Behind a finch-yellow door on Castle Street in Geneva sits a restaurant built on a love story. Slightly more than a year old, Anorah has woven itself into the fabric of a city singled out in the Finger Lakes for its excellent food and drink. It occupies the space formerly home to Red Dove Tavern, a beloved neighborhood spot that closed amid the turbulence of the pandemic. It was after a particularly hard night at that restaurant that the story of its successor began.
Shawna Shell and Mike Pavone, owners of Anorah, met at the nearby Linden Social Club. He was enjoying an open bar tab courtesy of Kindred Fare (also in Geneva, for those keeping score at home) to commemorate Pavone’s last day in their kitchen. Shell, then GM of Red Dove, needed a drink. Cocktail met bar tab, girl met boy, and six years later, they opened Anorah less than 400 feet away.
“Every time we go to Linden Social Club, which usually happens after a long day at the restaurant,” said Shell, “we look over at that velvet couch and say, ‘we met right there.’”
It seems appropriate now that so many local spots had a hand in Anorah’s inception, as local ties have become a throughline in both its cuisine and its mission. Pavone, the head chef, estimates that in the warmer months he sources 85% of the menu’s ingredients from regional farms. This includes meat from Bedient Farms in Middlesex and Fisher Hill in Canandaigua, mushrooms and microgreens from Mush Love Greens in Geneva, and Farmer Ground Flour from Trumansburg, which Pavone blends with Italian 00 flour for Anorah’s signature steamed bao buns. Cooking with local ingredients expresses a larger mission to bring people together.
“We’re eclectic comfort food,” said Shell. “We try to stay true to having inspiration from all different kinds of styles of cooking, taking that and making it our own, formulating some sort of comfort element so when you come in here you get a friends and family atmosphere.”
Shell, a Geneva native, started her tenure in hospitality in her early teens; young enough that she needed working papers. Her resume is a patchwork of Geneva favorites bisected by time spent earning a degree in public health education and a short stint working in a medical nonprofit, but red tape and bureaucracy made it difficult to feel as if she was actually making a difference.
“Since I was young that was my main interest — getting into some sort of field helping other people … working in restaurants is a different sort of helping people,” she said. “It’s not the same degree at all, but in a certain way if you get to a certain status, you can start feeding back into your community.”
The ideal of setting a table where all feel welcome is reflected in Anorah’s interior and menu icons. Verdant plants hug the windowsills and a tasteful scattering of framed art and nostalgic decor gives the impression of dining at the home of a very stylish, cosmopolitan godmother.
This sense of snug hospitality extends from the surroundings to signature dishes. A rotating array of puffy bao buns has spanned the last year’s oft-changing menus, including panko-crusted cod and shrimp cake bun with tomatillo aioli and a hoisin barbecue mushroom bun with cucumber and peanuts. A bolognese rich enough to raise a Nonna’s eyebrows features house tagliatelle, Bedient Farms beef and pork and Finger Lakes Gold cheese from Lively Run. The Thai chicken wings (also from Bedient) are a twice-fried, shatteringly crisp tribute to the famous and (sadly) shuttered Pok Pok in Portland, Ore.
This cross-cultural, cross-country range of influences reflects Pavone’s culinary history. An early interest in cooking led him to Tony D’s first days in Corn Hill, where owner Jay Speranza taught him the ropes.
“He pushed me quite a bit pretty quickly, and that was my launchpad for how I started,” said Pavone. “The goal was always to own my business. I was constantly trying to learn and absorb as much as I could.”
From there, Pavone landed a spot as sous chef at The Tasting Kitchen in Los Angeles. There, Pavone learned how a well-oiled kitchen can run with broadened seasonality (and deep pockets). He brought this knowledge home to open Lulu Taqueria in Fairport, after which he did a stint at Kindred Fare in Geneva, where (as we’ve covered), he and Shell next founded a restaurant called Anorah. The name is an amalgam of their mothers’ first names (Angela and Deborah).
The name’s significance hit home in Anorah’s first weeks, when Pavone’s mother passed away unexpectedly. A literal storm compounded matters around the same time. Heavy rains rolled downhill toward Seneca Lake, flooding the restaurant’s basement and drowning its water heater and a chest freezer. When Pavone arrived at the scene, the owners of Microclimate, another Geneva restaurant, were waiting to help.
“Ellie (Dolan) was down there with me in knee-high water trying to save stuff,” he said. “It was really cool to see what it’s like to have good neighbors.”
Good neighbors. Two Geneva restaurant workers share some post-shift drinks. They open a restaurant around the corner, fill the menu with bounty from surrounding farms, and when floodwaters (metaphorical and literal) rise, neighbors arrive with buckets and start bailing.
After the restaurant was officially named, Shell learned that “Anorah” is a Greek word meaning “to honor.” Today, the restaurant honors the memory of Pavone’s mother, honors the city and region that supports it, and honors all who come to a table hungry, in the name of hospitality and good neighbors. anorahrestaurantbar.comPete Wayner is a contributor to CITY.