I was born and raised in a small town in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains.

I grew up in a place where farms, makers, and things made by hand were simply part of everyday life. You cut through the woods to get to a friend's house. You played in fields. Your best friend's mom might be a potter who made the dishes you ate from. You went to school with farm animals and ate things you'd grown yourselves.

None of it seemed particularly remarkable at the time.

It was just home.

I moved away when I was 16, and for a long time I thought of the Catskills simply as the place I was from.

Years later, I found myself back upstate, living in what was once my grandmother's home. I returned to a place I knew incredibly well and somehow barely knew it all. I began seeing it differently though.

The Catskills felt different, too. There was a new energy here. Farms finding new audiences. Artists, growers, cooks, and makers building alongside families who had been here for generations. And I began noticing all of the things I'd barely thought twice about growing up.

As I built relationships with the farmers, makers, and artists around me, I found a sense of belonging I hadn't realized I'd been looking for.

Catskills Cupboard grew from that feeling.

It's a way of sharing the things I love about where I come from: good food, things made well, useful objects, beautiful objects, and the people behind them.

But Catskills Cupboard doesn't mean everything in the Cupboard comes from the Catskills.

Some things will.

Others might simply remind you of home.

A familiar jar. A dish that reminds you of one your family had growing up. Something useful. Something beautiful. Something you didn't know you were looking for until you found it.

Because to me, the Catskills have become about more than a place or where something was made.

They're a feeling of home.

And the Cupboard is my way of sharing a little bit of that feeling with you.

Something from home, brought home.
-Jonny DeStefano
Founder