You’d think that opening a new restaurant during a pandemic would take some courage. But opening a new subterranean restaurant, bar, and performance venue… with not a window in sight?

“I know it sounds unwise,” says Kieran Campion, sitting at a table on a recent morning in the freshly opened, already atmospheric Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar, & Stage, which runs beneath Still North Books & Bar and My Brigadeiro in Hanover. “But I think it’s actually the only time we could have done it. This whole thing was the brainchild of my father and I, and we’d been talking about it for years. The family owns the building, and this basement has been sitting fallow since the old Dartmouth bookstore left. Nobody’s going to be looking to rent a 7,000-square-foot basement in the middle of a pandemic. This was the time to do it.”

So they did—though it took a while to open. “We certainly suffered all the slings and arrows of supply chain challenges and labor shortages and everything else you’ve been reading about in the news,” Campion says. But finally, back in August, Sawtooth opened for takeout, and then in late September, for sit-down lunch and dinner. It kicked off its music series last week with The Conniption Fits.

Pretty much everything—both the space and the dining—is flexible. The tables, booths, and even partition can be moved to turn the restaurant into a performance space. You want takeout lunch? They can do that. You want a sit-down meal? They can do that. You want a late-night snack? They can do that.

“The reason we started with takeout was to give the kitchen time to get its sea legs, but also because that’s going to be the main engine,” Campion says. “We think that takeout is not going away, and since we’ll be using this front space for so many things, we won’t be doing the traditional two turns of dinner service. Plus, we envision ourselves filling the niche that EBAs left for late-night deliveries to the college crowd that wants a chicken sandwich at midnight.”

The “Stage” part of the name is also crucial, says Campion, who spent a couple of decades as an actor. “Growing up here there were limited options in terms of live performance, and not much to see in the way of live music. This may be a bit Pollyanna-ish, but I hope this is something that can bring the college and the community together in a communal space to share their creative energies.”

Same space, different setup. Photo (and banner photo above) by Rob Strong

But okay, you’re here for the food, which Sawtooth describes as “Southern comfort food with a New England twist.” Its menu, Campion says, was put together with two key thoughts. First, the food needs to travel well: “So it’s great when it’s boxed up and taken home and will still taste great the next day.” And then, he adds, “There just isn’t a place around here that makes really good scratch fried chicken.” Back in the kitchen there’s a Henny Penny pressure fryer, which can fry up the parts from eight entire chickens in 15 minutes. “We dedicated a couple of months to recipe testing,” Campion says. “I feel good about where we’ve landed.”

So what would he go for? Well, he says: “We’re still early, so right now I am still enamored of our signature chicken sandwich. I think it shows off what we do, and it’s not burdened by extra stuff. It’s just a great sandwich: a fried chicken thigh on a potato roll, with our signature sauce, which is mayo-based but includes pepper relish—our chef grows his own myriad peppers—so there’s pickled pepper relish and roasted garlic. It’s tangy and spicy and its a good, solid, crispy chicken sandwich. And then we have the buffalo sauce chicken sandwich, with blue cheese and bacon… but I can’t eat that every day.”

Kieran Campion and Sawtooth’s Henny Penny pressure fryer

The kitchen is already doing steady takeout business (you pick up through the door to the left of Still North, while the restaurant entrance is to the bookstore’s right), and after a trial-by-fire opening, so is the restaurant.

“Getting this off the ground was very similar to putting a show together, especially the last month before we opened. You never think it’s going to come together, until it does,” Campion says. “Some guys have been working on this project for two-and-a-half years, so when I said, ‘We’re opening on this date,’ they said, ‘What??!!’ But it’s like the theater. Opening night is opening night, and once the lights go out, you’ve got to start talking.”

— by Rob Gurwitt