Nickie HayesPoughkeepsie Journal
Melanie Lemieux has been working in the restaurant industry for 20 years, and has lived in New York City for 15, managing large restaurants as well as hotel clubs along the way.
She started off as a bartender in Montreal when she was 17 and toured with the USO for three years, but kept finding herself back in hospitality.
Lemieux decided to fully pursue the field. She founded ESS Hospitality and opened two restaurants in Long Island City, Queens: The Baroness and The Huntress.
Now, she plans to expand farther up the Hudson, eyeing a summer opening date for The Governess restaurant in Poughkeepsie at the former site of The Ice House.
In Queens, The Baroness, Huntress restaurants carve niche
Lemieux opened her first restaurant, The Baroness, in 2013. Zoning changes from manufacturing to residential and mixed-use in Long Island City made the economy boom and new construction blossom, she said, and she jumped on the opportunity.
She wanted to offer a place where there weren't many at the time, so people didn't have to trek all the way to Manhattan to go out and grab a drink or bite to eat. She set out to create a casual, neighborhood spot to see familiar faces and get out for the night — Lemieux noted she used to call The Baroness, "our second living room." The restaurant, she said, is the only spot in the city that teaches champagne sabering.
After The Baroness received recognition from their chef participating on the Food Network's "Chopped" and ABC's "The Chew," Lemieux expanded, opening The Huntress nearby in 2018.
Regarding the names of each restaurant, The Baroness was an ode to Lemieux's great-great-great grandmother. The Baroness' social media profile photo features her. A baroness is a French title, she explained, which meant a landlord in her ancestor's time.
The Huntress, Lemieux said, had more of a focus on wings and whiskey, so she wanted to elicit "a bit more savage" feeling. Thus, the two restaurants became sisters of a sort.
"Turns out I didn't have a second badass ancestor," she said.
The namesake of her newest venture, The Governess, Lemieux said, comes from the term for a nanny or private tutor. The Poughkeepsie restaurant will act as the governess of the two sister restaurants in Queens, fitting into the lore of the ESS Hospitality restaurants.
Why Poughkeepsie was the right fit for The Governess
In the early months of 2020, Lemieux and her husband purchased a 120-year-old fixer-upper home in Wappingers Falls. They planned on it as a vacation home, but as they were renovating, the pair fell in love with the area and they ended up spending half their time there.
Lemieux has been scouting for a year and a half now for a third outpost in this slice of New York, and once the request for proposal was sent out for the former Ice House in October 2023, she knew she had to take the opportunity.
Lemieux got the keys to her new establishment in April. There are no plans to change the exterior. Instead, the greater focus is on the interior design, creating ESS Hospitality's signature look: handpicked by Lemieux, embracing heart and character.
She wants customers to feel the close-knit neighborhood quality, recognize the team working and hopefully some familiar faces from the community too.
Similar to her two other restaurants, The Governess will encompass what Lemieux and her team know best, a gastropub with elevated American cuisine. "We're not pretending to reinvent the wheel, we just do the classics really well," she said.
Chef William Gauger has been working with Lemieux since 2015. "He can do anything really, and it tastes like elevated home cooking," she said. "It's fantastic."
Of course, The Baroness' burgers put the business on the map, and they'll be on menu at The Governess as well, along with a steakhouse environment incorporating surf and turf.
"There'll be seafood to highlight the fact that we're on the waterfront, and a good selection of steaks," she said.
During the day, The Governess will be family-friendly, but at night, the space plans to accommodate an adult crowd for food and co*cktails.
"I find it's really hard to get dinner past nine o'clock in the Hudson Valley, so our kitchen is going to be open late," she said.
With The Governess centrally located in Waryas Park, Lemieux also plans to create free events to bring the community together, mingle and meet new people.
The building has a stage suited for live music, karaoke or a piano bar, and Lemieux plans to use the existing patio outdoor space often, pointing to successful events held at the sister restaurants including a dog pageant competition and drag bingo bunch.
"We're very proactive in events and being involved in our communities," she said.
There's still work to be done, but Lemieux hopes to open the doors of The Governess to the mid-Hudson Valley community this summer.
"I'm still trying to push to open mid-July," she said, "so if we make that happen, I'm almost positive it'll be a record-breaking time."
