Chef Josephine Proul has spent 19 years sticking to a beloved script at Local 111 in Philmont. Her pop-up supper club, 20 years in the making, is taking her creativity in a new direction.
This Sunday, August 23, Local 111 in Philmont throws its latest entry in its pop-up dinner series called Middle Child, and chef/owner Josephine Proul is teasing a lot more: the concept she says she's wanted to open for 20 years is coming to the restaurant's side room every weekend in December.
"Middle Child is essentially what I've always wanted to do," Proul says. "I'm able to blend the fusion of where I've been and where I've grown up on the West Coast, with the local seasonal angle, and with what I know that we're missing."
2026 is Local 111's 20th anniversary. Proul has been here for 19 of those years, first as chef starting in 2008, then as sole owner since 2014, after the restaurant's original owners, Linda Gatter and Max Dannis, passed her the torch. The restaurant itself occupies a converted service station on Philmont's Main Street that’s central to the community but a bit out of the way for many in the region. Proul is hyper focused on anything and everything she can do to increase the restaurant’s draw.
Proul has been running in the winter (and one August Sunday) for a couple years now. But she's just leaked to RI that she's aiming to open it as a physical space this winter.
The food, as she describes it in her excited, somewhat frantic way, is easy to understand, if a bit harder for her to put in words. "Some people would prefer it to be straight Mexican-inspired," she says, "but I just feel like I can't have just a California Mexican-inspired restaurant." Instead, she's pulling from what she calls the full range of flavors she grew up around—Filipino, Japanese, Guamanian influences alongside the Latin cooking of neighborhood families—crossed with what she's picked up traveling through the Yucatan. "I don't want to just be this generalized Latin-Asian fusion concept either," she says. "It bridges the gap between food I grew up with in California and where we stand in food traditions now."
The menu leans into the sibling-rivalry theme by name: Baby's Corner is fried baby corn with smoked chili relish, tomato, basil, cucumber, pepitas, and amaranth ($16), while Golden Child slathers fried eggplant in aji aioli, alongside sticky rice, corn, and cashews ($19). Exchange Student is a lettuce salad with carrot, radish, edamame, and a Kewpie brown sugar vinaigrette ($15); Spoiled Brat is pork belly with pickled peach, nori drizzle, and sesame seeds ($19); Spice Girls piles on Szechuan pepper vinaigrette, chili threads, bean shoots, jalapeño, and Thai basil ($21).
Her example of the dish that best exemplifies the menu is Scalli Girl: a scallion pancake with sticky sauce, yum yum sauce, edamame, Thai basil, and peanuts, served with chicken or BBQ corn ($24). It's a useful stand-in for how Middle Child talks to Local 111 without repeating it. Local 111's own beef short ribs, a menu mainstay, arrive plated in a dark, molasses-toned sauce over red pepper puree with olive slices and almonds—composed, knife-and-fork food. Middle Child's Tom Boy takes the same cut of meat and does the opposite: short rib stuffed into a steamed bun with a sweet-and-sour Fresno chili sauce, cucumber, and cilantro ($27), built to eat with your hands. Dessert includes Leona Sundae, a pea flower soft serve with kiwi, white chocolate quinoa, and puffed amaranth ($18).
Proul is planning the format around small, shareable plates—"but not as small as a tapa"—priced so a table can order most of the menu without breaking the bank. Sort of middle-sized plates, if you will.
What Middle Child won't be is a backdoor way to sneak new flavors into Local 111 itself. "I can't be the murky chef," Proul says. "It's not appropriate to my core concept. When I went to culinary school, menu engineering 101 is: Do not make it murky. I just can't do it." Hence the separate room, and separate reservation.
"My whole life, I feel like I've been such a middle child," she says. "I am one and I've always had to fight for a place in the conversation." She traces the restaurant's current moment—new furniture, a website overhaul two years in the works, the push to launch Middle Child at last—to something close to an existential reckoning. "I felt like my representation as a chef at Local 111 couldn't be this other side that I know it can be," she says.
She concedes it is a kind of “middle child mid-life crisis.” Feeling like she has to fight for attention, or wait her turn her whole life, despite the excellent reputation she's gained over the years is over. Now she’s doing what she wants.
Middle Child pop-ups are also the host of the Puffer Supper Club, a dinner series tailored for her friends in the cannabis industry, co-sponsored by Rolling Hills Wellness, a micro-license dispensary and grower based near Leeds, and by Supreme Soft Serve, the Hudson-based ice cream truck who handle desert for the pop-ups.
"There's no weed in the food," Proul is careful to note. "That's not what it's about." The dinners draw regulars from as far as Poughkeepsie and Middletown, some of whom, she says, use the side room to network with growers before settling in for dinner. What Puffer Supper Club does, in her telling, is strip away an assumption she runs into constantly. "It pulls down this veil that my restaurant's too fancy," she says, "It's a whole new set of people who totally appreciate the food, and not just because they're so, so stoned."
Proul's other creative outlet has been cooking for events and weddings at Basilica Hudson, the concert venue and arts space where she's held the chef title for 11 years. This year Basilica launched a partnership with concert promoter Bowery Presents, bringing a wider concert calendar to the Hudson riverfront former glue factory—Thievery Corporation, the Wallflowers, and, last month, the band Wednesday, which Proul says outsold anything she'd seen there on a weeknight. Third Eye Blind headlines a Halloween show on October 30.
It was at Basilica, doing quick-serve food for concert crowds, that Proul first noticed how well her non-111 instincts translated. "We did a fried rice quesadilla, then a general Tso's-style burrito, and I was like, ‘Well, okay," she says. "Everybody's going for it." That crowd-tested Asian-Mexican crossover is giving Proul the confidence to make Middle Child a regular reality.
Sunday's pop-up at Local 111 will offer an early look, with details on the full December launch to follow.
