Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [37]
Manchester, VT
BL | $$
Seats can be scarce in this cozy café, but if you are looking for something extraspecial in the morning, Up for Breakfast is a gold mine. You really do go up for breakfast. It is a second-story restaurant with window views of Main Street. There is pleasant art on the walls, and if you sit toward the back, you can enjoy watching goings-on in the semi-open kitchen.
Pancakes are a true taste of Vermont, especially when glazed with pools of maple syrup. You can have them with or without blueberries, made from sunny-hued buttermilk batter, dark and serious buckwheat batter, or sourdough. Sourdough ’cakes make a faint crunching sound when you press the edge of a fork to their surface. Inside the lacy web that encloses them, they are thin but substantial, with the vigorous disposition of a starter with character.
Muffins are excellent, available hot from the tin or sliced, buttered, and grilled. More elaborate meals include multi-ingredient frittatas, French toast made using big slabs of spice bread, and chicken-duckcilantro sausage. Wild turkey hash—wildly assembled, not made from wild turkeys—is a cook’s tour-de-force that combines big shreds of roasted turkey with peppers, onions, potatoes, and pine nuts, all griddle-cooked until crusty brown on the outside and topped with poached eggs and a film of fine hollandaise. If you like omelets, let us suggest “The Metropolitan”—smoked salmon, chopped red onions, melting-warm cream cheese, capers, and a sprinkle of dill.
Wayside Restaurant
1873 US Route
202 802–223–6611
Montpelier, VT
BLD | $$
The Wayside Restaurant has been an oasis of regional cooking since it opened in 1918. The true-Vermont menu has traditionally included salt pork and milk gravy, fresh native perch, old-fashioned boiled dinner, and several kinds of hash, including red flannel hash (so named because beets dye it the color of a farmer’s long johns). Most of these things are still available at the Wayside, although not every day. Perch can be had only during ice-fishing season, when it is lightly breaded and fried to a crisp; salt pork covered with creamy white gravy has become a Thursday-only tradition; boiled dinner and shepherd’s pie are cold-weather specials; fiddlehead ferns are offered only a few weeks in the spring. Every supper is complemented by fresh-baked Parker House rolls.
Whatever the daily specials, and regardless of seasonal shortages, you will eat well any time you come to this cheerful town lunchroom. You begin to sense that fact when you smell warm rolls being toted to the tables. They have a just-baked, yeasty perfume that promises great things to come. What joy it is to tear off a shred from a roll and submerge it into a bowl of Wayside beef barley soup—a hearty brew so thick with meat and pearly grain that a spoon literally stands up in it—or dip it in the vegetable soup, a jumble of hand-cut carrots, squash, onions, tomato, and beans.
Please note that Wednesday is traditionally chicken pie and meat loaf day. What a feast the chicken pie is: piled into a big crockery boat with dressing and a crusty biscuit, with a great heap of gravy-dripping mashed potatoes on the side. The meat loaf is superb, too: a two-inch-thick slab with a sticky red glaze along the rim and rivulets of stout brown gravy dripping down its sides.
In addition to such classic north country lunch-room desserts as tapioca pudding, Grape-Nuts custard, mince pie, and homemade ginger snaps, the dessert repertoire includes apple pie made with densely packed hand-cut apples in a fork-crimped crust and maple cream pie. Low and flat with barely whipped cream dolloped on top, the filling of the maple pie is too delicious for words. Its radiant band of amber cream is complex, powerful, and elegant the way only pure maple can be, and it resonates on your taste buds after a Wayside meal like a Yankee cordial.
White Cottage
Route 4
802–457–3455
Woodstock, VT
LD (summer only) | $
It was the summer of 1957 when the White Cottage opened on Route 4 at the edge of the pretty