At No Comply Foods in Great Barrington, skate culture, punk music and globally inspired comfort food collide in a pink frame house on Stockbridge Road where community matters as much as what’s on the plate. Opened in 2024 and named for a skateboarding trick, the restaurant hums with eclectic music while its walls double as a gallery of patron-gifted art — brightly colored skateboard cartoons, portraits of the owners’ pug, Honeybun, and offbeat collages.
High school sweethearts Julie and chef Steve Browning both loved skateboarding and punk music, especially the 90s California ska-punk band, Skankin’ Pickle. They also share a love for good food and a strong sense of community and fairness. After stints at Lutèce and the 21 Club in New York City, Steve helped open Prairie Whale in Great Barrington as the inaugural chef and worked there for 10 years. His partner, Julie, is a full-time special education teacher at Housatonic Valley Regional High School in Falls Village.
They opened No Comply Foods with their unique vision. “It’s a place that we did on our own terms,” said Julie. “Despite people trying to tell us things that we needed to do to be a successful restaurant, we do the things that we want to do.” Those things include no alcohol, no tips and no reservations. “It’s a place that anybody can come into, just sit down, eat and feel welcome. A complete reflection on who Steve and I are, and who we have been. That’s what this place is.”
Jena Battaglia at No Comply Foods in Great Barrington, serving tomato garlic cream soup and artichoke grilled cheese sandwiches during Sunday brunch.Jennifer Almquist
Clearly, their formula is working. In its August 2025 issue, Bon Appétit Magazine named No Comply Foods one of the 14 best new breakfast spots in the U.S.
Brunch on the first warm Saturday this winter offered Turkish eggs with labneh; two sunny-side-up eggs on a Japanese sweet potato topped with chili crisp; tender soft-boiled eggs resting on steamed spinach with silky béarnaise sauce, rye toast and smoked bacon; a plate piled with buttermilk pancakes with a dollop of maple butter and circles of powdered sugar; and mugs of strong coffee. The place stayed packed for hours, every seat filled as families fresh from skiing — suspenders hanging, boots clomping -— came in for warming meals. One couple marked a post-Valentine’s moment by sharing a chocolate heart doughnut by Pastries by Hanna, a baker in Canaan, Connecticut.
Wedge saladJennifer Almquist
Browning cooks globally influenced food with chef Dimitri Koufis, and the dinner menu changes daily. Recent offerings have included French fries with black pepper aioli; fried cauliflower with couscous, olive tapenade, orange and fenugreek yogurt; hot dogs and fries with jalapeño cheddar and special sauce; leek and mushroom pot pie with oyster mushrooms, spinach, cream and mascarpone; and rigatoni Bolognese with Grana Padano, onion soubise and herbed breadcrumbs. If you still have room for dessert, you might try an apple crostada with caramel sauce and ice cream or chocolate mascarpone mousse.
Prices are reasonable. The menu emphasizes fresh food to reduce waste, and produce is seasonally sourced from local farms. Guests can plan a party in the brightly lit upstairs space, enjoy special evening events that might include live music or comedy, or attend themed menus such as Greek Night. No Comply Foods is dog-friendly.
For hours and more information, visit: nocomplyfoods.com
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Marge Parkhurst with a collection of historic nails recovered from wall cavities during restoration work.
“At first it just looked like old paint,” said Parkhurst, who has been painting and restoring historic homes in Litchfield County for decades. “Until I realized it was a stencil, a beautiful pattern that repeated.”
She kept going carefully — a wet sponge, hot water, a little fabric softener — peeling back until she could see it clearly. A climbing vine emerged, applied in vertical runs to give the wall the look of wallpaper. Someone had signed it. The signature was faint, tucked above the baseboard in the corner, not fully legible. But the date was clear: 1870.
Parkhurst, owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co., has worked in enough old houses to develop a practiced eye for what they conceal — understanding that layers of paint, paper and plaster in a 19th-century New England home form a kind of compressed archive of the people who lived there.
The stencil bore a strong resemblance to what historians call Moses Eaton-type stenciling — a tradition of itinerant craftsmen who traveled New England in the early 1800s with portable kits of cut-pattern stencils. Their trade flourished because imported wallpaper was expensive. Stenciling offered the same visual effect at a fraction of the cost.
“These stencilers typically worked for a combination of cash, food and lodging,” Parkhurst said. “Their compensation was modest by any standard.” She paused, “He was a tradesman. But the work he left behind — that’s art.”
The vine pattern was dull with age but still legible. One section had survived intact beneath the layers of paper. The homeowners chose not to paint over it — instead building a wooden frame around it, a small window into 1870.
“Preservation means protecting something to prevent further deterioration,” she said. “Restoration means returning something to a previous state. In that room, we preserved what was there.”
This bottle is from the Hartmann Brewing Company of Bridgeport, CT, found inside a wall of a former railroad outbuilding relocated from Canaan to Colebrook CT. The bottle was sealed with a glass stopper held by a wire, inside was a grocery list written on the back of an envelope postmarked 1915. Photo courtesy of Marge Parkhurst/Cottage & Country Painting Company
A Station’s Secrets
Not every discovery is decorative. Some are written into the bones of a building.
Parkhurst’s own home in Colebrook is a former railroad outbuilding moved from Canaan in 1920. Scraping the trim revealed it had once been sage green — and beneath that, a warm orange-brown soaked into the wood grain. “Old paint was made more like a stain back in the 1800s,” she said. “It penetrated the wood rather than sitting on top of it — so there’s never a shine.”
Up in the attic, eye bolts still anchored in the framing mark where cables stabilized the building during its move a century ago.
The most memorable find came by accident. Cutting open a wall under the stairs, she found a clear glass bottle sealed with a glass stopper held by a rusted wire. The label read: Hartmann Brewing Co., Bridgeport, Conn. It took days of careful oiling to free the stopper. Inside: a handwritten list of sandwiches and drinks, a postage stamp still attached. Not treasure. But a treasure just the same.
“I worked for days to get that thing open — and it was just somebody’s lunch order.”
Newspapers stuffed into wall cavities, hand-wrought nails, paint layers thin as stain — over 50 years, Parkhurst has cataloged the details that tell a trained eye when a house was built and by whom. Litchfield County’s architecture is unusually varied: Georgian and Federal-style houses on Litchfield’s Main Street, industrial buildings along the rivers in Torrington and Winsted. “Each town has its own fingerprint,” she said.
The most consequential mistake she sees is changing a home’s character. “When you paint over stained woodwork, you hide the details. You can’t get them back.” She has talked more than a few owners out of it. Some have listened.
Not long ago, Parkhurst and her grandchildren gathered a few small objects, wrote a letter and tucked it into a wall of her Colebrook home. Someone will find it — a record of people who were once here.
“Walls still surprise me,” she said. “If you look hard enough, you can find buried treasure.”
In a county full of houses whose walls hold untold stories — stenciled by traveling tradesmen, nailed together by farmers, papered over by housewives following the fashions — Marge Parkhurst has spent a lifetime reminding us that history doesn’t only live in museums. Sometimes it’s hiding just behind the wallpaper.
Marge Parkhurst is the owner of Cottage & Country Painting Co. She can be reached at marge@cottageandcountryct.com or 860-379-4748.
Sarah Belzer is a writer, editor and creative director whose career has crossed journalism, advertising, film and cultural commentary. Managing Editor of The American Rant and founder of Jump Advertising, she has spent three decades shaping narratives for media and national and global brands.
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