Mary Eddy - Fordson Hotel - Creative Cocktails with a Side of Progress

How Mary Eddy’s Dining Room created natural inclusivity

Hospitality is more than serving food and shaking cocktails — for businesses that go the extra mile for guests, people are as pivotal as the menu. Restaurants and bars, as casual and fun as they can be, have the potential to shift the cultural paradigm and expectations for a city at large. That’s the case at Mary Eddy’s Dining Room, the gilded dining room inside the 21c Museum Hotel Oklahoma City, where bolognese rigatoni comes with a side of palpable inclusivity.

The restaurant has been a fixture in the artsy downtown hotel for years, but a 2021 remodel saw not just an aesthetic glow-up, but an emboldened approach to hospitality on the whole. It’s apt that a contemporary American restaurant named after arts connoisseur and philanthropist Mary Eddy Jones would evolve into a sanctuary for a wide array of people.

Mary Eddy’s bar team is Nathan Cover, Emily Beeman, Shylen Aufieri, and Andrew Lee. Cover, the head bartender, grew up surrounded by Pennsylvania’s Amish country, with “lots of trees and not so many people,” he recalls — though to draw a distinction, he affirms that “We did use electricity.” Once he found a little freedom, it meant spending the next half a decade traveling across the U.S., working on farms in Arkansas and Colorado and studying herbalism, before spending the last decade as a bartender. For Cover, the opportunity to work at the 21c Museum Hotel — a place he’s long appreciated and frequented on first dates — was an opportunity to imprint his style upon a community cornerstone.

His approach to the cocktail creation process is fundamentally informed by his experience working in herbalism and agriculture. It may be best visualized as a complex word map of ingredients and flavors he can sift through to create unique and, at times, unexpected combinations.

To pair with the new food menu — which skews seasonal and modern American, with the likes of roasted carrot soup, rabbit and dumplings, and butternut squash with smoked apple broth during the late winter — Cover rejiggered the bar program to strike a balance between “fun and approachable with wow factor. There’s a whole lot of care that goes into it,” he notes of all the scratch-made syrups and creativity poured into cocktails like the Tiger’s Blood, with tequila, mezcal, carrot, habanero, cinnamon, lemon, and smoked paprika; or Mr. Sandman, a variant of the famous Sidecar with chamomile flower-infused cognac, orange, lemon, and ginger liqueurs, plus lemon and honey.

A key part of that care, he adds, comes naturally from working with like-minded people. “The progressiveness of that mindset carries over into how we approach cocktails and food,” says Cover. “We use newer techniques and ingredients. We like to push the envelope. We’re doing a lot of things that other people aren’t.”

Beeman, born in Indianapolis and raised in Edmond, is a former athlete and kinesiology student, and a lifelong book nerd who can talk about the chemical composition of a drink while ensuring her colleagues tip the jigger in a way that prevents repetitive stress injuries. For Beeman, who previously worked with Cover at The Jones Assembly, Mary Eddy’s represented a chance to go even deeper into the science and history of cocktails through her experience and home library of cocktail books.

Aufieri is a drummer and guitarist who spends his down time recording and traveling. Lee, originally of St. Simons Island in Georgia, is a Ph.D. student completing their dissertation from Drew University remotely, focusing on the artist Genesis Breyer POrridge and the intersection among art, sociology, and contemporary religion.

While the restaurant and its gallery-filled hotel have been dedicated beacons of safety and creativity, the sentiment has never been stronger. Mary Eddy’s 2.0, Cover says, “is elegant, while also being more approachable.” A hotel, by nature, must be welcoming to all. A lot of that approachability comes from a staff that’s diverse, welcoming, and therefore innately inclusive. “It naturally formed itself that way,” Cover explains. “Having that mindset and energy of everyone feeling welcome naturally lends itself to produce a staff like this.”

Setting this tone naturally lends itself to further progress, as Cover says staff members meet other queer people, espouse the benefits of working in such an environment, and spread the good word. “Just being inside 21c helps,” adds Cover. “It’s always been a very inclusive space, and one of the first places in Oklahoma City to support gender-neutral bathrooms and other things that are not so common. I feel like this space lends itself to being open-minded.”

This ethos of inclusion permeates every aspect of the restaurant, too. “Building-wide, from kitchen to servers, there are so many non-binary people, and a lot of trans people,” Cover explains. Fostering this sense of inclusivity for staff and guests alike, he said, sets a standard and creates an ecosystem of safety, support, and camaraderie. “It’s honestly the best work environment I’ve ever had,” he says. “We’re all really close, we’re friends, and we take care of each other.” As a result, and thanks in part to the hotel’s ever-changing guests and artistic emphasis, the dining room is frequently filled with diners who support this ethos.

That air of inclusive hospitality even extends beyond staffing. To ensure every customer is seen and accommodated, the restaurant and bar offer ample plant-based menu items and spirit-free cocktails, all of which are as intricate and thoughtful as their meaty and boozy alternatives — like oyster mushrooms with smoked celery root and pecan gremolata, or the New Moon with non-alcoholic aperitif, Meyer lemon black tea, cinnamon, and lemon oil.

For Cover, a seasoned alum of the bar business, working in an environment where inclusivity is a vital part of hospitality is refreshing and meaningful: “I can’t name a previous job where I didn’t have some kind of awkward or uncomfortable encounter with a manager or co-workers. It’s starting to die off and we’re getting better as a society in a lot of ways. There is something special about Oklahoma City. I’ve connected with people more easily here than anywhere else in the country. Being a part of that and doing what we do here gives me a sense of fulfillment.”

Mary Eddy’s Dining Room, 900 W. Main St., Oklahoma City, maryeddysokc.com, (405) 982-6960