Vermont Restaurateurs Add Vegetable Production to Their Long To-Do Lists

As the pandemic (and Hulu’s “The Bear”) made clear to those of us not in the biz, running a restaurant is hard. Grueling hours, an uneven flow of customers, equipment failures, staff shortages, supply chain issues and ingredient price increases are all part of the job.

Gardening is no picnic, either; bringing forth something edible from a patch of dirt — while facing unpredictable weather, insatiable pests, pernicious fungi and noxious weeds — is nothing short of a miracle. Only the bravest souls take on both at once, growing their food and cooking it, too.

Sometimes, all the bravery in the world is no match for bad luck. This month’s catastrophic flooding wreaked havoc on gardens around the state, including the restaurant garden for Stone’s Throw in Richmond.

Usually abundant with cheerful flowers, ripening tomatoes and perky lacinato kale by midsummer, the garden is a total loss this year. “This is the second time this garden has flooded,” co-owner Allie Stratton said, referencing a fall 2019 storm that wrecked newly prepared beds.

The 2023 flood was the nail in the coffin for the pizza garden. Stone’s Throw will switch gears going forward, eighty-sixing the vegetables and extending the outdoor dining space. The staff may grow herbs and perennials, but no significant crops.

“It was really heartbreaking to see it all just washed away. There were some tears shed over it, for sure,” Stratton said. “I just made the executive decision that we didn’t want to go through that again.”

The estimated $20,000 in damages to the outdoor space are not covered by the restaurant’s flood insurance policy, so the owners have resorted to crowdfunding to rebuild the landscape. (Read more on restaurant fundraising efforts here.)

Seven Days checked in with three other food professionals who are making a go of growing their own produce, the holy grail of farm-to-table. Though safely above floodwaters, they contend with packed schedules and nature’s whims, with mixed results. Their motives vary, but it boils down to a deep-seated desire to serve the best food they can.

Planting Heritage

Café Mamajuana, Burlington, cafemamajuana.com

Maria Lara-Bregatta exudes cool-as-a-cucumber energy. On a phone call during her 2-year-old daughter’s nap time, the Café Mamajuana chef-owner seemed decidedly unbothered by the worries that plagued other gardeners. Through the spring’s wild weather — early heat, late frost, droughty then sodden — her Colchester homestead garden did just fine. “I am super grateful,” she said. “This is the best garden I’ve had, ever.”

Last year, due to labor shortages and ingredient price increases, Lara-Bregatta turned Café Mamajuana from a full-scale Burlington restaurant — a semifinalist in the 2022 James Beard Foundation Best New Restaurant category — into a catering business with pop-ups for the foreseeable future. Between events, she’s been doing her best to fill her half-acre yard with plants, growing vegetables in six raised beds in front of her home and even letting plantings spill onto a public access trail beside her property.

In that area, “I just, like, throw down seeds and see what catches,” she said.

With the beds, she’s more intentional, planning each year’s garden around a theme. Last year’s was purple. This year she selected seeds based on her heritage, grouping crops by region. One bed has eggplant and cauliflower for her Sicilian roots; her Dominican origins are represented by African and South American crops, such as yellow watermelon and okra. She pays homage to indigenous North American food plants with a three sisters-themed bed featuring corn, beans and squash.

Lara-Bregatta plants veggies she can use in her cooking, such as Caribbean peppers, and ones she and her daughter, Ayla, can snack on, such as pineapple ground cherries, which she also uses in pickles, sauces and relish. She said artfully using local produce — whether from her own garden or from farms in Burlington’s Intervale, where she has ordered many ingredients — adds another layer of freshness to her food, such as garden salsas to accompany empanadas and tropical salad with passion fruit vinaigrette featuring homegrown mint and coriander flowers.

“Latin food can often be stereotyped as being heavy and greasy,” she said. “But when you really look at the breadth of tropical zones, we have the freshest foods in the world.”

How does Lara-Bregatta stay motivated to keep the garden going between the restaurant biz and raising her daughter?

“It’s really exciting to wake up every day and look at what is happening,” she said. “It’s like, here’s a flower, and next you’ll have your food. It’s just so cool.”

‘Gardening Is Humbling’

Red Barn Kitchen, Charlotte, redbarnkitchenvt.com

On July 3, Matt Jennings found himself staring at an unplanted field. The award-winning chef-owner of Charlotte-based Red Barn Kitchen, a catering business and small event venue, had spent a few years working with Hilary Gifford (aka Farmer Hil, who sells produce from her own farm to many Burlington-area restaurants) to establish succession plantings, or seeds planted weeks apart to ensure a continuing harvest. This year, Jennings decided to go it alone.

“I was feeling … overconfident,” he admitted. He was taking on the gardener role in addition to his full-time gig creating restaurant concepts for hospitality groups around the country, as well as running his catering “side hustle” and raising two boys, ages 13 and 10, with his wife, Kate, a pastry chef who bakes for Red Barn.

A pep talk from Gifford put things into perspective. “I had a moment of panic this spring where I called Hilary and I was like, ‘Be honest with me. How screwed am I?'” Jennings said. She talked him down, reminding him to do what he could and hope the season extends into October.

It worked, to an extent. “Life happens,” he said. “We just have to roll with the punches and keep moving, right?”

Jennings has been promoting a ticketed late-July tomato dinner on Instagram, crossing his fingers that continuing rains will give way to sun. He has planted broccoli, kale, cabbage and specialty peppers — crops he would normally use in seasonal menu items such as smoked ham sandwiches with grilled brassicas and garlic jam, marinated couscous salad, and wood-grilled veg with goat cheese tzatziki. But a swollen mountain stream has been dumping water in the field, leaving it with a bleak prognosis.

Even as he battles weather extremes, Jennings said his own limitations are what get him down the most. “I live with one foot in the world of wanting to go down the rabbit hole and learn more and be as great a grower as I can,” he said, acknowledging that he’s “just so damn busy.”

So why keep at it? “My whole life’s work and focus has been about creating food that can only be as good as the ingredients you start with,” he explained. “I wanted to be able to control everything myself: find the seeds, grow them, raise the starts, plant the starts and reap the benefits. But gardening is humbling in so many ways. Mother Nature is the one that’s in control, not you!”

Growing Community

Red Panda, 163 Pearl St., Essex Junction, 662-4902, redpandaessexvt.com

Red Panda, 2403 Shelburne Rd., Shelburne, 399-2714, redpandashelburne.com

On a recent sunny afternoon, Dan and Sadhana Raut’s backyard provided an idyllic setting for a conversation. Strolling through the expansive lot in Essex, complete with a red barn and a Mount Mansfield view, Dan Raut explained that the garden was off to a rough start. “This year, it’s a mess,” he conceded.

Last year, Raut was able to use about 63 items from the garden at his Essex Junction restaurant, Red Panda, including beans, radishes, squash, potatoes, peppers and tomatoes.

This year, he opened another location in Shelburne, hoping the garden would supply both. But many seeds failed to germinate during an early dry spell, and the subsequent rains produced an overabundance of weeds. Raut was in good humor as he pointed out more successful crops: cilantro, mustard greens (used fermented and dried as a condiment), and patch after patch of mint. The herb is known to run rampant while requiring little care, which is convenient since the kitchen teams need large quantities for sauces at both Red Panda locations. (The Burlington Red Panda is separately owned.)

The Rauts strive to serve fresh, healthy food at their Nepali, Indian and Indo-Chinese restaurants, which means growing whatever herbs and vegetables they can. “Every day we are taking cilantro, mustard leaf, green onions to make dumplings, and the mint,” Raut said. “Not like last year, but still a lot.”

The Rauts have cultivated their land since they purchased it for their family of five in 2015, with Sadhana acting as the main gardener. Dan Raut explained that his wife also takes care of the kids and the business when he travels to Nepal to procure fresh spices: Timur pepper, cinnamon sticks and leaves, and green cardamom. A sip of tea — warm and spicy with cardamom and black pepper — demonstrated the potency of the Himalayan-grown spices.

Raut is passionate about sharing his culture’s cuisine with his Vermont community, as well as helping new Vermont transplants. He drives neighbors to appointments and grocery stores and gives away extra produce.

For the future, Raut is considering installing grow lights in the barn to try to keep some vegetable production going in the winter. “My goal long-term is that the community will slowly get to know our food, how healthy it is and how good,” he said.

Like the mint thriving in their garden, the Rauts plan to continue growing, come what may.

Source: sevendaysvt.com