The Rural We: Christopher Knable
From his hometown in Texas to New York City — and then Mexico, China, South America and the United Arab Emirates — Christopher Knable has spent his career traveling the world, working in the hotel industry while baking on the side, until now. He’s settled in Chatham, New York, and is now the proprietor of the restaurant Main St. Goodness and the attached PieconicNY bakery. Knable and his team (bakers Amanda Richards and Marion Vinot) make sweet and savory pies from scratch, using fresh ingredients from Hudson Valley farms. Main St. Goodness serves up all-day breakfast, as well as lunch and light supper. It even has a juice bar and vegan, gluten-free and keto options. Recently, after Al Roker mentioned Pieconic’s bourbon pie on the TODAY Show, people rushed in for it, but there’s plenty of other reasons to visit Knable’s dual businesses.
I spent my teenage years in Texas, then moved from Austin to New York City on a whim at 19 because “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” I was hired at Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, as probably the youngest assistant manager they’ve ever had, probably ‘til this day. It’s one of the top hotels in the world, so it was a great way to break into NYC. Then I worked at the Plaza Hotel, I traveled overseas with Peninsula throughout Asia, then came back to New York and became the general manager of Regency on Park Ave., then the Regent, then everything changed. After 9/11 the hotel was sold, and I made a bit of money from the sale and began building hotels with other investors — in Mexico, Uruguay, what is now the Waldorf Astoria in Chicago.
I ended up working in Dubai for three years, as a manager of HRH Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal's Kingdom Hotels, and then for the Qatari Emir's hotel company, Katara Hospitality, where my wife and I lived in the capital, Doha. That was a big corporate job, with 15,000 employees and lots of hotels. We would develop the hotels and hire another company, like the Four Seasons, to manage it. I was managing the managers. From 2001-2010, almost until last year actually, I was traveling almost half a million miles a year.
In 2016 I came back to New York to help Ian Schrager with the Public Hotel on the Lower East Side. After that, I was tired of traveling, and my weekend house had turned into my permanent home. I decided to take the summer off and figure out what I was going to do next. I couldn’t see myself taking a big corporate job again. My wife says that I ‘woke up one day and decided I was going to bake pie for a living.’ I thought, ‘What do I like to do?’ and ‘What does everybody love?’ I put up a website and soon there were pies all over the house, so I rented the kitchen at the back of what used to be Ralph’s Pretty Good Café, which has its own door. The landlord had a retailer for the front of the store.
Over the next couple of weeks, the lights were on and people would smell pie baking and they were like, ‘Hey, whatcha doing back there? Do you sell it by the slice?’ And then, what do people want when they have pie? Coffee. I started making coffee. My landlord said ‘Hey, whatcha doing back there?’ So I said, ‘Fine, I’ll take the whole place.’ I hadn’t worked in a restaurant since I was a kid, when I started by washing dishes. But it’s like riding a bike, it all comes back to you.
‘Main street’ is nostalgia, everyone has grown up around or near a Main Street, and ‘goodness…’ who doesn’t need more goodness? I’m not here to tell you what to eat; sometimes you want breakfast for dinner, so we serve breakfast all day.
Accidently stumbled into Chatham, but I used to bring my kids into Ralph’s Pretty Good Café, it was a family tradition. I knew I wanted to create something like Ralph’s, where people could hang out with friends and family. I knew Ralph worked at the Hawthorne Valley Farm Store, and I always wanted to go up to him. He came in about a month ago and was really complimentary and it meant a lot. There’s a group of ladies that come in every Tuesday morning, I call them the Tuesday ladies, and they’ve been coming here for 40-odd years. There’s some great stories in the walls and I feel like I’m picking up the torch and carrying it forward.
I recently became a volunteer fireman here; I love Chatham and I love the life here. It’ll be almost two years in November and it’s so much fun and so rewarding. I’m blessed to have a great group of folks I’m working with. When you’re working in corporate, you’re really far from the customer, you never talk to them. We’ve had support from so many people, everyone has been helpful and generous with their advice and time. We wouldn’t be here without them.
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