Ellie Nowakowski
Kyle Beach (left) and Leah Spicer have taken over the White Schoolhouse in Spring Green with a new restaurant called Homecoming.
Tall windows stream natural light through the dining room, located in a former schoolhouse, and offer a view of the garden in full bloom. Music floats out from the kitchen as staff prepare for the night. The wood-fired pizza oven heats up outdoors behind the building, painted traditional white with neat green trim.
In the kitchen co-owner Leah Spicer rolls a pen between her teeth while she types up the night’s menu. It’s like a scene from an earlier era, save for the laptop and the printer beside her.
When the restaurant opens at 5 p.m., orders start coming in and customers form a line out the door to place orders at the counter.
Leah Spicer and Kyle Beach opened their restaurant, Homecoming, in Spring Green on June 25, serving pizzas and a few more items Friday and Saturday nights only. Homecoming is built on the foundation of a Spring Green tradition, Pizza Night at The White School, which served pizzas informally out of the old school.
The couple jumped at the opportunity to take over the schoolhouse building and develop the restaurant inside. “It was too perfect to not do it,” Spicer says.
Former White School owner Eric Ferguson started pizza night after winning a wood-fired oven in a charity auction, setting it up behind the 1887 schoolhouse he’d been using as a photography studio.
Recently Ferguson’s other business, Convivio, a coffee shop in Spring Green, has been taking up more of his time, and he and his wife approached Spicer and Beach about taking over, Spicer says.
“This was just ready to walk into, which was pretty amazing,” Spicer says. She appreciates the chance this gives them to expand slowly. “It's nice not to have to go for it 100 percent in the beginning and instead to slowly build up.”
The couple officially took the reins on Monday, June 21, and opened for pizza that Friday.
“It was an opportunity for us to continue doing something that worked and to add on to it to see if other things work out,” Spicer says. While it was a lower-risk way to start a restaurant, the couple does have a lot on the line, with Beach having quit a salaried job. They also cashed out a 401k.
The name Homecoming plays on Spicer’s move back to Wisconsin. She grew up on an organic farm in nearby Clyde that now supplies ingredients for Homecoming. Beach is originally from North Carolina, where the couple met and had two children before moving back to Spicer’s family’s farm during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Homecoming offers a seasonal menu that changes from week to week and sometimes day to day based on what local farmers can supply.
“We really want to highlight fresh, local flavors,” Beach says. “What's coming out of the ground this week is what we're serving on the plates.” That’s evident from the menu, which notes that you can “add a big pile of fresh arugula to any pizza” for $2.
Ellie Nowakowsi
Summer squash pizza is a highlight of the seasonal menu.
On a recent Friday, pizzas included classic cheese, margherita, sausage and pepperoni versions as well as a squash pizza. Also on the menu was gazpacho and a pork sandwich; a summer berry trifle was the featured dessert.
At other times, menu items have included a shishito pepper appetizer, salads, a local bratwurst plate and a fresh peach cake.
The couple hopes to develop the restaurant to be a “full-service casual fine-dining restaurant” and to be open five days a week for lunch and dinner and with an expanded menu. But for right now, being open two nights a week is fine, says Beach, if that’s “what our community can support from a labor perspective and also a sales perspective.”
Spicer and Beach are seeking a balance between fair pay for their employees and serving affordable food made with quality, fresh ingredients. “I don't ever want anybody to feel like it's pretentious or they couldn’t come here,” Spicer says.
The couple share an extensive and diverse restaurant background; they met while both were managing restaurants in Asheville, North Carolina. Those experiences influence both the menu and their idea of what’s possible with Homecoming. Ensuring that each person in their restaurant, whether it’s guests, staff or vendors, feels taken care of is extremely important to them, Spicer says.
“There's a lot of things that we learned [working in restaurants] that we get to use here,” Spicer says. “But I also feel like there's a lot of things that didn't work for us, and we get to not do those in our restaurant.”
Homecoming is open 5-9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at 242 N. Lexington St. in Spring Green.
