Lovejoy in Milford offers something for everyone
Matt Berry has been part of many restaurants over the years.
“My background has been primarily in fine dining,” he said. “I’ve been all over southern New Hampshire, up into the Lakes and Exeter, but my heart, food-wise, has always been here in the Milford area.” Berry was a chef at Unwined and at Greenleaf, both high-end Milford restaurants. Earlier this year, however, Berry and his bar manager Gill Burnet decided to focus on a different type of dining experience in their new restaurant Lovejoy.
“We wanted to bring more of a focus on a casual cocktail bar setting. So we came up with the idea for Lovejoy,” Berry said.
Because Lovejoy is just off the Oval in downtown Milford, Berry wanted to acknowledge the town’s history when he named it.
“I did some digging into Milford history. The Lovejoy brothers, who opened up the Lovejoy Quarries, which are better known as the Twin Quarries, were responsible for the big monoliths at the National Treasury in D.C. and really expanding the Milford granite industry nationwide. I thought it was very fitting for us and what we like to bring to the table and the atmosphere that we wanted to create here, but also … [we] wanted to pay homage to Milford history.”
Berry described the menu at Lovejoy as “cocktail-forward, with elevated cocktail bar food.”
“New England as a whole kind of hit that craft beer stride probably in 2012 or 2013,” Berry said, “and it really stuck for a while. I think cocktails themselves got kind of back-burnered a little bit. But there’s been a re-emergence of cocktails. That also includes navigating this whole sober culture. Just so there’s like something for everyone — not everyone drinks. Fifteen years ago, like everyone drank. We wanted to be able to serve sophisticated adult drinks that aren’t alcohol and that aren’t like Shirley Temples. Though I have absolutely no beef with Shirley Temples; I love them. We wanted a very intentional focus on non-alcoholic drinks as well as our standard cocktails. We really just wanted to bring an interesting craft cocktail experience into a more casual, more approachable setting.”
The menu at Lovejoy could probably be described best as focused.
“I like to keep my menus nice and tight,” Berry said. “I’d rather do a couple things really, really well than have a very big, extensive menu. I’m really big on utilizing local produce, local farms, purveyors whenever I can, so I wanted to take that, which I really enjoy doing, and kind of mold it into a much more casual setting. I really wanted to take that kind of ‘elevated’ style of cooking, for lack of a better term, but push that into like fun, nostalgic junk food, if you will.”
There are a number of sharable tapas-style appetizers on the Lovejoy menu but only four or five main dishes, some of which are either meat-free or gluten-free, or both — a Shiitake Bhan Mi sandwich, for instance, and a Maitake [mushroom] Parmesan.
“I love cooking vegetarian and vegan food,” Berry said. “I like doing that without making a big stink about it. That’s kind of the philosophy when I ran my menu. And everything on my menu is gluten-free with the exception of the bread and the buns, and we have gluten-free alternatives available for those.”
Berry wants a place where customers can order something comfortable and familiar, but where other customers can be more adventurous.
“If someone wants to come in and have a beer and a burger,” Berry said, “we have that. If someone wants to come in and try these crazy cocktails that Gill’s coming up with and try some new food that I’m playing around with, we have that too.”
Lovejoy Restaurant
40 Nashua St., Milford, 554-8430, lovejoynh.com
Open Tuesday through Thursday from 5 to 9 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 4 to 10 p.m.
Featured photo: Lovejoy Restaurant.
