Nouvelle Island Cuisine Discovering lesser-known eats on the champlain islands
Pork dumplings at Zach’s Café at the Gallery
b Y A l icE l EVi t t
tour of some of their best culinary surprises, keep reading.
Eben & Tessa Hill of Broken Arrow
Broken Arrow
82 route 2, south hero, 777-6357
assistant), artist Tessa Hill, have enhanced the chef’s skills with Central American fare. The pair of overstuffed tacos’ anchobraised pork falls apart in piggy ecstasy, combined with tender mangos and crunchy cabbage slaw. Doused with cumin-soaked Costa Rican Salsa Lizano, the dish is transporting. That’s Hill’s intention. “Every time I cross this bridge, I’m in the Caribbean,” he says of driving to his beloved northern islands. Anyone who orders right at Broken Arrow will feel the same way.
Capsand Creamery
available at Wednesday south hero Farmers Market and snow Farm vineyard tasting room. special orders through capsandcreamery@ gmail.com.
Christine McMillan realizes that her life has taken an ironic turn. Having left her job as a diabetes researcher and moved to Vermont with her husband to raise her young children, she’s making candy
for a living. She began selling sweets as Capsand Creamery late last year. McMillan raises Nigerian Dwarf goats and has crafted cheese from their milk for her family for several years. Unwilling to make the necessary investment to become certified for commercial cheese manufacturing, she instead began turning the milk into ultra-creamy caramels, chocolates and fudge. The goats prance and wag their tails as McMillan enters the barn to greet them. Perhaps their happiness helps make the fudge and salted caramels so rich. More likely, those qualities come from their milk’s exceptionally high butterfat content, which exceeds that of other goat breeds, says McMillan. The grass-fed critters aren’t just
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“We’re starved around here. Bacon is microwaved,” says Eben Hill. He knows something about good food. In his career as a bartender, Hill has worked for six James Beard Foundation Awardwinning chefs, including Mario Batali at Lupa Osteria Romana and Tom Colicchio at Craft. Most recently, Hill poured drinks at Burlington’s Juniper and nika. On August 1, Hill returned to his native South Hero to feed locals, including himself and several generations of his family, the kind of food he believes we all deserve to eat. At his new food trailer, Broken Arrow, beef in burgers is grassfed and comes from just a few miles up the road at Grand Isle’s Canamak Farms. Most veggies, including greens and heirloom tomatoes, come from Pomykala Farm, also of Grand Isle. Broken Arrow is the reincarnation of Hill’s Red Barn Café, which he closed at South Hero’s Allenholm Farm two years ago. (It’s since been replaced by a stand called the Accidental Farmer.) Many menu items will ring bells for Red Barn diners, including Hill’s carnitas tacos. Recent travels with his wife (and café
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sk most Vermonters outside the Champlain Islands what they eat when they visit the area, and they’ll tell you it’s a wasteland. Sure, they may recall, with the misty glow of a vacationer, a particularly fine meal at the North Hero House Inn & Restaurant or Blue Paddle Bistro. But these same informants might be hardpressed to offer any other island dining recommendations. Are the islands really a food desert? Online searches turned up a few worthwhile destinations, but I decided to discover the culinary landscape for myself. I thought of my journey as a parallel to Samuel de Champlain’s: I would explore the shores of the lake named for him, learning all I could from the natives. Using the Thomas Mott Homestead Bed & Breakfast in Alburgh as a home base (and source of a gorgeous breakfast of peach-stuffed French toast and homemade yogurt), I spent 32 hours wending my way up Route 2 and back, discovering both new and lesser-known dining destinations, farms, producers — and one place to pick up a fresh smoothie while filling your prescription. I excluded from my survey some obvious choices: the well-stocked convenience stores that serve campers, as well as most of the islands’ long-established seasonal snack bars, which we’ve already written up in our annual snack-bar survey. Those who seek a touristy meal featuring $30 plates of frozen fish can still find it on the Champlain Islands. But for a
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