Belden House & Mews Receives Michelin Key, but Here's What Chef Tyler Heckman is Doing in the Kitchen

Belden House & Mews, Winvian, Lost Fox Inn, The Litchfield Inn, Mayflower Inn. All in Litchfield County. All boutique hotels. And they all have something in common…if you aren’t staying there (or even if you are), don’t overlook them for dinner—or for breakfast or lunch for that matter.

Getting a lot of attention since it opened in the first half of 2025 is the first one listed in the bunch, Belden House. And if you pay attention to happenings in Litchfield, Belden’s charming and restored Queen Anne style Victorian and its 10 rooms, plus, its 21 additional modernist rooms, called The Mews, was recently awarded a Michelin Key, a high honor that recognizes outstanding hospitality.

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But this is a food publication. And I’m here to tell you what’s happening inside of the mansion’s dining room, what’s going down in their kitchen, and introduce you to executive chef Tyler Heckman.

A Rocky Hill native who now calls Kent home, Heckman spent a stint away from his home state in favor of working in hotspot restaurants in New York City before returning to Connecticut and landing at Belden House.

Essentially a lifer in the industry, Heckman almost went with another career entirely.

“I went to an art magnet high school called Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts for visual arts, then I went to UCONN for visual arts as well,” Heckman says. “But my sophomore year, I moved into a house with my brother. We had a kitchen, I started playing around, and that kind of took over. But I worked at a restaurant since I was 15, New York Pickle Deli, a breakfast and lunch place in Rocky Hill. I worked there from when I was 15 to 22. I started off as a dishwasher, then I was prep for a couple years, then worked the hot line. It was a very busy restaurant. The owner had it for like 35 years. She just sold it last year. But probably the most popular for breakfast restaurant in town.”

After college, Heckman moved to NYC, and after about a month, enrolled in culinary school at the Institute of Culinary Education. He admittedly got bored not having a job so he kept frequenting a restaurant in order to get one.

Lettuces, palm sugar, kohlrabi, fresh herbs

Hamachi crudo with passionfruit—chances are, it will be different when you go, as Belden’s House’s staple dishes undergo component changes.

“There’s a chef I really adored, who’s from Connecticut, who’s based in Boston, Jamie Bissonnette, and he opened a restaurant in New York called Toro,” Heckman recalls. “While I was in culinary school, I just like kept eating dinner there. They had they had two kitchens; a basement kitchen and a little kitchen in the dining room that had two cooks and like, nine seats. I just kept going and asking if I could get a contact to the sous chef. It ended up being two guys working their way up, who are now two of my best friends, so they eventually gave me the contact. I did a trial and then they hired me, and I worked there, probably a month and a half into culinary school. I went to culinary school from 8 a.m. until noon and I worked there from one to like two in the morning.”

For about five months, Heckman kept up with this rigorous routine while he finished culinary school, and upon graduation, he was a hired employee at a restaurant that he says was instrumental in his career because of being exposed to “really cool ingredients” like geoduck and razor clams, but also the ability to do whole pig butchery and a charcuterie program, all in a high-volume environment.

Agnolotti, pistachios, saffron butter, Aleppo pepper

After two years at Toro, Heckman moved onto other projects as a line cook, then sous at Le Turtle, then he’d follow his chef at Le Turtle to cook at the Made Hotel in NoMad, eventually becoming their executive chef. When that restaurant closed during COVID, Heckman reopened Villanelle, a New American spot, and after about a year-and-a-half, he found himself cooking Spanish cuisine again at The Lobby Bar at The Hotel Chelsea.

“It’s a very old, pretty famous hotel, and it was under a reconstruction for about eight years,” Heckman explains. “A restaurant group took over the restaurants in it, so I joined there a little less than a year after they took it over. I ran their Spanish restaurant and I did all their events for two years. It's kind of funny because Spanish is my least favorite to cook. I don't enjoy eating it, but it's a good learning experience because Spanish food is obviously tapas style, so there's no coursing. The food cost is very low and very high volume, so it's a good structure for not learning about the food, but learning about how to operate a restaurant with margins and how to manage. Hotel Chelsea is my biggest management job because when I first started, we only had one restaurant in the hotel in the Lobby Bar, then they started a construction on a second restaurant, so I took over the one restaurant and I had about, I don't know, 45, 50 employees at one point until they moved some over to the new restaurant, so we were doing breakfast, lunch, dinner, and events, and then we also did food for the Lobby Bar.”

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Now with a few prestigious hotel restaurants under his belt, how Heckman ended up at Belden House is through a connection from Belden’s sister property, Troutbeck, in Amenia, NY. Troutbeck’s chef, Vinny Gilberti, and Heckman, were roommates once upon a time in the city.

“When they started the construction here (at Belden), they wanted Vinny to do both restaurants, but Troutbeck is huge, 70-something seats, events year-round, and he said, ‘I might know someone who’s interested.’  He called me and I was in New York for 11 years and I saw New York change a lot. Restaurants weren't as exciting. The cooks weren't passionate anymore after COVID. It was a lot of moving. And when I first moved to New York, there was so many interesting restaurants and people doing passion projects, and over the years, they're all just, like, closing. My last few years in New York, every hot new restaurant was like a French bistro or so boring. But I understand why; the labor costs, cooks went from making $9 an hour to $17 for entry level. I have cooks that would walk in the door with no experience be like, ‘I want $25 an hour.’ Dude, I made $9 an hour. It’s just changed a lot and I was kind of sick of living there and working 18 hours a day, six days a week, different days off every week. This project was good because this is a different part of Connecticut and also, my parents are in their mid-60s. My mom's retired, my brother has two young kids, so it's good to be back home. This gives me more opportunity to spend time with my family, because as I get older, I realize what's important in life, you know? Not just like working and making a name for myself. I could do both here. I like this project because it's pretty intimate and it's a small dining room. In the future, we will have more to offer, but for right now it's pretty manageable. And I think it's an opportunity to bring a different style of dining to Connecticut, where I think a lot of the restaurants are Italian-American or this and that. Up here, I think there's some fun restaurants, but I want to bring my style of food.”

Reposado espresso martini with olive oil

Heckman says that the bar program was taken over by one of Belden House’s servers, but that it’s a team effort, making sure the cocktails and food are in synch.

“If you have a mixologist or whatever they call themselves nowadays that's making crazy cocktails and the chef is making this food, they never really coincide. It can feel like they don't balance each other out. It feels very inconsistent. I'm working with them about what's in season, what we have, because we get everything seasonal. Our menu will change all the time. Right now citrus is coming in and a lot of people don't understand how the seasons work and what is available. And I also bring in a lot of unique ingredients. Like right now we're getting quince and I'm like, ‘You can do something with this.’ I like using ingredients that we also have on the menu. If you can cross utilize it, that's good.”

After dinner cocktails are a thing, too, like this one that’s basically drinkable mint chocolate chip ice cream with vodka. But who says you have to wait for after dinner to groove on this?!

Calling that “style” New American is accurate. But the results of the matchup of Belden House and Heckman is so much more than that. His big city stints, paired with local, seasonal ingredients from nearby farms like Town Farm and Hungry Reaper, featuring lots of New England coastal seafood, is, according to him, a little something different for Litchfield County.

To boot, Heckman and his team are making everything (except the fries) from scratch; the koji cultured butter, the sourdough focaccia that you spread that butter on, the pasta is freshly made, and so are the pastry, ice creams, and some cheese.

And he’ll tell you that it’s not a one man show as Heckman and Belden House are invested in teaching.

“I like to teach,” Heckman says. “Keeping the cooks inspired, to keep teaching them every day, it's important. Giving them tasks and making everything in-house is extremely important, especially in our small restaurant. We do 40 covers a night, so if we can spend a little time to make our butter and I can teach one of my dishwashers how to make it, I do it, you know, making bread every day. So, the bread is my recipe and I hired a dishwasher, a local from Harwinton. He used to work at a pizza shop and he's a very obsessive person, so he started to play around with it and playing with the hydrations, he made it better. He's now a breakfast cook and prep cook in the morning, but he makes all the bread every day. I have another kid that's 16 or 17 years old that we hired as a dishwasher, and now we're getting into prep, so he's learned how to make our butter from start to finish. He knows how to clean razor clams now, so we're slowly teaching these guys how to do everything. And a friend I used to cook with in the city, he is the chef at a restaurant in New York and he makes all of our pasta.”

Heckman on his burger:

“We serve our burger in here, starting at lunch, or at the bar, but, you know, nowadays, you have to have a burger. I was like, since we have to have one, it has to be great. It has to be a little bit unique, you know, not just like the smash or the special sauce like everyone else is doing. It fits with what we do here.”

Telling you about Heckman’s full menu at Belden House, though, could prove tricky as dishes change up frequently, seasonally, all of that, but there some. He notes the bread and butter as something that’s never leaving, but if there is one in particular, it’s the agnolotti—stuffed with homemade pistachio butter made from cream, pistachios, and parmesan, tossed in saffron butter and topped with crushed pistachios and Aleppo pepper.

If there are two more, it’s a salad, and a dry aged duck that he’s proud of.

“We make a vinaigrette out of palm sugar, a sugar from Thailand; it's palm sugar, rice wine vinegar, lemon, juice, lemon zest, Thai chilis and there's no oil in it, so it's a really light dressing and inside the salad, and it's not heavy, like salads can be if they get overdressed and this is just a really light, crisp, salad,” he says.

And as for the duck, they get the birds in whole, break each one down, and dry age it in the walk-in for two weeks, and when you order it, it’s a multi part entrée.

Miso browned butter chocolate chip cookies, served hot and fresh, straight outta the oven.

“You get served all parts of the duck,” Heckman says. “We make a consommé out of the carcasses, and that's served with tortellini, then you get croquettes that are made from the confit duck legs and they get served with duck fat aioli, then you get the duck breast, so it's like a two, three-part dish.”

But…if there’s ONE more, and if you’re stopping by for lunch, it’s gotta be a burger, right?

Juicy, beefy, perfectly pink on the inside, and topped with nutty Comté cheese, horseradish aioli, and mild, tangy, vinegary piparra peppers, all on a potato-sesame bun, Heckman’s recipe, but made steps away at The Bakehouse.

Even though it’s still early in Belden House’s story, Heckman hinted that the menu should grow at some point, and in a way, so will their dining room, but in a different building. Nearby is an old bank that Belden House owns and they’re set to begin construction on it pretty soon.

“It’ll be a three-floor event space and another dining area,” Heckman teases. “Maybe overflow. A mixture of events and dining. But at Troutbeck, we have members packages, so maybe we’ll do that here, a space just for them. Not sure yet but we’re still working it out.”

31 North Street, Litchfield
860.337.2099, beldenhouse.com