A soon-to-be-refurbished Italian villa without a chef

July 9

My friend and boss, NRN editor-in-chief Ellen Koteff, and I spent a Saturday afternoon outside the town of Chester, N.Y., at the very beginning of the Catskills, where her friends Dan DeSimone and Alan Steinberg are busily supervising the overhaul of a forgotten Tuscan-style Italian villa.
The mansion, called Glenmere, feels remote and isolated, but it’s just an hour-and-twenty-minute drive from New York City. Dan and Alan are working on turning it into a super-luxurious, 19-room hotel. They were inspired by Wheatleigh in Lenox, Mass., but Glenmere is on a much bigger, more isolated piece of land, with a grand view of Glenmere Lake and close proximity to fertile “black dirt” country, where we drove by fields of sweet onions and strawberries and corn and lettuce and so on.
And they’re looking for a chef, someone who wants to be immersed in the local flora and manage a luxurious kitchen from which to serve, say, 20 people a day, plus staff, except during weddings and such when of course more people would be eating.
So, if you’re a chef who wants to settle down into the country on a lovely piece of land in a beautiful villa not really that far from New York and cook for rich people, let me know.
The hotel is on track (for now) to open in May of 2009, but Dan and Alan want to have a chef on board within the next six months to help design the kitchen.
So, post a comment here or e-mail me at bthorn@nrn.com if you’d like to visit the place.