Hunky Dory closes after more than 2 years of serving Southern-inspired food – and cultivating a folk music community
Less than three years after opening, and just months after being featured in The New York Times, Hunky Dory in Warren has closed. The restaurant was known for its unique approach to local, seasonal, Southern-inspired food – but it was also home to a community of folk musicians.
Every month on the first and third Wednesdays, while the restaurant was closed, chef and banjo player Sam Duling would open the doors for an old-time music jam session.
A rotating cast of anywhere from six to twenty people would come from across Rhode Island and Massachusetts toting their fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and more. Most had never met before getting wind of the jam, which was promoted very gently through a Facebook group, the occasional mention on Hunky Dory’s social media, and by word of mouth.
That’s how fiddler Peri Sasnett ended up there.
“It’s like the most random group of people of all ages and occupations,” she said. “I don’t even know what a lot of people do in their day jobs, but everyone just sort of comes together in this space for this specific, niche little thing, and forms a little community.”
Old-time jams are like that. There are people ready and willing to play old-time music almost anywhere you go – and when someone opens up their space to make it happen, they will come.
“To go to some random person’s house, you have to get an invite,” Sasnett said. “And so to have kind of a neutral space like this, where anyone’s welcome and anyone can join, is a great way to get an introduction to the scene.”
When I moved from Chicago to Providence in 2022, I was one of those people looking for a jam. My partner and I started coming to play at Hunky Dory within weeks of moving, and we’ve rarely missed one since then. It’s a special thing to move to a new place and be able to immediately settle into a welcoming, appreciative and generous music community, which is what we found at Hunky Dory – thanks to Duling, as well as to fiddler, banjo player and guitarist Jason Wood, who helped make it happen.
“The jam is the highlight of my calendar. I look forward to it every two weeks,” Wood said. “Social music has become a very important part of my life, and this is probably my favorite event in that genre that I attend.”
Joanna Ray (left) and Sam Duling (right), co-owners of Hunky Dory in Warren, now closed for good.It didn’t hurt that Duling provided exceptionally good food. By the circle of musicians, he would fill a table with charred brussels sprouts, smoked chicken wings, melon wrapped in country ham – whatever he felt like cooking that night.
For Sam, it was a longtime dream of his to have a space like this to host his own jam.
“Having a place to host people, and especially when you’re running a restaurant, and you’re not always able to make it to all these jams and travel – the people come to you,” he said. “I’m just happy that everyone comes to the jam, you know. So it’s been a beautiful win-win for everyone, I think. And there’s snacks.”
I ate at Hunky Dory many times. It was as warm and welcoming a restaurant as it was a space for the jam session. Duling’s partner Joanna Ray, the restaurant’s co-owner, said their goal was for everyone coming in to feel like they were walking into their home for dinner. “So really approachable, but then lots of surprises and upper-scale experiences in a really comfortable atmosphere,” she said.
They were committed to local, seasonal food, something that came through in every dish, with seafood from Andrade’s Catch in Bristol, vegetables from Moonrose Farm in Rehoboth, beef from Stony Creek Farm in Swansea, among many other local sources. The menu was kept small and carefully curated. Dishes included things like pillowy hot honey drop biscuits, “Bloomin’ Hen of the Woods” – which is one huge deep-fried hen-of-the-woods mushroom – and a sorghum- and tomato-glazed smoked black sea bass head, served on a bed of marinated tomatoes, Carolina Gold rice, and preserved tomato broth.
Hunky Dory’s “Bloomin’ Hen of the Woods” – one huge deep-fried hen-of-the-woods mushroom.Duling and Ray called the food “Southern-ish.”
“I grew up with a Southern mother and a Southern grandmother around, and so I grew up eating Southern food and Appalachian food,” Duling said. “That was like my home base, that was what I knew and was most comfortable with.”
After moving here from Charleston, South Carolina in 2019, Duling said they saw a niche that could be filled in Rhode Island. “No one was really tackling Southern food in a way that spoke to authentic Southern food, and kind of told a tale of the South, and the whole tale. So we decided to follow that path and label ourself as Southern-ish in a way – to not pigeon-hole ourselves, but to definitely have that as our foundation of everything we do.”
One of the dishes that really stuck with me was their crab rice. Hunky Dory’s version is made with crab from Andrade’s Catch; Carolina Gold rice middlins, which are broken bits of rice that result from hulling and processing the grains; Broadbent Country Ham from Kentucky, a dry-cured ham similar to prosciutto; and topped with scallions and shaved bottarga, a salted, cured fish roe pouch.
It’s a dish, Sam says, that comes from Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina, from the Gullah Geechee people – descendents of enslaved Africans who developed a unique culture, language and cuisine due to their isolation in island and coastal communities in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. Crab rice, like so much good food, was born out of necessity and ingenuity, turning what would have been considered scraps into something delicious.
“That’s just really the essence of Southern and Appalachian cooking, is making something delicious and beautiful from literally nothing,” Duling said. “The crab rice, to us, encompasses the whole story of what Southern cooking is.”
One of the signature dishes at Hunky Dory was crab rice: local crab, Carolina Gold rice middlins; Broadbent Country Ham from Kentucky; and topped with scallions and shaved bottarga.Their commitment to creating this welcoming place and serving thoughtfully prepared food led to good press and good business. But behind that success were many 80- to 100-hour weeks.
“It’s been really hard to make this decision, because we are doing really well. Dinner sales are up 30% over last year,” co-owner Joanna Ray said. “We’ve gotten really great PR recently. And so we are doing excellent, and it’s easy to get caught up in that. But then when you take a step back, there’s still so much financial struggle. … And we’re so far off, Sam and I are still doing the dishes every single night here.”
And so they made the tough decision to close the restaurant. They’re selling the assets along with the lease, although they do plan to keep making their popular pimento cheese under the Hunky Dory name – and the name itself is not for sale. As for the space, they’re hoping it’ll go to someone who wants to keep it a restaurant.
“We’re not really looking to just sell to anyone and everyone. That’s not really our goal, to just cash out and get money and leave,” Duling said. “We want to leave it in good hands and make sure that the town is getting another great restaurant and another great person to come in.”
Sam broke the news to the Wednesday night jammers in December that the restaurant would officially be closing, meaning the end of the Hunky Dory jam as we knew it. He told me later that, hard as the restaurant work would get, the jam would give him something to look forward to.
“It’s been so wonderful. As anyone may know, or can probably tell, running a restaurant is hard. So to have that little reprieve, and to have that break, and to have that little time to look forward to, to connect and play music … it kind of refills your soul in a way,” he said. “When things are rough, or we’re really busy, or I’m understaffed or, you know, just restaurant stuff happens, it’s great to have a jam to look forward to. And then, even though it’s more work and it’s tiring and I’m up late, none of that matters, and it doesn’t register because it’s refreshing. It feels like you go to the spa or something, or you did a cold plunge the next day, because you feel refreshed after the jam, even if you didn’t sleep.”
The old-time jam is still looking for a new home – but the community that grew out of it will live on.
“A jam or a session, I think of as a kind of living entity, right? It depends on who shows up, and people come in and bring different tunes and different ideas. I think the physical space is an important part of that. Not the only part of it, but that’s part of the milieu,” said jam co-organizer Jason Wood. But, he added, “if that changes and the people are still there, that’s the most important thing.”
Old-time musicians playing at Hunky Dory in December.The post Hunky Dory closes after more than 2 years of serving Southern-inspired food – and cultivating a folk music community appeared first on TPR: The Public's Radio.
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