By Will Grunewald
Photos by Cait Bourgault
From the September 2025 issue
Tucked down an easily overlooked side street in Bethel’s village center, a few hundred feet back behind the local hardware store, is the small blue-clapboard building that houses Watershed Wood-Fired Kitchen. Up the front steps and inside, the atmosphere is relaxed, the layout is snug, the pastas are house-made, and the chocolate pot de crème is served in vintage Italian espresso cups, quite a few of which have been in chef-owner Victoria Fimiani’s family for generations. What the place is, in essence, is a proper trattoria.
While an Italian ristorante generally has an air of formality about it — artful plating, white tablecloths, fussy wine list — a trattoria is a lower-key, family-run establishment, with ample portions of classic fare and wine that flows without pretense. In the States, of course, “restaurant” is much more a blanket term, without the culturally ingrained demarcations to observe, and fanciness plays out on more of a sliding scale, but one can’t help sometimes feel that self-consciously upscale restaurants here have, a little ironically, become a dime a dozen. A restaurant like Watershed, on the other hand, has character.
Take, for instance, the ravioli. Fimiani’s greatest culinary influence was her father, Vito, whose mother fled Mussolini’s Italy with him as a child in 1940 and whose family tradition of cucina povera cooking — literally “poor kitchen” in Italian — showed Fimiani how to spin simple ingredients into flavorful meals (among her earliest kitchen memories: making pasta, mixing meatballs, and cleaning tripe). Then, after she married into a family that, on both sides, hailed from northern Italy’s Dolomites, her mother-in-law introduced her to some finer aspects of Italian cooking. Now, at Watershed, the ravioli are the ideal balance of humility and finesse. The filling depends on what the seasons offer, from fiddleheads in spring to kabocha squash in fall. In early summer, when I visited, it was nettles and shiitakes. The sauce was the unassailable marriage of butter and sage. The noodles seemed almost too delicate to hold together. To finish: a sprinkle of Asiago cheese and a garnish of little purple sage blossoms.
Fimiani, a microbiologist by training, made her first foray into professional cooking almost 15 years ago with a friend, Kate Goldberg, when their fiddlehead ravioli were accepted into the Common Ground Country Fair. They opened Watershed two years ago, after stripping, gutting, and building a new basement and foundation for the tumbledown former headquarters of Bethel’s water district, which the town had slated for demolition. (Goldberg has since scaled back her involvement but still works at the restaurant.)
The square, one-story building provides just enough space for a bustling open kitchen behind the copper-top bar, with half a dozen two-tops nestled along the walls. Sitting at the bar gives a sensation of being in the action, although no seat is far from it. Outside, a lovely deck — open-air in the summer, enclosed and heated in the winter — doubles capacity.
Fimiani’s husband, Tom DeLuca, is a local primary-care physician and gregarious front-of-house presence who will happily chat with guests — about anything, but especially about wines. He oversees a concise, well-rounded list that strikes a balance between quality and price. Our table of two opted for a crisp, lightly fruity bottle of pinot grigio from northeastern Italy, versatile enough to pair well with the whole gamut of what we ordered (and just $32 to boot).
Pizzas, described as “personal” size on the menu, are plenty big enough to share a few ways as an appetizer. While Fimiani runs the rest of the kitchen, Andrew Raymond is the pizzaiolo, and he’s a deft hand at freckling the sturdy sourdough crusts in the wood-fired oven. The pizza we had was a rich, savory combination of pesto, mozzarella, mushrooms, and artichokes (aptly named the “Mother Earth”). The fritto misto, a crunchy medley of fried carrots, onions, green beans, bell peppers, eggplants, and zucchinis, was perfect for mopping up a trio of dipping sauces, especially the herbaceous, garlicky pesto and the sweet, bright red-pepper coulis. Then, the other entrée we ordered, in addition to ravioli, was penne alla vodka with sweet Italian sausage, yet another showcase of Fimiani’s wonderfully tender pastas.
On top of all that, main courses automatically came with sizable side salads, with carrot, radish, and pickled onion (choose the creamy, very enjoyable lemon-dill dressing). Suffice to say, we took home leftovers. But first, for dessert, there was that enticing pot de crème. A none-too-sweet dark-chocolate custard, it had a semi-firm texture that recalled a perfectly baked pumpkin pie. And the vintage espresso cup in which it arrived seemed like just the right final touch, a stylish but homey flourish to sum up the evening.
