Yet another chapter begins for storied estate BY JANICE KIRKEL jkirkel@westfairinc.com
I UJA-Federation of New York’s Westchester Business and Professional Division
2012 Annual Luncheon honoring
Mark Levenfus Managing Partner, Marks Paneth & Shron, LLP
and
Mark Weingarten Partner, DelBello Donnellan Weingarten Wise & Wiederkehr, LLP
Thursday, May 17, 2012 Brae Burn Country Club Purchase, New York Cocktails & Hors d’Oeuvres at 11:30 a.m. Lunch & Program at 12:30 p.m. This event is intended for donors of $500 or more to UJA-Federation’s 2012 Annual Campaign. Cover charge: $125 per person. (The cover charge represents the value of the event and is not tax-deductible.) For further information, please contact Carol Lehrer at lehrerc@ujafedny.org or 1.914.761.5100 ext. 131.
To learn more about UJA-Federation’s life-changing work, visit www.ujafedny.org/westchester. Caring for people in need, inspiring a passion for Jewish life and learning, and strengthening Jewish communities in New York, in Israel, and around the world.
14 May 7, 2012 • WCBJ
f walls could talk, the ones inside the former William Fuller estate would no doubt speak of the high times of the Roaring ’20s to the lows of a blaze that nearly destroyed it to an amazing 40-year run as a well-regarded French restaurant. The 400-acre spread on Studio Hill Road in the town of Ossining was built in 1904 to serve as the country estate of Fuller, a wealthy financier, philanthropist and the president of American Tobacco. Legend has it that when “Gone With the Wind” was being filmed in the late 1930s, the building was used for exterior shots of Tara, the fictional plantation on which the character Scarlett O’Hara lived. Concrete evidence supporting the story remains elusive and so the legend remains a legend. Truer to history, after Fuller’s death in 1941, the mansion was home to thoroughbred horses and elephants. The resident pachyderms are easy to explain as the owner of the house at the time, Bernard Van Leer, was a Dutch businessman who fancied himself an “amateur circus master” who, for a short time, had shows in New York City and the on East Coast. After he moved on, the mansion served as a riding academy in the 1950s. It wasn’t until 1960 that it became the long-running restaurant Maison Lafitte. After it closed in 2000, the mansion became home to a pair of short-lived and less than memorable eateries. Today, David Breschel is looking to return the mansion to its former glory with Haymount House and Hudson, which he bills as a farm-to-table restaurant. Breschel, a lawyer from Chappaqua, heard the mansion was available four years
ago. So, with three partners, he formed North River Hospitality Group Inc. and has leased the site for 20 years from owner Sayed Nayeem of Chappaqua. Renovations began a year ago and on March 28 the restaurant opened. Haymount House will serve as a space for weddings and corporate events. The first wedding reception was held April 14. Breschel’s ties to Haymount House are intertwined with his time as a student at Fordham University and Fordham Law School. “I was first here in the late ’70s, when one of my professors at Fordham, Father Robert Gleason, a Jesuit priest, said he would take me to his favorite French restaurant. I remember I saw a society woman leaving, thought she was the coat check person, and handed her my coat,” he recalled, laughing. One of Breschel’s partners is Joseph LaRosa, with whom he went to law school 30 years ago. The other partners are David Darmanovic, a restaurateur from Pleasantville who owns Pizza Station in Chappaqua and Katonah, and William Gray, a landscaper from Staten Island who is married to LaRosa’s sister. Breschel met Darmanovic at Pizza Station. “That was my family’s Friday night out.” The two decided to go into business together and brought in the other two partners. One of Breschel’s goals for the new restaurant is to bring back the French countryside feel of Maison Lafitte as well as locally grown food. “We have a garden in the back and what we don’t get from there we get from local farms or if it has to be brought in from somewhere else, it’s organic, high quality.” The menu, as it stands now, which