At most restaurants, leaving the table usually means a trip to the restroom. At Accord Social, which opened late July, it might mean pouring yourself three ounces of an unfamiliar wine, filling a pre-chilled, garnished glass with a ginger margarita, or asking a stranger what they’re drinking.
That movement is exactly what owners Leslie Firtell and Michelle Morgan hoped to inspire. Upon arrival, guests receive a card linked to their credit or debit card, which they can use to dispense anything from tasting-sized portions to full pours of beer, wine, and cocktails. The system gives them a reason to get up, wander, and talk.
“People are roaming around the restaurant a bit,” Morgan says. “They’re going back to the self-pour wall. They’re saying, ‘Hey, what is that wine or that cocktail?’ They’re actually talking to each other and getting to know each other.”
For a restaurant aspiring to become “the Hudson Valley’s living room,” that is an early sign that the idea may be working.
A Living Room From the Ground Up
Firtell and Morgan bought their Olivebridge home in 2014 and spent years noticing a particular absence in the surrounding Rondout Valley. They loved cooking for friends but did not always want to host at home. Meeting at a conventional restaurant presented the opposite problem: the experience could feel too structured around ordering, eating, and vacating the table.
“We felt like a gathering space to bring the community together would be a big service to the area,” Firtell says.
So they began navigating town approvals in 2024. A deteriorating house at 4977 Route 209 was demolished to make way for a new 7,500-square-foot restaurant and community space with a dining room, full bar, covered terrace, self-pour wall, and a broad lawn intended for future activities.
Neither owner comes from a hospitality background. Firtell is an attorney who spent decades growing her own company, while Morgan trained as a civil engineer before becoming an obstetrician-gynecologist. Their respective careers left them comfortable solving problems, managing businesses, and working closely with people. Morgan also helped translate their ideas into the physical space.
The long, high-ceilinged dining room combines pale wood, brick, warm pendant lights, and dining tables with deep chairs and couches gathered around low coffee tables. A folding glass wall opens the indoor lounge directly onto the covered terrace and surrounding fields. Rather than fill every available foot with tables, they left room for people to settle in.
Some couch groupings seat six, creating situations in which two guests and a party of four may end up sharing a coffee table. When the dining tables are full, Firtell offers walk-ins couch seating and jokes that it is available “unless you’re not social.” She compares watching hesitant guests settle in to dropping a child at nursery school: within minutes, they are usually deep in conversation with the people across from them.
Ric Orlando’s Kitchen Cameo
Accord Social began with the gathering-place concept rather than a particular cuisine or chef. A mutual friend later suggested Firtell contact Ric Orlando, the local celebrity chef who won Chopped twice, beat Bobby Flay, and ran New World Home Cooking for 25 years before it closed in 2018. Their conversations revealed similar ideas about workplace culture and eventually led to Orlando joining the project as a consultant and executive chef.
The menu is described as modern or “New Wave” Italian, although several dishes happily stray from any strict definition. Thai Italian Love, revived from New World Home Cooking, coats broad pappardelle with coconut milk and Panang-spiced Bolognese. Pan-blackened string beans, another Orlando signature, arrive with double mustard dip. Elsewhere are whipped ricotta with Calabrian chili honey, Sicilian potato croquettes, eggplant “meatballs,” pastas, braised short ribs, fish, and plenty of vegan and gluten-free options.
Sharing is most explicit in the restaurant’s extensive boards section. Guests can choose among three composed house boards or assemble their own from cheeses, charcuterie, house-made pâtés, and accompaniments. The Social Board piles cheeses including Four Fat Fowl’s St. Stephen, Tête de Moine rosettes, and Midnight Moon alongside pistachio mortadella, truffle salami, prosciutto, preserves, raw honey, and crackers.
For Orlando, the menu begins with sourcing. “It’s easy to make a good dish when you spend time selecting the best ingredients from quality suppliers,” he says.
During a recent visit, the board was supplemented with a side of peach moutarde, a sweet, sharp condiment that threatened to steal attention from everything it accompanied. Weeks later, it remains one of the meal’s most vivid flavors.
Fried Rhode Island calamari followed with cucumber, lemon, and truffled white aioli, while the roasted cauliflower crowns arrived with local corn, peas, baby potatoes, and a bright tomato-cashew cream. Grilled peach-ginger bread pudding, set in spiced-rum crème anglaise, closed the meal. Orlando was particularly proud that it came out “nice and custardy” while ensuring it could still hold its shape.
For Firtell and Morgan, Ciccio’s rotisserie chicken may best express the communal idea. Served as a half or whole bird with herb-chili crema verde and schmaltzy potatoes, the whole chicken is carved for the table and meant to be passed around.
The menu will change with the seasons while preserving enough favorites to keep regulars happy. The crudo or ceviche and fish of the day rotate weekly, while a sustainable Alaskan cod dish remains among the core entrées. “We want to keep it exciting for people,” Firtell says, explaining that dishes will periodically leave the menu and later return.
The offerings extend beyond dinner. Lunch centers on smoked salmon baguettes and pressed sandwiches, while brunch adds latkes, stuffed French toast, a cauliflower scramble, and other daytime dishes. Three grab-and-go boxes bundle cheeses, charcuterie, preserves, baguette, crackers, nuts, and dried fruit for hikers headed toward Minnewaska or Mohonk, or anyone who wants to take a little of Accord Social on the road.
A Social Experiment
The self-pour wall is Morgan’s “baby,” but guests who prefer traditional service can order from the full bar, which offers a separate list of bartender-made and frozen cocktails. At the wall, guests can dispense either a small taste or a full serving of any wine, beer, or cocktail, with each paid pour tracked on their card. The range of sizes lets people experiment without committing to an entire glass, then return for a full pour when they find something they like. The early runaway favorite is Morgan’s ginger margarita, finished with a rim of salt and ginger dehydrated in-house. According to the owners, it has quickly become the restaurant’s best-selling item, food or drink.
The machines could easily have felt gimmicky, but their placement beside the lounge makes them part of the room’s circulation. Guests compare pours, return to the wall, and settle onto couches with drinks they chose themselves. It takes a familiar ritual from entertaining at home and moves it into a restaurant: If you want another glass of wine, you get up and pour one.
Plans for mahjong, cooking classes, movie nights, lawn games, and adult kickball are still taking shape. The most encouraging development, however, may be more ordinary. The owners estimate that 98 percent of their early customers have been longtime area residents rather than weekend visitors, and some have already returned several times.
“I thought that we were opening a great concept, but you don’t know until you know,” Firtell says. “It’s been really sweet seeing people who have been back multiple times.”
The kickball games and mahjong tables can come later. For now, strangers are talking on the couches, neighbors are returning, and guests are asking what else they can do there. Accord Social set out to give the Rondout Valley a living room. Less than a month after opening, its regulars are beginning to rearrange the furniture.
Accord Social
4977 US-209, Accord, NY
845-253-0173
