For the first time since COVID, one of Durham’s tiniest restaurants is set to return
Velvet curtains cover the windows of Durham’s Littler restaurant, shutting out everything that’s not its jewel box dining room.
For nearly two years, that dining room has been dark, remaining closed through the COVID pandemic as its menu and identity could never translate to takeout.
This week, Littler makes its return, bringing back one of Durham’s most intimate restaurants. Owner Gray Brooks, whose restaurant group includes Pizzeria Toro and Jack Tar, said Littler’s return hopes to remind diners of the magic of dining out.
“It’s our most convivial, most elbow-to-elbow, most like a dinner party restaurant,” Brooks said. “That intimacy and closeness, those are the sort of things that were most of all lost for the last two years.”
Littler’s first dinner service will be Friday, March 4.
Two new chefs
For a few months and on special occasions, Littler offered take and bake packages, but the restaurant never offered takeout or outdoor seating, or any of the other measures some restaurants took to stay afloat. Brooks said that wouldn’t work for Littler.
“The whole point is to be with people,” Brooks said. “Anyone can have a great meal at home, whether they make it or pick it up. This is a whole different experience. Littler is only about that, more than our other restaurants, it’s representative of what we lost in the pandemic.”
Littler will reopen with two new chefs with big resumes. At the helm will be Elizabeth Murray leading the kitchen and Tanya Matta, previously of acclaimed restaurant The Grey in Savannah, as pastry chef at Littler, as well as Pizzeria Toro and Jack Tar.
“This is the kind of restaurant that’s chef-driven, while Toro is more reflective of the place,” Brooks said. “Littler is very much reflective of the person at the wheel in the kitchen.”
Murray arrives in Durham after nearly a decade in the coastal California paradise of Big Sur, spending seven years running the kitchen of Sierra Mar at the resort Post Ranch Inn.
Murray grew up in Boone and Blowing Rock and also lived in Chapel Hill, her food education beginning in her grandparents’ vegetable garden. Instead of culinary school she devoured cookbooks from the local library, teaching herself cooking and baking techniques from the pages of recipes, training herself well enough to land leadership jobs in the kitchen before she was 20.
Murray’s career includes stops at some of the best restaurants in the world, including a three-month stage at Noma in Copenhagen, which was the literal best restaurant in the world at the time. She also cooked at WD~50 in New York, in fine-dining kitchens in France, Spain and Italy and most recently at Post Ranch, which demanded creative and luxurious tasting menus, often for the rich and famous.
The move to Littler, to the cozy dining room with less than a dozen barstools and a few dozen seats, is at the different end of the dining spectrum from Post Ranch, but Murray said that was the appeal.
“When you’re in New York or the big city and you eat at the best restaurants in town, it’s usually the small hole in the wall places where you have a fantastic meal that you remember,” Murray said.
Murray was around 23 when she worked at Noma, one of only two American female chefs at the time, on a staff of 50 serving 40 guests a night. Murray worked every station in the kitchen but spent most of her time in Noma’s test lab, which was then housed on a boat, the team tasked with essentially inventing the techniques and dishes that would push dining further.
Now in Durham, Murray is focused on perfecting the small moments as America returns to its restaurants in full force.
What’s on the menu?
The menu mixes in Littler staples like raw oysters, latke benedict and the lamb burger, and many new dishes, like seafood cassoulet and a striped bass with king oyster mushrooms. The additions reflect Murray’s belief that the soil and sea hold the future of dining.
“I really believe vegetables are the future of dining,” Murray said. “I have a lot of respect for the community of vegetables I’m seeing in North Carolina.”
As COVID case counts wane and diners venture out, Murray sees Littler as the kind of experience that hasn’t existed for the past two years, the clinking of glasses and plates and swirl of voices together in a dining room.
“I’m very hopeful for it,” Murray said about dining in 2022. “The simplicity of having a conversation in a bubbly room. Littler is a small space, but this place embodies that good night out.”
Though she’s a North Carolina native, Murray has lived all over the world and the United States, making the move to Durham less of a homecoming, she said, than the next adventure. Though it’s nice being able to go to her mother’s house for dinner some nights, she said.
“I’m at home wherever I am,” Murray said. “I’ve lived all over and learned we’re all the same thing. It’s your connections with people and being authentic with people that matters.”
The reopening of Littler marks the full return of all of Brooks’ restaurants, a gradual move that started with the patio of Jack Tar, then the dining room of Pizzeria Toro and now Littler. All the restaurants will continue to require proof of vaccination for diners.
“It’s a huge accomplishment for our company to make it this far,” Brooks said. “I’m proud of us to manage to do it.”
This story was originally published February 28, 2022 at 11:00 AM.
