An Afternoon with Nathalie Dupree
On Sunday, Sept. 18, The Museum of York County hosted An Afternoon with Nathalie Dupree. At this event, award-winning chef Nathalie Dupree taught her fans how to create cream cheese Southern biscuits. The event concluded with a book signing and refreshments. I had the opportunity to catch up with Nathalie after the event and ask her a few questions. When asked what she likes about events like this one, Nathalie responded without hesitation. “Oh, I just love making people learn how to cook,” Nathalie said, “and learn that they’re not dummies because they don’t know all these important things.” The next question I had seemed a little more difficult for her. When asked whether she liked cooking or teaching cooking better, Nathalie was stumped. “Oh,” she laughed, “I like them both. I couldn’t choose. No one’s asked me that before!”
Fans were excited about the event and seemed more than thrilled to spend their Sunday afternoon at the Museum of York County. Attendee and fan Martha Jean Starnes found out through Facebook that Nathalie Dupree would be at the Museum of York County, just two miles down the road from her house. As a Southern girl herself, Martha Jean Starnes thought, “What better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than with a Southern girl?”
The Pump House Restaurant
During the past week, I was also able to meet with one of the owners of The Pump House, Colby Mosier. The Pump House is a new restaurant in Riverwalk, and it is essentially a reincarnation of the pump house that the Celanese plant used.
Some background information: the Celanese Acetate Filament plant operated in Rock Hill from the 1940s until 2005. Now, the site of the Celanese plant is home to athletic fields, a BMX Supercross Track, housing developments, and much, much more.
When talking with Mosier about how the initial idea to create a restaurant out of an industrial pump house came to be, Mosier said, “We really wanted to do something that would be an addition to what the community has and what the town has.” He continued, “We thought there was a need for some upscale dining opportunities in the area and felt like we could use the building to do that.”
There are some parts of the pump house that Mosier and his partner, Elliot Close, repurposed for scenery, such as the original operating control and the underground valves that were used to circulate 4.7 million gallons of water daily. The restaurant also has some other memorabilia from the time during which the plant was in operation, such as pictures of employees of the Celanese plant. This has proven to be exciting for Rock Hill locals, who either had relatives who worked at the corporation or who were employees of the corporation themselves.