Food at The Hyve
Photos by Linda Campos
Whether they are cooking for diners to enjoy their food in a restaurant or, these days, at home, Tom Fosnot and Ruth-Anne Adams are always focused on bringing joy to the people they still consider their guests. The husband-and-wife team, who have worked in some of the most storied dining rooms in and around Boston, left day-to-day operations at their Lincoln restaurant, Real (which has since closed), and launched their current venture, Food at the Hyve, a locally sourced meal delivery business, in November 2020.
“When the pandemic hit, it wasn’t viable for us for a lot of reasons to keep the restaurant,” Adams says. “We needed to make a change and do this on our own.”
The couple settled on the name Food at the Hyve after much consideration and following work with the Rural Land Foundation in Lincoln, a nonprofit that works on helping people understand the importance of bees. “We have worked with farms for years, but we decided we wanted to be absolutely clear to people what we valued,” Fosnot says. “The focus on pollinators, to us, was a direct line to farms, where we get our ingredients from weekly. We are focused on cooking from the ground up. It gives us meaning in how we cook and how we look at life.”
Fosnot and Adams met at Cambridge’s now-shuttered Rialto, when Adams interviewed her future husband for a job as a line cook before leaving herself to become executive chef at another long-lost Cambridge legend, Casablanca. Twenty-plus years, about a dozen restaurants and three children later, they are pouring their love, expertise and passion for delicious food made from local ingredients into their current venture.
“We do this because we love to cook,” Fosnot says. “We wanted it to be the best we can be. That was a lot of our decision to transition to this model.”
“We thought the food would be better if we designed it to travel, to be delivered, and for guests to reheat it themselves,” he continues. Like so many of its counterparts, Real offered takeout for several months during the first year of the pandemic. But, Fosnot concedes, “I wasn’t as happy with a lot of the food that you have to serve as hot and ready-to-go. It doesn’t look the way I want it to. Ultimately, you don’t do the food any favors by trying to make it hot and stay hot.”
Food at the Hyve’s menu changes weekly, depending on the ingredients available. One week in late January (shortly before we went to press), the menu featured roast Codman Community Farms turkey with whipped butternut squash, braised cabbage and Maine cranberries; potato gnocchi with shiitake mushrooms, peas and parmesan; and chocolate fudge cake with vanilla cream, among other items. There are always vegetarian, gluten-free and dairy-free options.
“Using local ingredients is sort of a catch-all,” Fosnot notes. “Everyone says it, and I think everyone tries. But the reality is, if you have a fixed menu and multiple employees, it’s hard to do it.” He and Adams source vegetables, fruit, honey, meat and poultry from Drumlin Farm, Lindentree Farm, Kanner Family Orchard and Codman Community Farms in Lincoln, Land’s Sake Farm in Weston, Verrill Farm in Concord and Sturgeon Creek Farm in Eliot, Maine. Mushrooms come from Fat Moon Farm in Westford. Because they pick up nearly everything directly from the farms, prep can take longer than if it was delivered by a restaurant supplier or even purchased at a market.
“Tom cooks nose-to-tail for everything: meat, fish and vegetables,” Adams notes, adding that as we spoke he was dehydrating peels to make a spice mix.
“As we’ve gotten into the pandemic we’re learning about how important it is to support our local food producers,” Fosnot says. “Wherever else we can find farmers and producers, it is exciting for us.”
With their combined talent and years of experience, Fosnot and Adams’ transition from the dining model where they spent their entire careers to an entirely new one has appeared seamless to their customers— many of whom know them from their restaurant days. But as in any restaurant, things can look a little different behind the scenes.
“There are challenges in the logistics of making a business work,” says Adams. “I think Tom is an artist with his food, like a lot of people in the industry. It’s hard to then get behind the wheel of a car and drive and think about things in a different way. You can’t just focus on your art.”
“It’s harder to get feedback from guests,” Fosnot notes. “You really rely on that in a restaurant. People will say, ‘The portion size was too small’ or ‘This dish was too salty.’ There are ways we have to think about that. Now we’re like a private chef.”
“It takes us a fairly long time to think through the menus with the ingredients we have available to us,” Adams continues. “We change the menu every week, and uploading it is also very time consuming. Getting the food ready the night before so it can be properly cooked for delivery the next day and the logistics of getting everything into a bag takes a considerable amount of time.” She later clarifies that the night before often stretches into the wee hours, and cold items are prepared the day of delivery.
Fosnot and Adams do all the menu planning and, for the most part, the cooking, packing and delivering. They have one part-time employee, who helps with prep. The couple, who live in Sudbury with their three children—Finn, 17; Will, 16; and Bridget, 14—cook out of Atlas Commercial Kitchen, a shared kitchen space in Woburn. For the first few months they rented kitchen space from Fireside Catering, owned by the Webber Restaurant Group. Fosnot was executive chef at the group’s Gibbet Hill Grill for eight years and Adams had done the family’s bookkeeping.
Adams, a self-described natural optimist, says, “We are eternally trying to look on the bright side. Working in restaurants, you don’t see your home life that much. There was a period when we didn’t see the kids that much. They were great about being self-starters in a lot of ways. With the [new] business, instead of working in an office, I’m at home in front of the computer. It’s easier to multitask being mom and working.” Adams notes that her children have “stepped up. It has not been an easy journey by any means.” With his relatively new driver’s license, Finn has been helping make deliveries. And all three kids have always helped with prep, dishes and farmers markets.
A major challenge for the chef-owners has been finding trustworthy people to work for them. “When you’re in a restaurant, you can see what people are doing and you can help them,” Adams says. “You can guide them in guest relations. When you send someone out in a car, there’s a lot of things that can happen that can alter the timeline,” which in this case is a significant part of the guest experience. “There’s not a lot of interaction, but it’s important to us because [the guests] are special to us and we want to make sure they feel that way.”
Having spent so many years in restaurants, the couple are keenly aware of the importance to diners of a positive overall experience. “The main reason people go out to eat is to be with friends and family,” Adams explains. “We always felt like our food was second to that.” With Food at the Hyve, she and Fosnot are always thinking not only about creating delicious meals, but also about how to “bring some joy and some fun to people while they’re at home. We’re really pushing ourselves from a culinary standpoint, thinking creatively about how we can be helpful to families with young children, families with teenage children, retired couples, people hosting small get-togethers, holidays. We thought if we’re going to have a smaller ‘guest list’ that we’re delivering to, we wanted to make sure that what we’re making is something they could not get anywhere else.”
In the venture’s first year the couple offered travel menus from Italy, Ireland and London, to name a few, as well as movie-themed dinners. “We just have tried to have fun with it,” she says. “It’s given us a lot of joy as well.”
Customers can order from a monthly subscription menu to receive a new dinner every week for four weeks, delivered on Tuesdays; or pre-order from the weekly menu for delivery Thursday or Friday. New menus are posted on the business’s website (foodatthehyve.com) every Friday. Food arrives cold, with instructions for reheating.
“Tom has worked really hard on honing in on how to cook meats, fishes and vegetables so that when you reheat it, it’s reheated to the correct temperature that you want to eat,” Adams explains. The couple have been at the Wayland Winter Farmers Market at Russell’s Garden Center all season and will be at more markets throughout the warmer months.
Though the core delivery area is Eastern Middlesex, Food at the Hyve drivers have brought meals to locations from Maine to Hingham, with Boston, Cambridge, Harvard and Newton in between. “We put extra effort into bringing food to places who may not be in our delivery area,” Adams says. “We recognize that this has been an incredibly hard time for everybody. Just as in the restaurant, we wanted people to come in and feel great about being there, we want people to have a nice day. If that means we have to drive a little further than we had anticipated, we genuinely think that’s the right thing to do.”
Even with the challenges, Food at the Hyve is another in a long line of accomplishments in Adams and Fosnot’s history. “We’re slowly growing but we’re being very careful,” Adams says. “You just don’t know what’s around the corner.”
“[The pandemic] has allowed us to experiment with a new style of service we had no experience with. We worked our way up in restaurants and we owned a restaurant. Now we own a space that we’ve never done before and there’s not a lot of rules on how it should be done,” adds Fosnot.
The couple have no plans to stop delivering meals when (if?) life resumes even a semblance of normalcy. “We really think we’ve hit on something that’s a nice thing for families and independent people and we like it,” says Adams. “We’ll continue to do it because I know some people really rely on us for dinner and we like it and we like the pace of it. But we miss restaurants terribly.”
“We do miss restaurants,” echoes her husband. “It’s a tough time for restaurants. But having some sort of brick-and-mortar location is something we do want. It’s not in the forefront. It depends on the right opportunity. No one knows how this is all going to shake out.” For now, he says, “This feels like the new normal.”
Update: After this issue was completed, we heard from Tom and Ruth-Anne that they will begin cooking in the kitchen at Fruitlands Museum Café in Harvard and will run the café there. This transition will enable the couple to extend the geographic reach of their delivery business and adds the brick-and-mortar location they wanted even sooner than they had hoped. The café, which will be open from 11:30–2:30, will have a soft opening in early May. A semi-private space that can accommodate 50 people will be available as of May 14. Dinner pickups and prepared food will also be available at the cafe.
This story appeared in the Spring 2022 issue.