At Westerly Canteen, the kitchen has wheels. The dining room might be an orchard, a brewery, or a farmhouse porch. And the menu changes weekly. This is not instability so much as method: a restaurant built to follow the ingredients, the seasons, and a changing hospitality landscape.
Founder and chef Molly Levine calls Westerly a “sort-of restaurant,” which has become both tagline and thesis. It has the familiar trappings of a restaurant—cooks, servers, reservations, and an evolving menu—but no fixed dining room. The 1971 Airstream travels among farms and hospitality partners in the Hudson Valley, setting up temporary worlds wherever it unhitches.
Chez Molly
First things first: Westerly Canteen has nothing to do with the beachfront Rhode Island town that shares its name. It’s directional, a westward look toward the California cooking culture that shaped Levine’s style. After college in Nashville, she moved to the Bay Area at 24 and spent four years cooking at Chez Panisse. “It’s the whole foundation of how I cook and how I now train other people to cook,” she says. But she’s not just referring to the pillars of seasonality and place-based food, but something she calls intuitive cooking.
“At Chez, we really didn’t have recipes that we followed—a lot of it was just oral tradition and instruction and how to taste and use these really incredible ingredients that were always changing and always seemingly showing up in the walk-in,” Levine says. The menu at Westerly Canteen changes weekly, adapting to microseasonality and the availability of small producers. A late-season tomato may be sweeter than the one that arrived the week before; the cook’s job is to notice and adapt.
From Pony Stall to Airstream
When Covid collapsed Levine’s restaurant work, consulting, and events, she had to figure out how to cook “without walls,” she says. While living in the Catskills, she began serving food from a dilapidated truck on the farm her then-partner was managing. The one-season project, which she called the Pony Stall, led to a collaboration with Deer Mountain Inn and planted the seed for Westerly Canteen. It also offered a revelation: “You really can put good food anywhere as long as you have access to good ingredients.”
Anywhere, perhaps, but not in just any vessel. Being stuck inside a rundown box truck did little for Levine, who is drawn to beautiful kitchens and wide-open landscapes. Hot on the idea of a mobile kitchen, she and her former partner bought a 1971 Airstream, drove to New Mexico to collect it, and towed it to California, where Levine designed the interior and started demo before handing fabrication off to a professional. The resulting trailer kitchen is compact—125 square feet—but luminous, with windows on every side.
“I never want to go back to a dark kitchen again,” Levine says.
In the Airstream, sunlight streams across the line and the windows open onto the scene beyond—be that mountains, fields, or a roadside. It also dissolves the usual border between dining room and kitchen. “I want to feel like I’m part of the experience with the guests and not have that division between front- and back-of-house,” Levine says. “And I want to be outside all of the time.”
Kitchen Choreography
For two seasons, Westerly operated four days a week—in the orchard at Tenmile Distillery in Wassaic—like a small restaurant, down to table service and custom-made ceramics, and remaining gloriously provisional.
That quality shapes the cooking. The Airstream holds a plancha, oven, four burners, and three stations. The commissary functions as prep space; the trailer becomes the service line. Early on, Levine drew maps to determine which dish would come off which burner. Now the choreography is muscle memory.
The menu must solve two puzzles: what can be made with the produce available, and what can gracefully emerge from the tiny moveable kitchen. It does have certain anchors. Labneh and flatbread, made with local spelt flour and buttermilk, are near constants, though their companions shift: seared tomatoes and za’atar in summer, mushroom conserva and preserved lemon in spring. The rest might include salads, pasta, fish, meat, and dessert. In peak summer, abundance becomes its own challenge. “I almost feel greedy,” Levine says. “But I have to remember not every little thing has to appear on every menu.”
After leaving the distillery at the end of 2024, Westerly swung toward private and ticketed events for the 2025 season—a financially illuminating experiment. Levine’s team, including her longtime operations manager, Jordan Klein, worked a fraction of the days and netted roughly the same profit. The downside: private events created distance from their usual customer contact. “We really missed the intimacy of serving our guests on a weekly basis and being a part of the community,” she says.
A New Business Every Year
“It is challenging, but there is a lot of flexibility,” Levine says of running a seasonal business, “and it feels more sustainable.” Levine still goes to California every winter to consult and cater. “We’re not starting from scratch every spring, but we have to hire new people; set up in a new location; and shake the cobwebs, literally and figuratively, off of everything.” That pause between seasons allows reflection and the chance to iterate. “It creates a lot of creativity and a lot of growth,” says Levine.
For the 2026 season, she and Klein looked to find a middle ground that mixed stability with mobility. In May, they took over the long-dormant Red Devon restaurant in Bangall as their commissary kitchen base. They spent the summer balancing porch suppers and Airstream window service onsite with roving farm dinners and pop-ups across Dutchess County. Private events have remained and will continue through the winter. Pop-ups and suppers in Bangall will continue through the fall, you can check their online calendar for details.
“The tight-knit intimacy and the creative way that we build a restaurant every year from scratch in these different locations has drawn really talented people in, and I feel grateful for that,” Levine says. “We’ve tapped some sort of crazy CrossFit version of a restaurant.” She’s not exaggerating: At Tenmile, Klein once logged 13 miles in a day on Fitbit, walking back and forth between field and kitchen, tables and dishwasher.
That scrappy humor sits beside a serious reckoning with what a restaurant can sustainably be in this geographic and economic landscape. “It is such a precarious dance,” Levine says. But there is something essential in Westerly’s refusal to settle: Airstream windows opening onto a flower farm, just-picked vegetables served where they were grown, the sensation that dinner has appeared for one evening only, but with the elegant trappings of a dining room.
Westerly may yet find a permanent home. For now, its truest address is somewhere between kitchen and field. And Levine is fine with that: “So much of what is charming and beloved about Westerly Canteen is the ‘sort of’ in the title ‘sort-of restaurant.’”
