‘Severance’ Features Upstate New York Restaurant Phoenicia Diner | Eater NY
"Located in the gorgeously remote hamlet of Phoenicia in the Catskills, this American diner reprises its role as Pip’s Bar & Grille in the fictional Northeast town of Kier on the Apple TV+ series Severance. Before the Emmy-winning series premiered, Courtney Malsatzki, the restaurant’s director of operations, received an email saying that a new Apple TV program was interested in filming at the diner and asked if they could visit. She agreed, and it happened to be Ben Stiller, the executive producer and director for Severance; he visited the diner with another person involved with Severance, and they sat in the same booth that would later be used on the show. “They spent a few hours there and they were just like mapping scenes,” Malsatzki says. “So I was immediately like, ‘I think they’re filming here.’” The restaurant had to close down for filming and the exterior and interior changes were obvious. “We had so many emails,” she tells Eater, especially when the temporary Pip’s sign was put up. “I was getting 100 emails a day — ‘I can’t believe you closed;’ ‘What are you thinking?’ — hate emails, sad emails, just everything.” Once the first trailer aired in January 2022, “it was a huge stress release,” she says. “Not only was it cool to see how they made it look and see somewhere you love on the big TV, it was also like, ‘Okay, everybody knows. Thank god.’” In the show, the spot appears in a Season 1 scene in which Mark is dining because he got a gift card from Lumon to make up for a work injury, and returns in Season 2 for a booth-window scene where Mark and his sister Devon have an important discussion over mugs of hot coffee while a Lumon henchman lingers at the counter, spying on them. Severance turns the diner’s throwback charm into a more insidious backdrop, making a universally comforting and familiar place feel like part of a town that threatens to turn people into mindless cogs. The diner is an American diner on NY Route 28 that serves local seasonal Catskills/Hudson Valley food and is open Thurs–Tues 8 a.m.–6 p.m. (closed Wed), with breakfast served all day." - Nadia Chaudhury
