighting is low but not dim; the serviceware is matte, not gleaming; the wood of the tables has the patina of fifteen years of dinner service. The waitstaff is small and has worked there a long time. The pace of the room is set by the kitchen, which is the right way around, and you never feel pushed.
What this produces, cumulatively, is a dinner that takes two and a half hours and that feels like the right length of time. You arrive at seven, your coats come off, you order, you eat, you drink, you talk. Somewhere in the middle of the main course you remember that you are two hours from New York City and twelve miles from a village of two thousand people, and the gap between where you are and the caliber of the meal in front of you is one of the small, quiet luxuries that the Finger Lakes offers to a visitor who is paying attention.
A word about reservations, because this is where most of our guests make the mistake that costs them the meal. Hazelnut's book opens two to three weeks out and fills the same day for a Friday or Saturday night. We tell guests to plan this dinner first, before the wine day, before the gorge hike, before anything else on the Finger Lakes itinerary. If you can only get a Thursday — and often you can — take the Thursday. The kitchen is, if anything, better mid-week, because the pace is easier. Sunday and Monday the restaurant is closed. Tuesday and Wednesday vary by season. Call and ask. They pick up the phone.
We do not write dinner profiles for most regional restaurants because most regional restaurants do not reward the writing. Hazelnut is an exception, and it is an exception because it is the kind of operation that does not happen by accident. It happens because two people decided, at some point in the mid-2000s, to open a restaurant in a place where doing so was economically unreasonable and to then keep doing it year after year at a standard that nobody imposed on them. That is a kind of stubbornness that good restaurants are usually built on, and it is the thing our guests describe, afterward, when they try to explain why the drive from Burdett to Trumansburg was worth it at 6:45 on a Tuesday night in February.
Why it matters, to us, to the list: because the Finger Lakes story is usually told as a wine story, with food as a supporting act, and because the version of the region we want to send our guests home with includes a dinner of this caliber. The lake alone is the argument for coming. The wine is the argument for staying three days. Hazelnut is the argument for coming back.
What we tell our guests to order
- The prix-fixe, as offered — trust the kitchen and don't overthink the course-by-course pick - A bottle from the Finger Lakes section of the wine list; ask the server to steer you toward whatever Wiemer or Forge or Bloomer Creek is on that week - The chocolate tart if it's on, and ask a question about the pastry — the answers are always worth it
How to plan the visit
Reservations open two to three weeks out and fill the same day. Book before everything else on the trip. Thursday is the easiest night; Friday and Saturday require persistence. Dinner only; closed Sunday and Monday. Thirty minutes from the Landing.