SHELBURNE – In this Chittenden County community you can dine on charcuterie and crème brulee at a Victorian estate, or you can dive into a pile of whole-belly clams and French fries from a glorified convenience store.
More than many towns, Shelburne offers the yin and the yang of dining, from down-to-earth to upscale. Shelburne has plenty of good in-between options, too, including the Falls Road restaurants Barkeaters and Rustic Roots. But for this latest installment of Eat Your Way, the Burlington Free Press series that finds us dining through communities in and around Chittenden County, we decided to experience the glamorous and no-frills extremes of dining in Shelburne.
Route 7 Liquor & Deli
I had driven by this place off U.S. 7 for years and thought it was a run-of-the-mill convenience store. Then a co-worker told me a couple of years ago that he had great fried clams there – the whole-belly kind, not those scrawny clam strips – and as I’m a sucker for succulent fried clams I knew I had to pay a visit.
Route 7 Liquor & Deli is not a convenience store. The place sells plenty of beer, wine and liquor, but what really impresses is the copious menu that makes the word “deli” in its name sound inadequate. It offers 20 varieties of pizza, plentiful burger and quesadilla options and – perhaps most surprisingly for landlocked Vermont – fresh uncooked seafood as well as prepared seafood baskets filled with not just clams but shrimp, haddock, scallops and most anything that can be harvested from the sea and eaten.
A previous owner hailed from Maine and began offering seafood at the store about half a dozen years ago, said manager Steve Ward, who also began working at Route 7 Liquor & Deli around that time. He’s used to the look of surprise on first-time visitors’ faces when they walk in the humble storefront and encounter that sprawling menu.
“I get that a lot when they come in. They go in the back (to the deli counter) and it opens up into another whole world,” Ward said. “The menu gets out of control sometimes.”
He said the store’s clientele includes mechanics from Shelburne Road’s many car dealerships as well as other workers on that stretch of road. “The seafood obviously is very popular,” Ward said. “We do New York pizza. I do my own barbecue, pulled pork, brisket.”
My wife and I went in a seafood direction for take-home dinner last week. I picked the fried whole-belly clams, of course, and my wife opted for the lobster roll. Both came with French fries and small cups of creamy coleslaw that, while it became disconcertingly warm packed tightly in the takeout container with the fried food, still satisfied.
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This food qualifies as one of Shelburne’s down-to-earth options, which doesn’t mean it’s dirt cheap – each of our meals cost $14.99, though as Ward pointed out a lobster roll in Maine might set you back 24 bucks. The fat fried clams and refreshing lobster roll made my wife and I as happy as we could hope to be eating fresh seafood in our humble landlocked home rather than a seaside shack Down East.
The Bearded Frog
Some of my favorite restaurants in Vermont are those with the imprint of late restaurateur Michel Mahe, most notably the Black Sheep Bistro in Vergennes and The Bobcat Café in Bristol, both of which aim high with fresh flavors while staying fun and approachable. For whatever reason, though, The Bearded Frog that Mahe opened in Shelburne had never left me with that same feeling. My wife and I set out to change that one night last week.
The Bearded Frog qualifies as upscale, but just barely, as its dinner menu offers a variety of price points and its mellow dining room has a certain casual elegance to it. I’d compare the vibe to a playful French bistro, as the “Messieurs” sign above the men’s room door signifies.
My wife and I each ordered beers from breweries on Pine Street in Burlington – a Queen City Yorkshire Porter for me, a Zero Gravity Green State Lager for her – and a shared appetizer. Our graham-cracker-crusted calamari in a lime chive emulsion had a surprising citrus kick and gave me a classy flashback to the fat-belly clams I enjoyed the night before from Route 7 Liquor & Deli.
Our entrees won us over even before we tasted them; both were GOA (gorgeous on arrival). My wife’s hominy-crusted catfish ($22) sat sandwiched between a Christmas-like mélange of green beans and warm tomato ginger relish. The citrus saffron cream sauce on top of my tenderloin ($31) from the local butcher shop Green Pasture Meats complemented the squash-toned dining-room walls and gave the super-tender beef a savory introduction. The pesto mashed potatoes my beef came with made a great meal even better.
So did the palate-cleansing mango and passion fruit sorbet I had for dessert. That capped a dinner that taught me not to take The Bearded Frog for granted again.
The Dutch Mill Family Restaurant
This year marks a milestone for this breakfast-and-lunch spot on Shelburne Road. “This is actually our 50th working summer” on the property, said Jamie Bissonette, co-owner of The Dutch Mill.
The family began at that location in 1968 with cottages and a motel and in 1972 added an 80-site campground. They started the restaurant in 1995.
“The restaurant was my dream. We always wanted a restaurant,” Bissonette told me Wednesday, two days after my wife and I had stopped in to The Dutch Mill for breakfast. “There wasn’t really a place like ours in Shelburne.”
Much like Route 7 Liquor & Deli, The Dutch Mill offers good food without pretention from a surprisingly huge menu. My perusal of the menu on Monday turned up French toast, waffles, pancakes and oodles of egg options, including surprises such as a bacon-stuffed waffle and a crabmeat and asparagus Benedict.
I chose the eggs Chaz ($9.75) , a colorful variation of eggs Benedict featuring spinach and tomato, while my wife settled in happily with a Greek omelet ($9.25). The 45-seat restaurant was moderately busy when we got there a little after 8 a.m. Monday, but by the time we left at 9 a.m. it was packed. Jamie Bissonette said that’s when the summer tourist crowd typically descends upon The Dutch Mill.
Along with summer tourists, he said the restaurant’s clientele includes local families, farmers, doctors and, in the winter months, snowmobilers. The Dutch Mill aims for a family atmosphere, Bissonette said, putting Mickey Mouse patterns on children’s pancakes and hosting community events.
He has cut back his work schedule while awaiting a kidney transplant, so his son, Mike Bissonette, does much of the day-to-day operation at The Dutch Mill. When my wife and I visited I was wearing a New York Mets T-shirt, and Mike Bissonette offered me amiable condolences on my team’s lousy season. He was wearing a Boston Red Sox T-shirt, so I congratulated him on his team’s strong showing so far this season. (A sign at The Dutch Mill says Red Sox fans can park there but Yankees fans should go home, so at least I chose the less-controversial New York baseball team.)
“We like to have fun and we like to joke,” Jamie Bissonette said. “You can’t make everybody happy, especially in the food business, but 99.9 percent of our customers are happy.”
Inn at Shelburne Farms
When it comes to upscale-dining experiences in Chittenden County, the Inn at Shelburne Farms pretty much tops the list. I had only been there once before, for a casual farewell-to-a-co-worker gathering on the outdoor patio (cue gorgeous Lake Champlain views) that’s part of the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed grounds.
I had never eaten inside the sumptuous dining room in the 19th-century country estate built for railroad magnate William Seward Webb and his wife, Lila Vanderbilt Webb. (The family fortune would go on to support another town institution, the sprawling Shelburne Museum founded by Electra Havemeyer Webb.) Frankly, the prospect of sitting in a space inspiring the phrase “sumptuous dining room” and resembling a Merchant-Ivory film set sounded intimidating, so I didn’t know what to expect when my wife and I went there for dinner just before 8:30 on a rainy Tuesday night.
We sat at a table covered in a white tablecloth, among walls lined in plush, red silk damask imported from France, and ordered a $40 bottle of wine also imported from France. We started with a house charcuterie plate filled with silky chicken-liver pate, rugged lamb pastrami and all sorts of other delectable meats and veggies I couldn’t quite identify.
The waitresses were super-attentive – one cleaned our charcuterie debris with a crumb scraper, which I don’t remember seeing when I dined with my family last weekend at my hometown Dairy Queen – adding to the ultra-classy atmosphere, as did the soft jazz that played in the background. Then I glanced across the room at a well-dressed couple with a teenaged boy who was attempting to affix a spoon to various parts of his face and realized the Inn at Shelburne Farms might not be as stuffy as I feared.
I ordered duck ($33), which arrived rare, fatty but tender and sliced half an inch thick in a delicious plum sauce among a montage of root vegetables. My wife loved her Faroe Island salmon ($36) awash in dill-yogurt sauce and accompanied by fingerling potatoes. The portions were sized just right, meaning I had room for the corn husk crème brulee; I broke the crusty cover with my spoon like it was that first thin layer of ice on wintery Lake Champlain and dove in for the custardy contents.
Two hours and one relaxing bottle of wine later, I sat in this TV-free, portrait-and-gilded-mirror-adorned dining room and realized something: My wife and I had just had a wonderful meal and, even more importantly, a meaningful and enjoyable conversation, that most elusive quest of the 21st century.
If you go
For more information about the Shelburne restaurants featured in this article:
- Route 7 Liquor & Deli, 2659 Shelburne Road, 9853246, www.route7liquoranddeli.com
- The Bearded Frog, 5247 Shelburne Road, 9859877, www.thebeardedfrog.com
- The Dutch Mill Family Restaurant, 4309 Shelburne Road, 9853568, www.dutchmillvt.com
- Inn at Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, 9858498, www.shelburnefarms.org
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter atwww.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.
