Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont internship, for the Bridge
This week, Feb 15 through Feb. 22, is Montpelier’s second annual Restaurant Week, hosted by Montpelier Alive. Throughout the week, participating eateries will offer a variety of specials, including deals, prix fixe menus, limited-time dishes, and featured drinks. The Bridge spoke with four chefs participating in this local celebration of Montpelier’s culinary offerings. See the full list of participating restaurants and specials here.
North Branch Cafe
At North Branch Café in downtown Montpelier, the focus goes far beyond a simple cup of coffee or tea. Owner Lauren Parker has built a space centered on community, health-conscious eating, and locally sourced foods, all shaped by both personal experience and her customers’ needs.
Q: What influenced you to open North Branch Café?
A: My purpose has been to create a place where people, especially those with specific dietary needs, can get really good and healthy food. We offer an extensive menu of organic and local foods whenever possible, with many gluten-free and vegan options.
Over the years, we learned that we needed to be more than just a spot for sweets to go with tea or cheese to pair with wine. The community needed more savory food, so we started asking ourselves what would actually appeal to people for lunch. That led us to expand the menu, and now we have a much more varied selection. Some of what we serve is made here, and anything that isn’t comes from local Vermont bakers and producers.
Q: What is your signature dish?
A: Our seasonal Buddha Bowl is definitely a standout. I make it year-round, but it changes depending on what’s available locally during each season. In the fall and winter, delicata squash is the centerpiece.
The bowl is basically a giant, filling salad. Along with the squash, it includes ingredients like corn, black beans, carrots, pickled red onions, pecans, cheddar cheese, and lots of fresh greens. It’s hearty, colorful, and very satisfying, hence the name “Buddha Bowl.”
One of the key elements is the house-made peanut lime dressing. People ask to buy it all the time, it’s that good. The dressing changes occasionally depending on the ingredients, but it’s always designed to complement whatever’s in the bowl that season.
Q: What local foods do you incorporate into the menu?
A: Most of our food is from Vermont producers. We use hydroponically grown greens from Green Mountain Harvest in Waitsfield, which means the lettuce tastes great year-round. For baked goods, we work with Sweet Alchemy and Magic Spoon Bakery, both of which specialize in gluten-free and vegan items.
We make our own hummus, tapenade, salads, wraps, and rotating sandwiches. Because we don’t have a full kitchen, we get creative with countertop ovens, Instant Pots, rice cookers, and blenders. That limitation has actually pushed us to be more intentional and resourceful.
Being able to offer food that’s local, inclusive, and thoughtfully prepared is really important to us. We want North Branch to be a place where people feel cared for, whether they’re stopping in for tea, lunch, or something they know they can safely eat.
North Branch Cafe, at 41 State Street, Montpelier, is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
—A.G.
Enna
At Enna in downtown Montpelier, culture and technique meet on the menu. Chef/owner Shannon Bates brings global inspiration into a small Vermont space by building bold sandwiches.
Q: What inspired you to become a chef?
A: Travel has influenced me more than anything. I’ve always chosen places to travel based on the food. After I graduated from culinary school, I spent a year living and working in Vietnam at a hotel, and that experience really shaped how I think about cooking.
I’ve also spent significant time in Mexico, Spain, and Japan. It’s hard to pick just one place that influenced me the most because they’re all equally important to me. I’ve spent long enough in each of those places that they’ve all contributed to how I cook, from technique to flavor combinations.
Q: What is your signature dish?
A: The bánh mì sandwiches are definitely what I would consider the highlight of our menu. Bánh mì is a classic Vietnamese sandwich, and I draw a lot of inspiration directly from my time in Vietnam.
We offer a pork belly and a mushroom bánh mì. The pork belly is slow-cooked, marinated, and then seared before it goes on the sandwich. It’s paired with house-made daikon pickles and lots of fresh herbs. One of the key elements is the chicken liver mousse, which is very traditional in Vietnamese cooking.
For the mushroom bánh mì, I created a mushroom mousse. That part isn’t strictly traditional, but I felt that if we were going to use mousse on the pork version, we needed to do it on the vegetarian one as well. Both sandwiches reflect the flavors I fell in love with while traveling but adapted to how we cook here.
Q: What local foods do you incorporate into the menu?
A: We always try to use the freshest, highest-quality ingredients we can. In the winter, it’s harder to source local produce, but we do get hydroponic lettuce year-round from Green Mountain Harvest in Waitsfield, which is great.
We use bread from Red Hen Baking Company, and our gluten-free bread comes from Bonté Bakery right here in Montpelier. Most of what we serve is made entirely in-house. We start with raw ingredients — we pickle the carrots and daikon, slow-cook and marinate the pork belly, and make things like chicken liver mousse from scratch.
Enna, at 14 State Street, Montpelier, is open Monday through Thursday, 10:30 to 2:30 p.m.
—A.G.
Chico’s Tacos
At Chico’s Tacos and Bar at the corner of State and Elm streets in Montpelier, Mexican and southern Californian fare intersect to create a vibrant menu. Chef-owner Andrew Lay’s experiences in fine dining and his travels inform his approach to cooking and are embodied in every bite.
Q: What has influenced you most as a chef?
A: Probably travel and my younger experiences. I’ve been to lots of places around the world and tried different kinds of food, it broadens your palate. I grew up in southern California, so a lot of my friends were Hispanic, and I ate at their houses on the weekends. I also spent about eight months working in Chihuahua, Mexico, in my late teens and early 20s, so that definitely had a big influence on our menu.
Q: What’s your signature dish?
A: Our fish tacos are one of the best things we have on the menu. That’s very nostalgic for me: the fresh cod, fresh sauces, and lots of lime juice. Also, I’d say our pozole, which is a classic Mexican pork stew with hominy.
Q: Do you incorporate any local foods into your menu?
A: Our beef tongue for our barbacoa is from Maple Hill Farm, but otherwise, with pricing here in Vermont, it’s actually cheaper to ship beef from New Zealand. Most of our chilis come from New Mexico and southern California. We don’t have a lot of salads or fresh produce, and for the produce we do use, there aren’t a lot of options up here.
Q: Why did you pick duck carnitas for your Restaurant Week specials?
A: Duck carnitas is something I did in culinary school. Carnitas traditionally use pork butt; this is duck confit using duck from Maple Hill Farm. You cure it with salt and spices for a day or two, and then it gets cooked in duck fat for several hours until it falls off the bone, and you shred it. Then it gets crisped on the flat top and goes into the taco. Duck is rather expensive, so doing it all the time doesn’t make a lot of sense, but for Restaurant Week, it’s worth it to do something a little more high-end and interesting.
Chico’s Tacos at 45 State Street, Montpelier, is open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
—G.E.T.
Three Penny Taproom
At Main Street’s Three Penny Taproom, Chef Erik Larson prioritizes what his customers tell him they want, serving locally sourced products and spins on classic pub dishes that excite locals and keep them coming back.
Q: What has influenced you the most as a chef?
A: In the beginning, it was cooking shows on PBS like “Jacques and Julia” and “Yan Can Cook,” where I got to see a different culture and cuisine. What inspires me now is what our guests want to eat. Many chefs cook the food they want to cook, and if people don’t like it, they’re wrong. For me, we’re a community-based restaurant, so it’s really heartening to cook food that I know our guests will enjoy and come back for again and again.
Q: What’s your signature dish?
A: Our burger. We’ve got great grill cooks who do it. There’s nothing better to me than a perfectly cooked piece of beef, chicken, veal, or lamb, with perfect seasoning, perfect sear, and perfect temperature. That really makes me feel good.
Q: What local foods do you incorporate into your menu?
A: Our burger is made of local beef from Fairmont Farm, which is six miles up the road. We also always have a different mushroom dish on the menu using mushrooms from 1000 Stone Farm. They drop off 20 to 30 pounds of mushrooms here every week. In the summer, we buy all of our greens and a lot of our produce from them. We also purchase what we can, when it’s in season, through Black River Produce.
Q: Can you share some details about your specials for Restaurant Week?
A: It’s been a cold winter, so we wanted to bring a little levity and do what would normally be a warm-weather menu. The poke bowl is on our menu all summer and that’s a local favorite. The pulled pork fits with the island luau theme, and it’s something I know our guests will really like. The burger, that’s our signature, so we put a fun island spin on that.
Three Penny Taproom, at 108 Main Street, Montpelier, is open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
—G.E.T.