Wooden Paddle Restaurant Opens in Lemont on Tuesday, December 4th

The wait is almost over, folks. Wooden Paddle, a wood-fired pizza and craft cuisine/cocktails restaurant, will open in Lemont this Tuesday, December 4th, and the reviews from their soft launch this past week are outta sight!

Co-founders and Lemont residents Jonathan (Jon) and Brianna Cowan already run a wildly successful wood-fired pizza catering business and are now bringing their mad skills to Lemont's historic downtown district. Wooden Paddle is located at 212 Stephen Street in Lemont, kitty corner from Muffins Ice Cream Shoppe.

The Cowans describe their concept as, "A communal food experience where plates are passed, divvied up, and created to create discussion." Here is an interview with the couple, below.

Patch: Why Lemont?
Wooden Paddle: After leasing a restaurant space in Orland Park for nine years, my wife Brianna and I decided that purchasing a building would give us more stability. We started searching online for properties and ended up finding our new homebase during that process. I had only been through Lemont one time before (a quick trip to Pollyanna), but after walking through the building and going to dinner at La Dolce Vita, Brianna and I quickly fell in love with this village.

Patch: What's the vibe you're going for?
Wooden Paddle: We are going for an upscale yet casual vibe. I look at Wooden Paddle as an excellent date night spot. We want you to feel like you could be in a trendy Chicago restaurant while dining.

Patch: How would you describe the menu?
Wooden Paddle: Simple, fresh and excellent. We only utilize freezers for our gelato. We make 95% of our food from scratch. All of that being said, we offer a lot of options that you can only get at our restaurant. It takes A LOT of extra labor to do things like this but we believe our target customer totally connects with it. All of our food is shareable. My wife and I love going to restaurants where you can try a ton of options so that’s what we did here! We do specialize in wood-fired pizza, which is airier and lighter than the tavern style pizza often seen around this area. Because the dough is so different we are able to make pizzas with very off the wall ingredient combinations. A new one to the menu is our “Gettin Figgy Wit It” pizza. It has a base of mascarpone cheese, fresh mozzarella, prosciutto and fig preserves. Might sound a little odd to a traditional pizza eater, but it is delicious!

Patch: Walk-in? Reservations Both?
Wooden Paddle: We accept walk-ins and we also have a feature on our website that you can get in line from your phone. https://tables.hostmeapp.com/restaurants/11288 Our space is limited (60 seats) so we will not be taking reservations.

Patch: Special features?
Wooden Paddle: Our cocktail menu! It’s totally insane. Like our food, everything is fresh. Fruit purées, pressed juices, herbs - all prepped hours, if not minutes before they make it into your drink. Also, our housemade gelato! We make roasted pistachio, salted caramel, vanilla (from real vanilla pods, with the seeds hand-scraped out!), chocolate, and olive oil. Olive oil gelato gets the most “huh?” looks. But when you use high-quality, extra virgin olive oil (the oil expressed from the first press of the olives), it has a fruity quality to it. So, our olive oil gelato has a fruitier finish than most would expect. We put it in our gelato flight, otherwise it would rarely get ordered. Once you’ve tried it though, you may have a weird new favorite!

Patch: What else do you want people to know?
Wooden Paddle: In January of this year Brianna, my son Kingsley, two dogs Punk and Pippa moved here to Lemont. We love the town and are thankful people have been so welcoming to our new business. Thirteen months after our move to Lemont we are expecting our second child in February!

The Wooden Paddle also features an amazing and beautiful Marra Forni oven, and their menu includes a mouth-watering variety of wood-fired pizzas, entrees, salads, small plates, craft cocktails, beer, and wine.

Parking is on the street and well worth the short walk through historic downtown Lemont.

For more information, call (815) 382-9252, visit their website at http://www.woodenpaddle.com/re..., or follow Wooden Paddle on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Woode...