Photos by Linda Campos

Walking into Bird + Wolf in North Andover feels like a breath of fresh air. Which is largely the point. The airy, capacious restaurant and café, which opened in phases beginning in March, was designed around the concept of biophilia—a term coined by naturalist Edward O. Wilson to express people’s innate tendency to seek connections with nature. But a successful restaurant can’t rest on atmosphere alone, and Bird & Wolf has plenty of culinary cred, with a highly credentialed and experienced three-person team in the open kitchen.

Owner Xochitl Bielma-Bolton grew up in San Diego and on a ranch in California’s Imperial Valley, where fresh, local fruits and vegetables were always plentiful. “I always had a sense of water and air,” she says. “I was raised to have that balance.” A 30-year hospitality-industry veteran who worked in restaurant kitchens and operations management, she notes that she has always tried to incorporate natural growth into her work environments. “Being able to bring the outside in was something that I always wanted to do.”

By day, Bird + Wolf is a café serving Executive Pastry Chef Giselle Miller’s outstanding croissants, brioche, quick breads, muffins and dessert pastries alongside coffee drinks and teas and some savory items. Café seating is in a covered, four-season patio with a heated floor and plants all around. The café reopens at night as a charcuterie and dessert bar.

The restaurant, which boasts a sophisticated seasonal menu of largely local ingredients, has seven living walls populated with ferns, bromeliads, philodendron and other plants selected for their beauty, texture and tone. The texture casts shadows throughout the 200-seat space, “especially at night as light cascades down,” Bielma-Bolton says. There are also five glassed-in towering farm stands growing lettuces and other greens, tomatoes, herbs and edible flowers that the chefs and bartenders use indishes and drinks. The staff also grows six varieties of mushrooms. To supplement the yield from their indoor gardens the restaurant relies on local Smolak Farms and Barker’s Farmstand in North Andover, Ward’s Berry Farm in Sharon and a small selection of local butchers, fishermen and cheese producers.

Executive Chef Chris White, who was born in England and raised in Ireland, attended culinary school in Stratford-on-Avon. He cooked around the world at acclaimed restaurants and as a private chef before settling in North Andover with his partner and their daughter to be near her family. Specialties on the menu include a starter of house-grown mushrooms with shallot, thyme, spinach and black truffle; house-made pâtés; and duck breast with duck leg tartlet and duck fat potatoes. Miller, a Connecticut native who worked at Radius, Sel de la Terre, Liquid Art House, Café ArtScience and Menton, says she loves to “play with ingredients we have for the season,” incorporating herbs like lemon verbena, anise hyssop and rosemary into her pastries and plated desserts. Among her favorite activities, she says, is making croissants. “Every time you do it you learn more. It really challenges me.”

Opening a restaurant is a tricky proposition even in the best of times. Opening a restaurant in the middle of a worldwide pandemic takes the challenge to a new level. “Because of COVID it’s been a little difficult to hire in this area,” Bielma-Bolton admits. But over the summer the restaurant was able to expand the café hours to accommodate patrons who want to just come for a drink and charcuterie or dessert and coffee. And gradually, by word-of-mouth, it is growing into the local gathering spot Bielma-Bolton had envisioned two years ago.

With its impressive menu and distinctive atmosphere, Bird + Wolf just might become destination dining as well.

birdnwolf.com

This story appeared in the Fall 2021 issue.