Justin Gitto reported this story on assignment from Lakes Region Free Press. The Community News Service is a program in which students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
Nestled away in Poultney, Vermont, along Route 30, Nicole Bower and her husband Scott recently opened a second location of The Cluckin’ Cafe. For the former, it’s a return to her roots.
“I grew up in Poultney and swore I’d never come back, but here I am,” she said. “I actually used to work here in high school when it was Cone’s Point Country Store,” she added.
For the time being the Poultney location is small, but Bower sees plenty of room for it to grow.
“We purchased it in September, and opened up in October … We have plans for the summer to have live bands, miniature golf, and ice cream,” she said.
Before The Cluckin’ Cafe came into existence, the husband-and-wife duo started out in 2019 with a food truck, The Rollin’ Rooster. When the pandemic hit, they switched to strictly doing pre-order takeout through Facebook. Then they added a second trailer to help manage the workload.
However, it still proved to be “too much to work out of food trucks,” she said. The solution was to find a restaurant space in Pittsford while serving the same food that had gained a lot of popularity. They then added a third food trailer in 2021.
The food trucks are licensed in Vermont, New York and Maine. Every year they go up to Wells, Maine, for Cogdon’s After Dark for the Food Truck Park. You can also find the Rollin’ Rooster at Killington during the ski season.
The Pittsford location “offers a little bit more – you could get steak, burgers, salmon, it’s more of a sit-down restaurant,” Nicole Bower said.
“For this we’ve taken the food truck and made it so that it’s food truck but there’s breakfast sandwiches, desserts, a little bit more short-order food,” she added.
She attributes a great deal of her success in the food industry to her background as an art teacher.
“Today we’re coming up with a new sandwich, we’re always coming up with new things, and I think that’s the art teacher in me. I’m taking food and creating works of art,” she said.
Although she would like the new spot to offer the seating of a proper restaurant, she doesn’t think it’s possible due to the limited space, in addition to selling groceries.
“The amount of milk that we sell is actually quite a bit, and we have a frozen section of grab-and-go, which we don’t offer up in Pittsford,” Bower said.
The couple also sells an assortment of soft drinks, local and domestic beers, as well as fishing supplies and bait, and they’re also a big-game weigh-in station.
Being in a small town like Poultney, there’s a lot of charm to The Cluckin’ Cafe with its regulars. Bower doesn’t undervalue their importance.
“We have customers that when they walk in, I already know what they want. If they’re a regular, we will know them by name, we’ll know what they want, and we have a very friendly staff,” she said.
After opening the Poultney location, she closed out 2023 by being named business leader of the year through the Chamber of Economic Development of the Rutland Region.
“It has to do with the fact that we’ve seen such growth in a four-year period,” Bower said. “We have 22 employees right now, and it’s crazy to think that we started four years ago with only one food truck.”