Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
― Mark Twain
The Shack vision always started with the food! The Shack Kitchen Crew is home to a group of creative culinary nut jobs, led by our “Mad Genius” Jim Davis. Growing up on New Hampshire’s seacoast, his Culinary journey began. Starting in a small beach front breakfast and fried food joint, Jim discovered that good food makes people happy. Coming from a family with roots in New England, focus was always on freshness and quality.
Jim attended The Culinary Institute of America (Hyde Park, NY – Class of ’91). The CIA offered him the opportunity of an externship at the prestigious Four Seasons Hotel-Boston. Upon graduation, Jim returned to the Four Seasons and continued to learn. In 1995, Jim became the Executive Chef at The Wentworth-an elegant country inn located in Jackson NH, a position he still looks on fondly and with great pride. As a chef new to the area, relationships with purveyors, local farmers and residents of the Mount Washington Valley, he suddenly found himself “HOME”.
Fred Nemeth is Jim’s partner in The Shack and leads our amazing, fun-loving Front of the House Crew. A recovering lawyer, who left Boston big law firm practice eighteen years ago and moved to the mountains, Fred worked for a while as in-house legal counsel to companies based in Waltham and Boston, sharing time in the Valley he loves and on the road for work. In 2012, he was more than ready to leave the road behind and start a local, community-based project. Always a lover of restaurants but with no previous experience working in one (unless you count bussing tables in high school and college), Fred was lucky enough to connect with the Mad Genius of Chef Jim Davis and The Shack was born . . .
Coming upon Stanley’s Hill, Jim and Fred envisioned reviving this historic and humble location with an innovative sense of food, drink and community good times. The idea was simple — create a down-home roadside joint that offered top-notch, creative food for modest prices where local folks could gather. Fresh, local and good!
Now in our eighth year, The Shack is well-known for many of our menu staples – unique breakfast bowls, melt in your mouth pancakes, housemade maple sausage, house ground corned beef hash, the enormous and stunning Madame sandwich, juicy hand-formed burgers, tender marinated steak ciabatta sandwiches, hand-cut fries, melt-in-your mouth shoe string onion rings and extremely creative, sometimes bizarre, but always tasty daily specials. Rounding out the good times, we offer delicious, hand-crafted mimosa combinations, homemade Bloody Maries and extensive local, craft beer selection at the home of “Cheers to Breakfast Beers!”
Today we reimagine The Shack as Shack Street, a purveyor of high-quality, innovative street food. As we felt that many of our popular dishes don’t translate as well as we’d like to take out, we decided to make some changes. This means a more limited menu (at least at first) with a heavy focus on our creative take on street food, grub that you can eat easily as you walk on the path, enjoy in our new outdoor breakfast biergarten or as you travel down the road . . . think of Shack Street as a high-quality, fresh, local and stationary food truck on steroids. Cheers to y’all from Jim and Fred!
