Busy Bee Cafe in Poughkeepsie

by Harold Jacobs and photographs by Angelika Rinnhofer, May 06, 2009

Debbie Didomenico, owner of Busy Bee Cafe.

Good restaurants use fresh ingredients, prepare their dishes with vibrant flavors, and seasonally change their menus. But the Busy Bee Cafe stands out from its peers by fulfilling the requirements above while changing its offerings every week or two. Frequent Busy Bee Cafe patrons anticipate that they will be able to choose from an array of new and appealing dishes. Its chefs, Charles Fells and Kelly Johnson, have a passion for cooking and innovation. Using Italian, Asian, and Cajun cuisine as their springboard, they love to mix and match and to experiment. They admirably succeed in turning out an intriguing diversity of consistently great-tasting dishes.

Located in an aging, primarily residential neighborhood in Poughkeepsie, not far from Vassar Hospital (where parking is often tight), the Busy Bee Cafe appears as unimposing as its setting. The rectangular dining room, surrounded on its facade by shaded plate glass windows brightened with two giant flower boxes, seats 35 to 40 people. A large, refrigerated deli-case, a holdover from the premises's former incarnation as a deli, divides the dining room in half. The case holds perishables, sauces, dessert components, and other assorted items that one would more appropriately expect to find stored in the kitchen. Tan-colored walls, decorated with photographs, complement the darker brown wood paneling that encircles the lower half of the room.

Despite this unpretentious backdrop, there are strong indications that one has arrived at a place of culinary distinction upon entering the restaurant. The staff project a professional demeanor. The tables are well-appointed and decorated with white tablecloths and high-quality glassware. Gleaming wine bottles and sophisticated cookbooks adorn the room. Most importantly, diners have a satisfied look. What counts here is not the ambience, but the food and the pleasure derived from eating it.

The person responsible for setting these priorities, Debbie DiDomenico, the Busy Bee Cafe's owner, spent much of her life in the food business. In the early 1970s, she and her then-husband owned a fish restaurant and then a fish market in New Paltz. After her divorce, she acquired advanced cooking skills in French cuisine at L'Europe Restaurant in the Westchester town of South Salem. She then gained catering and management skills working for Abigail Kirsch, a renowned full-service caterer operating out of Tarrytown. Upon its opening in early 1999, DiDomenico became the chef at 121 Restaurant & Bar in North Salem. Toward the end of that year, she purchased the Busy Bee Cafe, which had been a take-out deli, made some cosmetic changes, and opened what she envisioned would be a serious but affordable restaurant.

Chef Kelly Johnson chatting with patrons in the dining room

In 2001, DiDomenico hired Charles Fells to work with her in the kitchen. At the age of 15, Fells began cooking at the Italian Center in Poughkeepsie, then later served for two years as a chef's assistant at the Culinary Institute of America, followed by a stint in the army and a number of cooking jobs, including working under Daniel Smith, a past executive chef at the Beekman Arms Hotel in Rhinebeck. Soon after hiring Fells, DiDomenico acknowledged his talent by making him the Busy Bee Cafe's executive chef. In March 2004, Kelly Johnson, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who had done her externship in New Orleans at Susan Spicer's Bayona, joined Fells in the kitchen. The two chefs presently work as a team and collaborate on putting menus together.