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Melting the Snow Seasoned Traveler: Cool Runnings, Burlington B Y AlicE l E Vit t
maTThew ThORSen
L
ast spring, Mayllet Paz received a text from a friend — a photograph of rice and beans from Burlington’s Cool Runnings. It was the beginning of what would become an obsession for the Panama native — and, later, a job. Paz, co-owner of catering company La Fondita Latina with fellow Panamanian 112 Lake Street • Burlington Wilfredo Amor, began driving almost daily www.sansaivt.com from her Swanton home to North Street’s Cool Runnings, the Jamaican market owned by Leroy Headley. Last month, 12v-SanSai010913.indd 1 1/7/13 2:08 PM the cook, now living in Winooski, began to make her trips with more of a purpose. That’s when Paz began cooking her native cuisine at Cool Runnings. Now, guests at the small store can enjoy not only Headley’s jerk chicken and curried goat but also a mix of Panamanian specialties that Paz varies daily. The two cooks are creating this taste of the tropics without a hood, using just an electric stove and fts Crock-Pots. The food is served at a stand Dra k bac itch $2 Sw at the back of the store that resembles that use $2 off any Ho of a stadium vendor, complete with chafMac n Cheese ing dishes for quick service of long-cooked stews and braises. 20 mac varieties to Paz explains that construction of the Panama Canal led to the development of choose from including: a unique fusion cuisine in her homeland. buffalo chicken • bbq Typical Panamanian dishes she prepares crab • lobster • beef & bleu include Mexican specialties such as tamales chicken parmesan • surf & turf and mole but also Peruvian ceviches and pb&j • mary had a little lamb Jamaican grub such as braised oxtail and coconut rice. Paz says her versions of the last caprese • cheeseburger two dishes vary from Headley’s only slightly, southwest • shrimp scampi mostly due to the subtraction of a few spices mediterranean • blt from her meat and addition of sugar in the super cheesy • nutty new england rice to enhance the coconut taste. cheesesteak • breakfast The uniting factor of the cuisines at Cool Runnings is big flavor. “For us, it’s just the flavor and the seasoning. So many people [in the U.S.] don’t really season stuff. When they go outside the box, they use a bottle of barbecue sauce,” Paz says. “In our kitchen, we season our stuff. [Vermonters] taste the flavors, and their taste buds go back to life.” On a recent Thursday, the aroma of cloves fills the air as Paz pulls a Panamanian Christmas ham from an oven that looks only slightly more serious than one made by Hasbro. Meanwhile, the spicy smoke of Scotch bonnet peppers for Headley’s jerk chicken, topped with shaved slices of raw carrot, wafts to the snowy sidewalks of 36 Main Street, Winooski North Street with eye-burning intensity. 802-497-1884 Though Paz and Headley only recently www.ourhousebistro.com began working together, the action in the tiny kitchen is a ballet of cooperation.
$2 Twisted Tuesdays
And Mondays Too!
Cool Runnings
38 FOOD
SEVEN DAYS
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FOOD imageS COuRTeSy OF maylleT paz
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Hojaldres
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Headley slides a pan of aromatic coconut rice with black beans into a chafing-dish slot, while Paz puts the finishing touches on her candy-pink ensalada de feria, a potato-and-egg salad sweetened with beets and made tangy with vinegar and mustard. Just as their paths at work crisscross, their paths to Cool Runnings show similarities. Paz, who is now a youthful 36 (“I’m Latina, so we have good skin,” she says with a laugh and a doff of her trendy newsboy cap), arrived in Vermont in January 1998, during the ice storm that knocked out power all over the state. She and her then-husband, a true native Vermonter of Abenaki heritage, were moving back to his home state. Paz says she didn’t own a coat in those days and was shocked by the cold, despite embassy warnings that she would
find even Vermont summers sweatshirt worthy. A lifelong cook, Paz focused on raising her two children, now 11 and 17, until she hit on the idea of a food-delivery service for Latin farmworkers missing their warmweather home cooking. Last summer, she got a catering license and began selling her well-seasoned fare at the Burlington Farmers Market. Ill-fated love also brought Headley to Vermont. Originally from Negril, Jamaica, he worked for two of his brothers at their Cape Cod Jamaican restaurant until 2002,
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