Everyone’s A Winner At Door Prize Restaurant

My call interrupted Jenny Klowden as she was putting bacon on sheet pans. She and her husband, Bryan “Swifty” Josephs, are the owners of Door Prize, the latest popup to inhabit the space across from the upside-down trees at the MASS MoCA campus in North Adams, Massachusetts. Their personal tale is another one of those pandemic silver lining stories and it’s worth hearing about, but let’s talk about the food first.

Door Prize’s menu features sandwiches, salads, sides, and desserts — regional classics, the owners say, with sandwiches named for particular cities in which they’ve lived or worked. But those are just starting points, because the items are clearly inspired by the fertile imaginations of Klowden and Josephs, who have spent the better part of their lives working in restaurants, catering companies, bakeries, food trucks, and packaged goods companies. Here, everything from the potato rolls and other breads to the salted chocolate chip cookies and popular rosemary lemon bars are made in house. It’s not a huge menu, but it’s a tantalizing one, and it changes frequently.

Bryan "Swifty" Josephs and Jenny Klowden. Photo courtesy Door Prize

One of the best-selling items, the fried chicken sandwich, is dredged with pickle-brined panko served with jalapeno cabbage slaw and aoli on a potato bun. The “Berkeley” is a fried cauliflower sandwich, while the “Saratoga Springs” is a classic club uplifted by J’acuterie bacon and tomato jam.

The salads are just as inventive: the Little Gem sparkles with preserved lemon yogurt dressing, fried chickpeas and pickled onions; the mixed green salad includes pickled blueberries. The salt and vinegar fries are slightly tangy — salty and crispy. Noticing a pickled theme? Door Prize has a fermentation program, so all of the sandwiches come with mixed fermented vegetables.

Once their liquor license comes in — any day now — Klowden will manage a small list of wines, ciders and beers. When she first moved here, she worked at the Berkshire Cider Project at Greylock Works in North Adams, so she’ll be consulting with her friends there to create an interesting bar program.

The space, formerly occupied by Chama Mama, Gramercy, and Café Latino (and possibly some others in between), is bright and airy, furnished with cheery orange picnic tables. The patio, though, is the main attraction, with its sun umbrellas and flower boxes. The setting outside the walls of the former Sprague electric factory is urban yet inviting. “We want it to feel welcoming and inclusive,” says Klowden.  (That inclusivity extends to the menu, which offers gluten-free and vegetarian items.)

And for all of that, we can pay a little gratitude to COVID-19, because that’s what brought the California couple to the Berkshires. They were working at restaurants in the Bay area, and when the pandemic hit, their jobs no longer existed. (Incidentally, they were introduced in 2013 by their friend Nico Dery, an artist from Adams who was involved in the art scene in Oakland and has since returned to North Adams.)

“We had no intention of moving out of California,” Klowden says. “With no jobs, we started Door Prize Delivery and ran that for a while.” (The name Door Prize comes the John Prine song “In Spite of Ourselves,” a special tune for the couple; they danced to it at their wedding.) “But fires were out of control farther north and the smoke in Oakland was unbearable. I have asthma so I couldn’t breathe.”

They decided to go camping across the country and came to the Berkshires to hang out for a couple of weeks and to visit Dery in North Adams.  “We were here at the height of the pandemic,” she recalls. “We ate at A-OK Berkshire Barbeque [Editor’s note: Now closed.] and had a nice visit. I saw my first snow touring the museum. The snow was drifting by all the windows — it was one of the prettiest moments of my life.”

Dery had been encouraging them for years to take up residence here. By the time Klowden and Josephs got back to the west coast, they’d decided to move from Santa Rosa to North Adams. It was a leap of faith.

They did, however, arrive with the intention of opening a restaurant. Initially they used A-OK Barbecue’s kitchen, offering their cuisine on order through the Bright Ideas Brewing on campus. They knew from their first visit that the vacated space had a lot of things they would want: a great location, a patio, room to spread out. They moved in at the end of May. Technically, it’s another popup, booked through October 31, but they have hopes to make it a permanent venture.

“It’s going better than we expected,” Klowden says. They’ve hired extra people, and plan to open on Thursdays rather than Fridays (through Monday). When they get their liquor license, they’ll extend their hours from 7 to 8 p.m.

The restaurateurs bought a house within walking distance in September, and they’re finding a community of other restaurant people and entrepreneurial couples. And even though Klowden just opened a restaurant, her blood pressure is down.

“We bought a house, opened a restaurant, and made a ton of friends,” she says. “It was crazy and impulsive, but a really good decision.”

Indeed. The space they’re in has seen restaurants come and go Let’s hope Door Prize is a permanent installation.

Door Prize
1111 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA
(413) 346-4046