There is a stone building on the outskirts of Bethlehem that has been welcoming travelers since before the American Revolution. Built around 1740 as a stagecoach inn, it has served as a waypoint for centuries of visitors passing through the Lehigh Valley. Today, it houses Bolete: a restaurant that has earned James Beard nominations, national magazine features, and a devoted following among food lovers who make the drive from Philadelphia and New York.
But the real story of Bolete is a homecoming story.
The Chef Comes Home
Lee Chizmar grew up in Allentown, the son of a family that loved to cook. After culinary training, he headed to Boston, where he worked under Chef Jeremy Sewall at Great Bay, learning the craft of seasonal, ingredient-driven cooking. He could have stayed in a big city. Instead, he came home.
"I wanted to cook with what was around me," Chizmar has said. When he and his partner Erin Shea found the old stagecoach inn, they saw the possibilities immediately: thick stone walls, wood beams, a fireplace you could stand in. This was a building that demanded honest food.
Twenty-Five Farms and Counting
Bolete's menu reads like a love letter to the Lehigh Valley's agricultural landscape. Chizmar sources from more than twenty-five local farms, many of them within a thirty-mile radius. Scholl's Family Farm provides the eggs. Salvaterra's brings the mushrooms. Primordia grows specialty greens that arrive at the kitchen still wet with morning dew.
The menu changes constantly, sometimes daily, based on what the farmers bring. A spring dinner might feature ramps foraged from the Blue Mountain ridge, morel mushrooms from a secret spot in Northampton County, and the first asparagus of the season. By autumn, the plates shift to root vegetables, braised meats, and the deep flavors of a Pennsylvania harvest.
The Recognition
The food world noticed. In 2008, Conde Nast Traveler named Bolete one of its 105 Best New Restaurants in America. In 2015, Chizmar earned a James Beard nomination for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. In 2016, OpenTable included Bolete on its list of the 100 Best Restaurants in America. And in 2019, the restaurant received a James Beard nomination for Outstanding Restaurant, one of the highest honors in the industry.
Best Life Magazine placed Bolete on its list of America's 25 Best Farm-to-Table Restaurants, alongside names from much larger cities with much bigger culinary reputations.
The Experience
Dining at Bolete feels nothing like eating at a typical fine dining restaurant. There are no white tablecloths, no tuxedoed waiters, no pretension. The dining room is intimate, a few dozen seats arranged among the inn's original stone walls and wide-plank floors. The wine list leans toward small producers. The service is warm and knowledgeable without being stuffy.
What you notice most is the food itself. Each dish has a clarity of flavor that comes from starting with ingredients at their absolute peak. A simple roasted beet becomes transcendent when the beet was in the ground that morning. A piece of fish tastes different when the chef knows the farmer who raised it.
Beyond Bolete
Chizmar and Shea didn't stop at Bolete. They opened Mister Lee's Noodles in the Easton Public Market, the Lehigh Valley's first ramen bar, applying the same farm-to-table philosophy to bowls of steaming broth, handmade noodles, and 60-minute eggs. A second Mister Lee's location followed on 3rd Street in Bethlehem's SouthSide.
The couple's commitment to local sourcing has rippled outward, inspiring a generation of Lehigh Valley chefs to build relationships with nearby farms and rethink what regional cuisine can mean.
A Lehigh Valley Treasure
In a region that spent decades being defined by what it lost (steel, manufacturing, downtown retail), Bolete represents what the Lehigh Valley is building. It proves that world-class food can come from a small city in eastern Pennsylvania, cooked by a chef who chose to come home, served in a building that has been welcoming travelers for nearly three centuries.
