Press Kit

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RootsTable is a modern American restaurant rooted in Appalachia and oriented toward what comes next. We cook from tradition, not nostalgia—using regional ingredients and time-honored techniques to create contemporary, restrained dishes. Our food reflects stewardship, seasonality, and transformation, shaped by a living landscape and modern producers. This is not revival. It is continuation.

Name: RootsTable — one word, capital R and capital T. Never “Roots Table,” never “RootsTable Restaurant.”
Concept: Contemporary Appalachian, rooted in the Potomac Highlands
Address: 9 North Centre Street, second floor, Cumberland, Maryland
Setting: Above Ferleman Gallery, in the same building as Gallery Stage
Ownership: North Branch Holdings, LLC

Opened: July 28, 2026

Service: Dinner, Tuesday through Saturday, 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Last seating: 8:30 PM

Size: 30 to 40 guests a night

Owners: Thomas and Rebecca Ferleman, together and in equal part

Chef: Thomas Ferleman

Business Manager: Rebecca Ferleman

Reservations: Online through Toast — booked from rootstable.com, Google, and the restaurant’s social channels

Website: rootstable.com

Social: facebook.com/rootstable — Instagram:

Press contact: Megan Vaughn, ‪(240) 609-0077, art@ferleman.com

Thomas is self-taught. He and Rebecca Ferleman spent a year in the Belgian Ardennes, on a hill above the Meuse near Dinant. It is the closest thing he has found anywhere to where he cooks now: a river town below a forested upland, hard winters, a short season, and a larder built on cured pork, game, mushrooms and whatever could be put up before the cold. The Ardennes runs on from there into France, Luxembourg and Germany, and they traveled the whole of it and ate their way through it — small towns, markets, cafés, wines they had never heard of — and what he took from that year was not a list of dishes but a question. He started asking why a thing tasted the way it did, and then went home and tried to reproduce it. That has been the method ever since. He lived in Andravida, in the Elis region of the western Greece, and learned Mediterranean cooking there; work took him further east across the Middle East; and he has done the same thing in South America and in most of the United States places that cook something of their own. He took classes at L’Academie de Cuisine in Maryland. There was no culinary school and no plan to become a chef. There was curiosity, and then decades of practice.

The rest followed the same shape. Art became Ferleman Gallery. Music became Gallery Stage. Food became RootsTable. Three rooms in one building, at one address, run on the conviction that they belong together.

He holds a Ph.D. in Strategic Leadership and multiple Masters degrees, and spent his career in national security and technology before opening the restaurant. He calls RootsTable his third and final act.

Cumberland sits in a gap in the mountains. That single fact built the town. The Narrows opened a route west through a wall of Appalachian ridge, and for a century everything moving between the eastern seaboard and the Ohio Valley funneled through it. The National Road began here. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal ended here — Cumberland was its western terminus, the last place a boat could reach and the first place a wagon took over.

A town like that is not primarily a place that grows things. It is a place where things are unloaded, stored, traded, and moved along. Cattle, hogs, grain, whiskey, flour, salt. Some of it stayed. Most of it kept going.

RootsTable is built on that distinction. The menu asks two questions of every dish: what grows and stays here, and what came through here. Ramps, apples, trout, rutabaga, buckwheat, sorghum, pork — those stayed. Salt, whiskey, flour, and the people who arrived to work the mines and the shops and the rail yards — those came through, and left their cooking behind. The Cornish and Welsh brought the pasty to Georges Creek. The Polish, Slovak, Italian, and Irish families who followed brought their own.

The second thing that stayed here was technique. Canning, preserving, pickling, curing, brining, rendering. Those were not rustic habits. They were a technology for making a hard winter survivable in a narrow valley with a short growing season, and they were practiced with real precision. RootsTable treats that technology as the local element — more durable, and more honest, than a sourcing radius. A jar of chow-chow made correctly is more Appalachian than a tomato that happened to be grown nearby.

The people came through the same way the freight did, and some of them stopped. The Cornish and Welsh went underground at Georges Creek. The Polish, Slovak, Italian, and Irish families followed them into the mines, the shops, the rail yards, and the farms. Their descendants are still here, and so is their cooking. RootsTable treats that as the subject of the restaurant rather than the backdrop.

What RootsTable does not do is play the region for sentiment. Appalachian food is not a poverty story and it is not a costume. It is a distinct culinary class within American cooking, with its own larder, its own preservation methods, and its own logic — and Western Maryland, which is routinely left out of the conversation about Appalachia entirely, sits squarely inside it. The kitchen cooks it as a serious cuisine, at a level of execution the food has always deserved and rarely received.

RootsTable — one word, internal capital T.

Pasties — not pastries. A pasty is a sealed hand pie; the plural is pasties, with no apostrophe.

Pot likker — two words, no apostrophe. The liquid left from braising greens.

Chow-chow — hyphenated.

Puddin' — it's not pudding. Drop the g.

Ferleman Gallery and Gallery Stage are all part of the same  businesses in the same building.

Cumberland was the western terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the starting point of the National Road.

Potomac Highlands — the highland country of the upper Potomac, defined by the river’s drainage across Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Western Maryland is at its top edge. West Virginia tourism material uses the same term for a smaller district inside that region; RootsTable uses it in the older geographic sense.

North Branch Holdings takes its name from the North Branch of the Potomac, which runs the Maryland and West Virginia line past Cumberland.

The Cumberland Narrows is the water gap west of town, cut by Wills Creek through Wills Mountain and Haystack Mountain. The National Road and the railroad both used it.

Western Maryland is Appalachia. The restaurant is emphatic on this point.

 Attributable to Thomas Ferleman, Chef and Owner. Nothing here is cleared until he clears it.

“Cumberland was a place where things were unloaded on the way to somewhere else. That is the menu. What stayed, and what came through.”

“The local part is not only the ingredient. It is the technique. Canning, pickling, curing — that is what stayed here, and that is what we do.”

“I am not interested in nostalgia. People here cooked well because they were good at it, not because they had nothing.”

“Appalachian food is a culinary class of its own. Western Maryland is part of it, and it gets left out of the conversation almost every time.”

“The people came through here the same way the freight did, and some of them stopped. Their grandchildren are still in this valley. That is who I am cooking for and about.”

“One braise carries three dishes on this menu. That is not thrift. A component you make every night is a component you make well.”

A representative selection. The menu changes with the season and the printed menu is canonical.

Ham Shank — Slow-roasted shank-half ham carved to order, braised greens, pot likker, cracklin.

Peppa Fried Chicken — Half bird, fried and finished in the house pepper sauce: roasted Fresnos and red bell, garlic, vinegar, honey.

Pasties — Sealed hand pies in four fillings, one for each of the families who worked underground at Georges Creek: steak, potato and rutabaga (Cornish and Welsh); potato, onion and sharp cheddar (Irish); kraut and smoked sausage (Polish); greens and ricotta (Italian). Guests choose two.

Cast-Iron Duck Breast — Rendered until the skin crisps, mashed potatoes, port and bitter cherries.

Catfish and Grits — Cornmeal-fried catfish over cheese grits, pot likker, green tomato chow-chow.

Knuckle Dumplings — Potato dumplings, broccoli rabe, sausage, white wine cream.

Mountain Trout — Whole fish butterflied and pan-roasted, skin crisped and meant to be eaten.

Puddin’ —  A traditional, savory regional meat dish made by boiling pork scraps, head meat, and organ meats like liver, then seasoning and grinding them into a rich loaf.

These are our  primary producers. They are listed by name because the menu treats them as the people who make the food possible, not as a supply chain.

• B&B Country Meats — Bernie Garlitz and the Garlitz family, Frostburg, Maryland

• Casselman Creamery — Ben Riegsecker, with Devin Callis, Grantsville, Maryland

• Laurel Hill Trout Farm — Bob and Gloria Pritts, Adam and Liz Pritts, Somerset County, Pennsylvania

• Savage Mountain Farm — Ben and Hana Yoder, Meyersdale, Somerset County, Pennsylvania

• Sundreams Farm — Alex and Sam Serini, Everett, Bedford County, Pennsylvania

• Spring Valley Farm and Orchard— Eli and Misty Cook, Augusta, West Virginia

• Triple E Farms — Tony and Esta Eash, Romney, West Virginia

• Crossland Farms — Ed Crossland and family, Allegany County, Maryland

The kitchen does not describe itself as farm-to-table. Mountain sourcing is seasonal and uneven, and the restaurant will not claim a supply chain it cannot hold in February. What it will claim is that the preserving, pickling, and curing are done in house, and that the standard applied to an outside ingredient is the same standard applied to a local one.

9 North Centre Street stands as a prominent fixture within the Downtown Cumberland Historic District. Constructed during Cumberland's industrial and transportation golden age at the turn of the 20th century, the building rose during a period when the city boomed as a massive manufacturing center. Fueled by regional coal, iron, and extensive rail lines, a wave of robust, multi-story brick storefronts rose along core commercial corridors like Centre Street to serve the expanding population.

For much of the mid-20th century, the building was a major downtown shopping destination as the home of Bernstein’s Furniture Store. This enterprise anchored the block, supplying home furnishings to local residents during Cumberland's retail heyday before ultimately closing its doors in 1981. 

Following the furniture store's closure, the building transitioned to serve the community in a new capacity when it was leased to Goodwill Industries. Throughout the late 1980s and into the mid-1990s, the space functioned as a bustling Goodwill retail thrift store, drawing crowds right off the downtown pedestrian mall for housewares, clothing, and vintage goods.

As the local economy shifted away from heavy manufacturing and traditional retail, the building eventually sat underutilized by the turn of the 21st century. However, its history took a definitive turn in 2008 when Doug and Betsy Schwab meticulously renovated the entire building. Contractors stripped the structure down to its original interior wood framework, safely restoring its historic hardwood floors while upgrading its structural integrity with a new roof, modern windows, an elevator, and advanced fire suppression systems. This extensive rehabilitation breathed new life into the historic cornerstone, seamlessly adapting it for contemporary urban living while retaining its century-old facade.

In recent years, the building has anchored the local creative community. It served as the home of the Allegany Arts Council before transitioning to host the Ferleman Art Gallery, Gallery Stage, and RootsTable.