Eclectic by Design

On Purpose.

Eclecticism, done right, isn't a lack of identity. It's a wider one. It's a kitchen that's curious about the world and honest about what people actually want to eat. Modern American. Vegetable focus. Asian flavors. Italian. Fish Cookery. Continental Inspiration. Food grown in Lancaster soil. 

Per Diem's menu is eclectic in the truest sense — not because we couldn't decide, but because we didn't want to. Because the people who walk through this door don't fit a single profile either. There's the hotel guest who flew in from somewhere and just wants a properly cooked filet with potatoes and a good demi.   Something familiar in a new environment. There's the Lititz local who wants a solid happy hour. They know when their favorite bartender is there making drinks and slinging friendly banter.  There's the production crew that's been on the Rock Lititz campus, who just want some crispy wings and a beer before last call, so they can crash for the night to do it all again the next day. 

We cook and serve for all of them. And we don't think that's a contradiction.

What holds it together isn't a specific cuisine — it's a standard. And a point of view. The food and the bar program are speaking the same language: curious, grounded, unwilling to be copy and paste. There are a thousand restaurants that picked a lane and stayed in it. Safe menus. Predictable pours. Rinse and repeat…Nothing wrong with that. But there's something that happens when a kitchen and a bar decide to stay open — to influences, to seasons, to the person sitting down who didn't know what they wanted until it arrived. That's the space we occupy. Not the restaurant that's easy to explain. The eclectic one that's hard to forget.

That's the whole idea. 

-Paul

When the Kitchen Starts to Hum: Spring at Per Diem

Spring doesn't arrive in Lancaster County so much as it insists. One week the fields are nothing, and the next, everything happens at once — ramps, asparagus, the first real lettuces. When the farmers and purveyors we trust have something worth having, we move on it. That's when the kitchen starts to hum.

And right now, it's humming.

There's a sound to a kitchen finding its season — the high heat sizzle, the rhythm of a knife breaking down something that was in the ground two days ago, the way a sauce reduces into something that stops you mid-stride. That energy moves. It crosses the pass, hits the dining room, and lands at your table whether you know it or not. You taste it in the brightness of a dish that couldn't have existed in February. You feel it in the room.

We feed a pretty extraordinary mix of people in this room. Hotel guests finding their footing in a new town, still deciding what kind of day they're about to have. Lititz and Lancaster locals who've made us part of their rhythm. The Rock Lititz campus crew needing food that can keep up. Production teams mid-run who don't have time for bad meals. What they all have in common is simple: they deserve something worth eating.

Starting April 22nd, that means updated pizzas, new entrees built around what's actually good right now, and appetizers that hit the way first bites should — a little bright, a little unexpected, the kind of thing that makes the table lean in. Lighter dishes. Bolder flavors. The kind of food that sounds as good as it tastes.

These ingredients have a window.

-Paul