Harvey’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge on Avenue A in Turners Falls is a passion project for Evelyn Wulfkuhle of Greenfield.

Wulfkuhle has been in the local restaurant business for more than two decades. She started at Green Fields Market in Greenfield and then went to work at the late, lamented Bottle of Bread in Shelburne Falls.

There, manager (and eventual co-owner) Maggie Zaccara provided Wulfkuhle with on-the-job training in restaurant work. “Before that, food had been an interest but sort of a home hobby,” said Wulfkuhle in a recent interview. “I learned so much working with [Zaccara] and did some catering in the valley, too, in those years.”

After Bottle of Bread was destroyed by fire in 2005, Maggie Zaccara and her brother Jim invited Wulfkuhle to be their partner at a new restaurant, Hope & Olive in Greenfield. Magpie Pizzeria followed soon thereafter.

As time went by, the management team sorted itself out. Recently, the Zaccara siblings have concentrated on Hope & Olive while Wulfkuhle took over management and eventually ownership of Magpie.

She still runs Magpie with the help of “long-term employees who have been essential,” she said.

She began to long for more creative freedom, however. The main equipment at Magpie is a wood-fired oven. She wanted a full kitchen.

“Magpie’s in a rented space, and that is just somewhat limiting in terms of how much I can put in and expand,” Wulfkuhle said. “For me, having a place that I had a lot more control over and could make decisions about was an important next step.”

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The answer was the space in which Harvey’s resides, with a full kitchen, a patio and a fun vibe. Wulfkuhle set to work redecorating the space … and the menu.

I asked her to characterize the cuisine at Harvey’s.

“It’s a little hard to describe because it’s very all over the place. For me, it’s the foods that I have a hard time finding that I would like to be eating. That is the No. 1 piece of it for me,” Wulfkuhle said with a smile.

“Some of it is things I cook at home with my kids. I have a very picky eater who is also a vegetarian. That’s how we got the vegetarian gyoza (dumplings) on the menu. ... During the pandemic, we did a lot of baking at home. I put soft pretzels on the menu because they became a go-to for us.”

She said she hopes that Harvey’s customers can pick and choose items from the menu — and share their choices — rather than assemble formal meals. She wants her guests to “make several selections and share with everybody at the table so that everybody can have a mix and match and combine things in different ways.”

She compared the experience to going to a food-truck roundup and selecting a different, beloved nosh from each truck.

The extensive cocktail selection also reflects the sense of fun and personal taste exemplified by the food menu.

Curious, I felt impelled to ask who Harvey was. Wulfkuhle revealed that he was her paternal great-grandfather, who died before she was born. Despite never having met him, she learned a lot about Harvey from her grandfather, with whom she was very close.

Whenever someone in the family did something he liked, her grandfather would call that person “Harvey.” The words “Good job, Harvey!” were his way of offering congratulations to those he loved.

Consequently, Wulfkuhle recalled, “‘Harvey’ was always a proud, happy feeling for me.”

When I asked her for a recipe from Harvey’s menu, she immediately chose one of her childhood favorites, sopapillas. These are little morsels of fried dough that she serves as a side dish with local honey.

“Part of the appeal, frankly, is that there are so many apiaries in the valley. Being able to feature local honey is really special,” she enthused.

She noted that she hasn’t been able to find sopapillas much here on the East Coast. Consequently, they were one of the first things she tried to make when she started cooking.

“Sopapillas are served with every meal in New Mexico,” she explained. “My father’s side of the family is all from New Mexico. I moved around a ton as a kid. … [New Mexico] was a real consistent place for me. We went multiple times a year.”

Harvey’s opened in July and is cautiously expanding. It is now open Tuesday through Saturday from 4 to 9 p.m. Wulfkuhle said the community has been “incredibly sweet and supportive.”

She enjoys exploring the feelings of play and welcome that she wants the restaurant to embody. “We’re trying to be relaxed and put out something delicious,” Wulfkuhle said.

Ingredients:

½ cup flour

¾ teaspoon baking powder

¾ teaspoon sugar

½ teaspoon kosher salt

3 tablespoons water

Canola oil as needed for frying

Instructions:

Combine the dry ingredients; then stir in the water. Form the mixture into a ball.

On a floured board, roll the dough out to a thickness of ¼ inch. Cut it into six pieces.

Preheat the oil to 350 degrees. Gently pop in the sopapillas. When they puff out and rise to the surface, turn them over and cook them until they turn golden brown.

Serve warm with local honey. Makes six sopapillas.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.