About the restaurant

How it started

Nora Delacroix cooked in other people's kitchens in Manhattan for eleven years and then spent one very instructive year running a food stall that did not work. Woodside Table opened in 2016 in what had been a hardware shop, with a dining room she could see all of from the pass and a bar she insisted on against the advice of everybody who did the numbers.

The bar is now the reason the restaurant survived its second winter, which is the sort of thing you only find out afterwards.

What it is

• Sixty-four seats in the dining room across eighteen tables
• A twelve-seat bar with its own menu and its own later hours
• One private room seating up to twenty-two, with a door that closes
• A step-free entrance from 61st Street and a ground-floor accessible washroom
• One kitchen, shared by every dish on every menu, with no separate allergen line
• A wood-fired oven that runs the vegetable and fish sections
• Sixteen pavement seats from May to October, first come first served

How the food works

Seasonal American cooking, which is a phrase that has been worn thin, so here is what it means in this building. Marcus does the ordering, and Marcus is allowed to change a dish on a Tuesday because the fish is not good enough. About a third of the dinner menu turns over with the season. The wood oven runs the vegetables and the fish. Bread and everything on the pudding list are baked here each day by Daniel, who starts before eight.

Nothing is part-cooked in the afternoon and finished to order, which is why the roast chicken takes half an hour and why we say so on the menu rather than apologising for it at the table.

Why we close on Mondays

Because everyone who works here has to have two consecutive days off at some point, and because a restaurant open seven days is a restaurant where the same eleven people cover every service. Almost every independent restaurant in this city closes one day. The ones that do not are usually either much larger or quietly grinding somebody down.

What we are not

Not a destination restaurant, not a tasting menu, not a place you need to plan three weeks ahead. If you cannot get a table at eight on a Saturday you can almost certainly get one at six on a Thursday, and it will be the same food cooked by the same people in a calmer room. The twelve bar seats are never reservable precisely so that walking in remains possible.

The dish you read about may not be on. About a third of the dinner menu changes with the season, and single dishes change more often than that. This is not a marketing rhythm — it is what happens when the person doing the ordering is allowed to say the fish is not good enough this week. It has one consequence for you: the dish you read about here may not be on when you arrive. The menus on this site are updated the day they change in the kitchen, and if you are coming specifically for something, call and ask rather than trusting the page.

The things this restaurant does not do. There is no takeaway and no delivery. There is no private hire of the whole restaurant on a Friday or Saturday. There is no separate gluten-free kitchen, no tasting menu, no children's play area, no roof terrace and no car park. There is no online shop for the gift cards. We do not do outside catering and we do not do weddings — the private room seats twenty-two and a wedding does not fit in it. Each of those is a real thing somebody asks for weekly, and being told plainly on a website beats being told on the phone after you have made a plan.