Emily Fischer was six years old when her family bought the Limeport Inn. She was small enough to stand on a milk crate at the end of the line and watch the cooks work. What she remembers from that first year is an arcade game at the end of the bar, a cigarette machine out on the porch, and a jukebox by the bar entrance.
Twenty-five years later she is the executive chef, and the building is about to get the biggest change it has seen since her family rescued it.
The Inn is 1842 and has worn a lot of hats. At one point it was a funeral parlor. Most recently before the purchase it belonged to an Irish couple, the McGowens. Her family bought it in the summer of 2001 and opened the doors right after Sept. 11, into a building that still had a smoking section.
Her parents, Mark and Angelica Jamison, own the Limeport Inn along with Jamison Publick House and the Sumneytown Hotel. Her mother, known to everyone as Angel, is the pastry chef at all three, the interior designer, the overall visionary and, as the family puts it, the boss. Mark is the engineer, the handyman and the bartender.
“My dad is our engineer, handyman, bartender and even refurbished our dining room tables using wood from fallen trees on the family farm,” Fischer said.
Every table in the building is built from fallen ash off that farm. There are about 30 of them.
Sixty Acres in Zionsville
Before there were restaurants there were horses. Her parents boarded them, taught lessons and showed jumpers on 60 acres in Zionsville. The farm is still there, still the place the family gathers, with a few ponies left and plenty of chickens.
Her jobs started early: bring the horses in from the fields, water and feed, clean stalls, lock up the chickens. Summers meant repainting the interior of the barn or taking the cobwebs out of it.
There was also an in-ground pool, and a deal attached to it. If she wanted to use it, she cleaned it.
“So before toad season I’d drain, muck, clean, repaint the pool,” she said. “It became cathartic.”
She traces her work ethic straight back to that ground.
Fish Heads and Poppadoms
Food in her house was never a trend. It was what the afternoon smelled like.
Her mother cooked everything. Fischer’s favorite memory of it is a specific one: “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes playing while her mother taught her to cook Indian food, frying poppadoms and making chutney.
“We aren’t even Indian,” she said.
What came across was less technique than temperature.
“My mom taught me love,” she said. “She was so wildly passionate about food and entertaining, I think it imprinted on me.”
Two dishes from her childhood sit in her memory as fixed points: her grandmother’s chicken and dumplings, and a tomato pie so thick it held the print of her teeth. She calls them core memories, a Ratatouille moment before she had the vocabulary for it.
Nobody ever handed her the recipes. She has never seen them written down.
“I just kept tweaking them until it tasted like my memory,” she said.
Her grandmothers are Nancy Fischer, Norma Jamison and Margaret Megaro.
“We’re Going to Buy a Restaurant”
Limeport was not a business plan. It was where her parents went on date night. Her sister was washing dishes there before the family owned a thing.
“One day they came home and said we’re going to buy a restaurant,” Fischer said. “And it became all hands on deck.”
All hands meant her father. The entire outdoor space is his, along with the wainscoting, the repainting, the wallpaper, the bar back, the fencing and the flooring.
Her mother took the rest of it. The Ralph Lauren wallpaper is hers. The Christmas decorations are hers. Every aesthetic detail in the building is hers, pulled from a shared Pinterest board she adds to at all hours.
She is also, by common consent, a wizard with dessert. Every St. Patrick’s Day she makes a Guinness cake that customers call two months ahead to reserve.
Six Years on Salads and Fryer Grill
At Limeport you start in the dish room or on pizzas and desserts. Fischer started on pizzas and desserts, unpaid and, as she puts it, always well taken care of.
When she started working there for real, there were people in every position ahead of her. So she went to the station nobody wants.
“I worked salads and fryer grill for six years at least,” she said. “In my opinion it’s the hardest and fastest paced, it’s also the least glamorous and the hottest spot in the kitchen.”
Then she describes the night that teaches you everything, which is a busy patio weekend with a bain-marie down and a dishwasher who called out.
“I learned real quick how to multitask, clean a compressor,” she said.
She also cooked outside the building. She was the garde manger cook at Jamison Publick House when it first opened, and after that she worked with Jason Hook running tastings at hotels and venues.
“He taught me everything French,” she said.
The Caviar New Year’s Eve
In 2013 she bought the Alinea and elBulli cookbooks and went looking for a different kind of cooking. That New Year’s Eve she spent three hours making caviar and gels for specials.
They barely sold.
“The cost of time and low reward made it a no brainer,” she said.
What she landed on instead is the thing she still cooks: tradition, sharpened with technique, finished with emotion. Comfort with an edge on it.
Next in Line
She became executive chef in 2017 or 2018. She is honest that she cannot pin the date, because nobody ever sat her down.
“I don’t think there was ever really a conversation,” she said. “It was a natural progression as people would move on or leave. I would just step next in line and ask to do more.”
The groundwork was laid years earlier. By 2013 she was full time at Limeport, pulling consecutive doubles, first one in and last one out, happily sweeping the floor.
“Lead by example always,” she said.
Asked what refusing to be the owner’s daughter actually cost her, she does not reach for anything dramatic. It cost her time off.
“I don’t clock out. I don’t stop thinking about that place, it’s my future,” she said. There is no silencing the notifications. “I am always thinking.”
Room 204
In March 2024 she went into the hospital with severe preeclampsia. Her daughter, Iris, was born at one pound and spent three months in the NICU.
Fischer wrote the Easter and Mother’s Day menus from hospital room 204. Every weekend special from March through July was written in the NICU, which in a restaurant that busy is a considerable amount of writing.
“I didn’t miss a weekend,” she said.
Iris is two and a half now. She has graduated out of physical therapy, speech therapy and her NICU check-ups.
“For all intents and purposes she is a regular old toddler,” Fischer said. “She is the best thing I ever created.”
Six A.M. to Nine P.M.
The day now runs like this. Up at 6 a.m. to get herself and Iris ready. Daycare by 8. Limeport by 8:15. Work until noon or one, then home to clean the house, make dinner and walk the dogs. Iris at 3. The babysitter at 4. Back to Limeport until 9.
“I don’t stop moving,” she said. “It’s exhausting some days and others I feel empowered because I got this.”
Iris, for her part, considers the restaurant a good time. She gets passed from staff to customers and eats goldfish, French fries and ice cream.
“What more could a two year old want,” Fischer said.
“Hun”
Being a woman running a kitchen still means being talked past. Delivery drivers call her sweetheart. Sales reps ask for the chef and look right at her while they do it. Two weeks ago somebody called her hun.
“It happens so often it doesn’t phase me,” she said. “It’s generational but it’s no excuse. These men wouldn’t call grown men pet names.”
Her favorite recent example did not require her to say anything at all. The fire inspectors came in and could not work out the hood system, so she climbed the ladder and showed them how to take the panels off.
She does not need the title to run the room. Ask her what leadership looks like at eight o’clock on a Saturday night and she describes housekeeping.
“Noticing which station is swimming and anticipating what’s to come,” she said. Grabbing bus bins from the server station. Emptying the bar recycling. Refilling dressing bottles. Starting to clean and consolidate while the last push is still going out.
What Is on the Menu Now
Three plates make her case for comfort with edge. A mushroom pate with crispy goat cheese polenta, mustard seeds, pickled red onion and chives. A brisket smash burger with pineapple relish, bacon, cheddar and maple habanero mayo. And a mussel Rockefeller linguine in n’duja cream with spinach, bacon and herb panko crumbs.
The linguine is the one she is proudest of and the one she would like more people to order.
“It has all the flavor profiles of a classic Rockefeller with a kick in the sauce,” she said. “I think the weather just hasn’t gotten cold enough yet.”
Two dishes have survived from the very beginning, both of them from the cousin who was cooking there in 2001: the soy glazed sea bass and the chicken parmesan.
Ask her what makes the place iconic and she lists generous drinks, the Irish soda bread, that sea bass, and her mother’s carrot cake and creme brulee.
The menu turns over twice a year, once in spring and once in fall. The fixed point is the horseradish crusted prime rib, which runs every weekend and is the thing she thinks people look forward to most. Produce comes through Lancaster Farm Fresh and Buttervalley Harvest.
Of the three, Jamison Publick House and the Sumneytown Hotel are both a little smaller, and Fischer is quick to say the feeling is the same in all of them. Limeport just has the volume.
“There is no better feeling than walking out into the dining rooms at 7 p.m. on a Saturday and hearing and seeing so many happy people,” she said.
The People Who Stay
Restaurant kitchens turn over constantly. Limeport’s does not.
Head chef Tom Lion has been there more than 12 years. Fischer calls him a steady Eddie, consistent and reliable. Sous chef Jose Lucero has been there at least five, fast, always in a good mood, and the one who always knows somebody when they need more hands. Ann Chenault, known to everyone as Annie, has been there more than 15 years running the front of house.
“She’s the queen of HR, organization and really is the queen of managing many personalities,” Fischer said.
The reason people stay is not a secret, in her telling. Good hourly pay. A happy room to work in. Real flexibility on scheduling. Respect, in both directions.
“We are all on the same team with the same mission,” she said. Friendships that continue outside the building help too. “Remembering we’re all people outside that building creates empathy and camaraderie.”
The customers have been just as durable. Walk into the Limeport bar on a Wednesday, a Thursday or a weekend night and a good share of the regulars have been there since the start. Leroy and Jeanie. The Fitzpatricks. Melissa and Myron.
“These are people who met me before I was tall enough to see over the bar,” Fischer said. “Now they see my daughter. It’s a really beautiful progression.”
Off the Line
She teaches cooking classes at Northampton Community College, among them a holiday cookie class, a bao bun class and a pasta class. She is straightforward about why: it is good advertising for herself and for Limeport, and it is fun.
“I love food, I love cooking and I enjoy being around others who appreciate the same,” she said.
She was one of the chefs featured in the 2026 Yes, Chef! campaign, a nonprofit fundraiser run by a woman named Elaine that highlights 20 chefs a year with photographs and a bio, releases a calendar, and throws a reveal party where each chef brings a small bite. The money funds free retreat days for hospitality workers: massages, food, some light therapy, art, time outdoors. She also connects industry people with therapists.
Fischer saw the first calendar and asked to be in the next one. She went to one of the retreats too.
“It was nice to unplug and feel pampered,” she said.
Then there is the bike. She rode with Wheels of Thyme in Bend, Oregon, a cycling fundraiser for No Kid Hungry that raised more than $1 million. Her teammates covered 200 miles in two days. That was her goal, and she will tell you plainly that she did not hit it. She rode 50 miles and spent the second day seeing Oregon instead.
She had never cycled before. She bought a bike and a trainer in December 2025, rode indoors through the winter, and got out on the road in May.
“It was challenging juggling a baby and work and trying to train,” she said. Her best stretch came from getting up at 4 a.m. and putting in two hours in the saddle before the day started.
“Despite falling short of my expectations I still started a new hobby and traveled cross country to support it,” she said. The cause was never in question. “As a mother I’d give my last breath for my child, and anything I can do to help other families and children who desperately need support felt like a no brainer.”
A New Mortgage on a Paid-Off Building
The patio is becoming a four-season room, the atrium, due for completion by spring of 2027 and, she hopes, ready for Easter. It will seat 30 to 35, rain or shine, and every seat will look out on the fountain and the planting.
No more bees. No more humidity. A view of the snow.
It also solves problems the public never sees. The room gives the host a dedicated section, hides the server area, and makes the kitchen bigger.
The family is not marking twenty-five years with a party. They are marking it with a room.
The decision behind it was not small. She had the option to leave the place exactly as it was and enjoy a building with no mortgage, which is a great deal more freedom and a great deal less fear than taking on what amounts to a fresh one.
Against that sat an aging building, weather that does what it likes, and the problem of staying relevant while new restaurants open constantly.
She made the call sitting down.
“One Tuesday at 8 a.m. as I sat on the stairs of Limeport looking around I realized so much of me is here,” she said. “I want to do this. I can do this.”
Her plan for the Inn runs another 30 years.
“It is mine, it has held every version of me,” she said. “I can’t see a life where I’m not there.”
Iris will grow up in it as the third generation. Whether she stays is entirely up to her.
“If it’s something she wants I certainly won’t stop her. But I by no means will push her,” Fischer said. That is the part she admired most about how she was raised. “Never once did they make me do anything. The freedom was always there, which is so important.”
The kitchen is Emily’s now. The milk crate belongs to Iris, who gets to watch her mother carry the family legacy into the next twenty-five years.
At a Glance
- Who: Emily Fischer, executive chef, the Limeport Inn
- Where: Limeport, Lower Milford Township, Lehigh County
- Family ownership since: Summer 2001, opened just after Sept. 11; 25 years this year
- The building: 1842, a funeral parlor at one point, bought from the McGowens
- Owners: Mark and Angelica Jamison, her parents, who also own Jamison Publick House and the Sumneytown Hotel. Angel is pastry chef at all three, interior designer and, as the family has it, the boss. Mark is the engineer, handyman and bartender
- The team: Tom Lion, head chef, 12-plus years; Jose Lucero, sous chef, 5-plus years; Ann Chenault, front of house, 15-plus years
- Trained: Northampton Community College; garde manger at Jamison Publick House; French technique with Jason Hook
- Sister restaurants: Jamison Publick House and Sumneytown Hotel
- Order this: Mussel Rockefeller linguine, mushroom pate, brisket smash burger
- Every weekend: Horseradish crusted prime rib
- Menu changes: Twice a year, spring and fall
- Sourcing: Lancaster Farm Fresh, Buttervalley Harvest
- On the menu since 2001: Soy glazed sea bass, chicken parmesan
- Ask about: The Guinness cake, every St. Patrick’s Day, reserved two months out
- Coming: The atrium, a four-season dining room seating 30 to 35, grand opening targeted for spring 2027
