Every restaurant has a table that is especially prized. From here, diners can take in the dining room, the bar, the comings and goings of guests, and maybe even the kitchen’s frenetic energy. This post offers the attuned guest an intimate look at the restaurant’s mechanics—which dishes are ordered again and again, whether service is seamless or clunky, can the bartender keep up, is there a rhythm to the dance? 

I love this table, and I try to spot it at every restaurant I visit. At Roam, Adrienne Sirianni-Cavallario’s small, globally influenced restaurant in Eagle’s old downtown, I was fortunate enough to be seated at it. Granted, there are only nine tables here, so there’s not a bad view in the house, but the ultimate hub is situated at the center of the banquette that stretches the length of the dining room’s back wall. There, flanked by plush pillows and hygge-style animal pelts and beneath a large rustic art piece painted with antlers, the view is perfect.

If you haven’t been to Roam—or even if you have—you may not know that the space lacks an indoor kitchen. Instead, Sirianni-Cavallario helms her restaurant from a 20-foot trailer parked out back. Roam’s kitchen, which has five sinks, functions like any other, it just happens to have wheels. From inside the restaurant, you would never know. A heavy curtain divides the dining room and bar area from the back door where runners come and go, appearing and disappearing with plates full and empty (of deconstructed lasagna and gratin de crozets with duck) throughout the night. It’s only when you head out to the patio (romantically lit during the summer, with an additional ten tables clustered around a merrily crackling fire pit) that you discover that the kitchen and the restaurant are completely unattached.

This detail informs everything about Roam, including its name. When Sirianni-Cavallario and her husband first dreamt of the concept in early 2020, their business was a food truck called The Roaming Gourmet. The intention was to drive the trailer to Rancho del Rio, a whitewater rafting resort situated at the headwaters of the Colorado River, and park it there for the summer. And then came COVID, and the world stopped.

Sirianni-Cavallario couldn’t have known it ahead of time, but her vision for the Roaming Gourmet was prescient. Despite the pandemic’s cancellation of weddings, events, and most everything else at Rancho del Rio, Sirianni-Cavallario still received the thumbs up to serve. “It worked because the space was wide open,” she explains. “Our model was kind of upscale, but still fast and easy with interesting tacos. We sourced fresh ingredients and did organic and local whenever possible. We tried to make it above what people would expect from a food truck.”

The Roaming Gourmet was a hit—so much so that after that first summer at Rancho del Rio, Andy Jessen, cofounder of Eagle’s Bonfire Brewing, invited Sirianni-Cavallario to park the trailer outside the brewpub. With exposure to a larger community and access to travelers on I-70, this is where The Roaming Gourmet evolved into something more than a food cart. Sirianni-Cavallario reworked the menu to include fewer street tacos and more items like lamb wraps, gourmet burgers, and chili. Despite a sharp uptick in business, her sourcing philosophy—as fresh, as local, as organic as possible—never changed. 

In the spring of 2022, after Bonfire closed permanently following the tragic death of Jessen (who perished in an avalanche), Sirianni-Cavallario heard that the owner of a commercial space just around the corner wanted to open a restaurant. The hitch: It wasn’t zoned for a kitchen, but the forward-thinking landlord had put in a food truck pad out back. “I said yes and rolled the food truck around the block,” she explains. The Roaming Gourmet became the kitchen for the restaurant, truncated as Roam.

Sirianni-Cavallario, who taught herself to cook after a career in manufacturing, credits her parents with the inspiration. Theirs was a global table: Her father, whose parents emigrated from Sicily, was a pharmacist but also an artist who spent time during the Korean War cooking around Asia. At one point, he was stationed in Japan. “My father learned how to cook in the Japanese method,” she says. “I grew up with Japanese meals—he had so much passion for creating and plating. Meanwhile, her mother was schooled in Italian cuisine (by a grandmother who lived with the family) so pasta making, ragù stirring, and the like were a regular occurrence. 

Being tethered to a brick-and-mortar dining room has allowed Sirianni-Cavallario to really stretch as a chef. The menu now changes monthly, and it’s almost always influenced by the detailed journals she keeps of her many travels. “We roam the globe,” she says. Case in point: Earlier this year, she rolled out a menu inspired by pastas of the world: koshary from Egypt, chow fun from China, lasagna from Italy, not to mention Chinese dumplings and alplermagronen (a Swiss version of macaroni and cheese). And if that seems like a lot for a 20-foot food trailer to handle, well, that’s the magic—not to mention the beauty—of what Sirianni-Cavallario has created here.

ROAM 139 Broadway St, Eagle, 970-328-4696