Food & Drink

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Mediterranean Bounty in Green County

by Jennifer May and photographs by Jennifer May, January 25, 2007

A fingan, an Arabic coffee pot, used to brew sweet and thick cardamom coffee.

A fingan, an Arabic coffee pot, used to brew sweet and thick cardamom coffee.

In the kitchen of Bell’s Cafe, jars of exotic herbs and spices from the Mediterranean line the shelves: za-atar, harissa, sumac (not the poisonous one), turmeric, and several curry blends. Bottles of pomegranate juice fill another shelf and a bowl of pomegranates on the wooden countertop await peeling and seeding. While the name of the restaurant has remained the same for 25 years, in the past two years everything else has changed, including the owners.

“As long as I can remember, I wanted to cook,” says Keith McMorrow, co-owner. McMorrow dropped out of corporate life as a manager for FedEx to attend Peter Kump’s Culinary Institute in Manhattan. Running a kitchen in Queens after graduation, McMorrow met Yael Manor (now McMorrow), who moved to New York from native Israel to attend the French Culinary Institute. Keith says he was Yael’s boss, “for about this long.” He snaps his fingers. Yael shrugs her shoulders and nods, laughing.

Their first years as a couple, they traveled back and forth between New York City and Keith’s weekend home in the Greene County town of Durham. They looked at opportunities to cook at restaurants in the area, and when a friend told them she had seen an old luncheonette named Bell’s Café for sale in Catskill, they took a field trip. Yael recalls the day she peeked inside the closed shop windows. Two months later, it was theirs.
Plucked pomegranate seeds on a bowl the McMorrows purchased in a market in Israel.

Plucked pomegranate seeds on a bowl the McMorrows purchased in a market in Israel.


The building was a pleasant surprise. “It’s a gem. We just peeled away the layers,” says Keith. The circa 1830s building was well maintained when they bought it, though in need of cosmetic updates. In the first year they closed the restaurant every few days to renovate. The McMorrows handled most of the renovations themselves, incorporating elements from the previous owners left behind—like a circa 1950 freezer refashioned into a dessert case. A dropped tile ceiling hid beautifully embossed tin. Arched wood and glass details on the front windows were also buried. Upstairs, in the two floors they call home, they found gold-painted wallpaper behind the plasterboard.

Today, Yael and Keith pay homage to the earlier incarnations of Bell’s Café, and to the town of Catskill, in framed photographs on the wall by the kitchen. Horses weave through streets filled with bonnet and petticoat-clad women and men in wide brimmed hats. There are also black-and-white photographs of the shop as an ice cream and soda parlor, as a diner, and as a candy shop. Though they changed everything else about the menu and the interior, they left the name and the original hand lettering on the front windows. “Why mess with the karma?” Yael asks.