The Joel Palmer House celebrates and elevates the humble fungus. Credit cards accepted.
Children welcome, but uncommon.
Jack Czarnecki, owner and chef of the Joel Palmer House in Dayton, has his own version to tell, but the wild game he stalked were the elusive mushrooms of eastern Pennsylvania's dank forests. Czarnecki and his wife, Heidi, moved to a handsome antebellum mansion in the wine country village of Dayton a year ago. They lovingly restored the white-porticoed Southern Revival home, carriage house and garden to their pioneer glory and opened a restaurant overlooking a pure Americana town green. Czarnecki, a third-generation restaurateur from Pennsylvania with an ardor for wines as well as for mushrooms, sought a Yamhill County site giving him access to both the vineyards and the forests of Oregon. Czarnecki hunts the morels, chanterelles and matsutakes himself, but he also has agents who know the local woods he is just beginning to learn.