Restless labors of Sara Mae Zandi in food, community, and country living

By Jillian Scheinfeld
Photography Harold Julian
Creative Direction John Paul Tran
Styling Ise White
Beauty Moani Lee
Hair Linh Nguyen

The sun was at its peak when I pulled in to the eerily quiet town of Bovina and drove up the gravel driveway to Brushland Eating House on Main Street.

The town itself, which boasts a mere population of 600, felt like an empty movie set patterned with antiquated charms. Nineteenth-century porches, seemingly created for lazing on slow, muggy afternoons, were uninhabited but well-maintained. The only sound to be heard was a ladder tapping against a tin roof, the occasional swing of a screen door, the genuine chirps and humming of the birds and the bees.

That is, until Sara Mae Zandi met me with an iced coffee in hand, outfitted in a denim overall dress and muddy white Converse. Her pouty lips, green eyes, and golden hair hoisted in a tight bun contrasted faultlessly with a swift city-paced walk, exuding the gentle aura of someone who means business.

Sara and her fiancé, Sohail Zandi — who met as servers at the Brooklyn restaurant Frankies 457 Spuntino — relocated to Bovina following a wanderlust trip to the Catskills three years ago. They were coming off the heels of a starry-eyed year spent on Martha’s Vineyard. At the beginning of their relationship, Sohail moved there to make cheese on a farm, and Sara followed close behind to grow flowers. “We had always wanted to open a business and knew it wasn’t sustainable on Martha’s Vineyard. Then we took a trip up here and saw this building was for sale.” Frankly, they were captivated by the allure of this desolate, country town and developed a sort of “if we build it, they will come” approach. And luckily, they were right.

“We fell in love with Bovina, but were aware that there was a decent chance that if it didn’t work out, then we would be building it purely for ourselves — which was initially the motivator. Yes, we could have been in Hudson or even Narrowsburg, if we were out to make money fast,” she remarked as we sat on metal chairs in the bucolic garden behind the restaurant. “So many people do that. They come up, suss out the area, and say, ‘We want to open up a wedding venue or a restaurant; where should we do this?’ But we just thought, ‘Let’s make this area have a business so we can stay here.’”

“We decided to call it an eating house because we wanted to feed people, but our aim was to be a place where people could congregate and use our space.”

I couldn’t help but state the obvious to Sara: a cool, trailblazing couple from Brooklyn comes to a remote town in the Catskills and develops an Instagram aesthetic that looks like they may just lounge around in the tall grass all day and then dust off their aprons at night. She laughed. “If you stage the right photo, we would totally be fitting into that mold. But if you're here for a couple days, you feel the rush of this business and realize it could be anywhere — including in the city — because it's just nonstop. We wake up and hit the ground running. Those picture-perfect moments are far and few between.” She continued, “The other side of that is that it feels really good to be cast in that light, to have become a destination place for people. We have friends that want to visit us to see what our life is like because they think they want it. And that's cool, we'll take that. Because we are living the life that we want.”

Living that life day-to-day includes a 50/50 split of Sara and Sohail’s innate tendencies. Sara has always had a predisposition for hospitality. She knows all of her customers’ names, what garnishes they prefer, how they take their drinks. She serves patrons, maintains the two Airbnb apartments above the restaurant, and manages the staff. Sohail — who went to school for biology and poly sci — has evolved into something of a culinary and design wunderkind.

The restaurant’s demeanor is industrial yet cozy — which is no easy feat. During my tour of the restaurant, I stopped to chat with Sohail, who was fastidiously placing slabs of dough on a cement-colored tray. The artistry behind the eating house is as such: “It’s everything that inspires us. We wanted a clean room, inspired by those dudes who did the Prime Meats restaurant. We wanted dark wood, handsome, and masculine,” Sohail said. “Our aim was to be different from all the cute country places upstate, and at the same time, we didn't want it to feel like a dining room in Manhattan or Brooklyn. The goal was to mix in a lot of old with the new, and we wanted the windows, which display accouterments from the town we love, to reign supreme.”

The secret behind the success of the restaurant is evidenced by the couple’s utmost dedication to the community of Bovina. They aren’t there Thursday through Sunday with varying hours only to be found on their social media pages. They are full-time regulars, completely immersed in every aspect of small-town living — and that’s impossible for locals to ignore. “I think it’s really important for the community of true locals that we’re doing something that’s for everyone, all the time,” she said. “We’re here in February on a Wednesday when we have four people come into the restaurant because there’s a snowstorm. But for those four people who live close by, there is nowhere else for them to get a burger and beer. We put in 345 days a year for three years, and it’s really given us a grasp of what’s going on.”

“We have friends that want to visit us to see what our life is like because they think they want it… We are living the life that we want.”

After committing to the building, they even met with the town historian to find out more about the area and also source inspiration for the restaurant. “We decided to call it an eating house because we wanted to feed people, but our aim was to be a place where people could congregate and use our space.” The moniker of the restaurant itself is culled from the history of the area, a mannerly nod to its humble beginnings. Before it was Bovina, it was Brushland, founded by early colonizer Alexander Brush.

The time neared 5 p.m., and I followed Sara into the restaurant for an espresso to go as she grabbed a cluster of candles and began cracking out the wax in preparation for the night’s illumination. That day’s menu included shrimp cocktail, braised rabbit, guinea hen, and pan-roasted pork chops — all foods that Sara and Sohail like to eat. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, but what people imagine is being able to relax in the forest and drink rosé out on their porch every day, and the truth is no one runs this business but us,” she said. “We totally give people a place to come do that for a weekend, and we definitely get windows of time to do that. Sometimes when I hear people say they want to come open a restaurant here I think, ‘Uh-oh, I think we’re making this look too easy.’ And maybe they are — but the public fascination with their particular countrified lifestyle is merely a testament to the sui generis team working tirelessly behind their flourishing eating house.”

Published in the print edition of the DVEIGHT, issue 7.