Eating Wyoming: Sitti’s Table, A Guy Fieri Favorite In Cody, Is Getting Bigger

CODY — Walk into Sitti’s Table in Cody on any given day, and it’s standing room only. The line snakes back into the specialty grocery items, and available tables are few and far between.

That has the cashier directing people to other spots within walking distance where they can take their meals to eat.

But fans of this Cody culinary favorite that was featured on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” can rejoice. The popular breakfast-lunch hotspot is about to expand.

“We are just days away from signing a lease on the space for the place next door,” Sitti’s Table co-owner Jacob Scott told Cowboy State Daily. “Then in the spring, we’ll be opening up another restaurant that is on theme with what we’ve got going on here, but it’s going to be a full dining restaurant.”

They’re also working on expanding the coffee side of things at Sitti’s Table, as well as a bakery.

“We kind of have a lot of ideas within this spot,” he said. “We have our limitations in this area, though, so we’re going to kind of branch out, and then we’ll be able to do all of those things really well.”

Part of what’s making all this possible is a huge stroke of luck.

“We have a new chef who came in from San Antonio,” Scott said. “He worked with us this last year, but he has a pretty strong Middle Eastern background.”

The chef, Grayson Bacal, has family in the area. That made it an easy sell for him to return to Cody and be part of expanding Sitti’s Table.

“I had been spread so thin in between our catering business (and Sitti’s Table),” Scott said.

Now Scott believes the restaurant has somebody who can be “very present, with just the ability and the knowledge to really invest in kind of taking the food to the next step.”

Getting Back In the Full Swing Of Things

A full-service dining restaurant is something Scott didn’t know he’d ever do again.

“I definitely had pretty hefty (burn-out),” he told Cowboy State Daily. “And I didn’t think I’d ever do a restaurant again, or come back to it.”

The Laughing Pig, a catering business Scott operates with his wife Porter Koury, was Scott’s first step back into feeding people.

“We do private events, weddings and that type of thing,” he said. “We call them shindigs.”

The catering business allowed him more freedom to keep things interesting and fun.

“If we want to cook an animal over a fire or something like that, we can,” he said. “We don’t have some of the limitations that you have in restaurants.”

Those animals have ranged from goats to pigs for a luau.

“We worked with a guy who constructed a pit barbecue type of thing for doing a whole hog,” he said. “Or we might do, like, an Argentinian asado with a whole lamb over a fire.”

Through the catering business, Scott developed some great relationships that encouraged him on to the next step in his return, which was Sitti’s Table.

Among those great relationships is Farm Table West, which grows fresh produce about 7 miles north of Cody.

Scott is getting ready to augment that, too.

“We were able to get a grant for a massive 60-foot greenhouse,” he said.

With a greenhouse, Scott believes he can grow some of the specialty items that have been difficult for him to source for some of his ideas.

“The goal is to get to a place where we can kind of have control over everything we possibly can,” he said.

Tying it All Together With Nafas

The name of the new restaurant is something that Scott and his wife are still debating.

There’s an argument for keeping Sitti in the new name for that name recognition. There’s also an argument for a brand-new name to distinguish the new spot from the breakfast-lunch hot spot.

“One of the concepts we’re looking at is called nafas,” Scott said. “It’s kind of the idea of like love and what goes into your food. And that’s kind of a cool concept that I think really ties into what we’re trying to do.”

Nafas is that indefinable energy that grandmothers bring to all of their dishes that makes it somehow taste better, even though they might be using the exact same recipe for a dish that everyone else uses.

It’s already there in a lot of the food Scott prepares for Sitti’s table, like Guy Fieri’s favorite sandwich, Sitti’s Italian.

The sandwich comes stacked with impossibly thinly sliced mortadella, ham pastor and Genoa salami. There’s fresh julienned tomato, olive relish, lightly melted provolone. And then there’s the finishing touch: A spot of Calabrian-infused honey that’s house made.

It’s not so much that the sauce feels cloying or too sweet.

It’s just enough for a sweet surprise that hides amidst salty meats, pickled jardiniere and aioli, somehow tying it all together with something that tastes a bit like love at first bite.

The new restaurant is going to have a wood-fired oven, Scott said, which means the fresh-baked focaccia Sitti’s Table is using for its Italian sandwich — already exceptional — is going to hit a new level of amazing, as are all the other Middle Eastern breads.

There’s still plenty of time to decide the new name, Scott said.

Regardless of what the name ends up being, though, diners can be sure that nafas is the spirit that’s going into all the food at Sitti’s Table, The Laughing Pig, and the new place — basically anywhere Scott is serving food.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.